No more ‘D’ or ‘F’ grades? Grade inflation is masking a looming crisis of ignorance

I told my students on the first day of class this semester that I do not accept late work under any circumstances. Instead, I’m going to treat them like adults. They can drop their worst two homework grades during the semester, so they are to use those drops wisely. After that, they are out of luck.

The second week of school, I received no fewer than 15 emails from different students asking for extensions.

What is wrong with students today? For one thing, they have learned from experience that professors will roll over and give them better grades and no consequences for poor or late work.

This is the educators’ fault, of course. We have created a generation with no concept of what it takes or what it means to succeed.

Take the Oregon university that just announced it will no longer give students failing letter grades. That’s right — no more “D” and “F” grades, because failing grades supposedly mask students’ “demonstrated abilities.” If you fail, then no grade goes on your record. This is their plan to mask your demonstrated inability to keep up and do the work.

This is how our educational establishment is choosing to fail our kids upward. And there will be consequences for all of us.

Do you want your nurse to know what drugs can and cannot be mixed together? Do you care if your doctor can distinguish different parts of the anatomy inside your heart? Do you care if the engineer who built the bridge you are driving over can do basic physics? If we keep going this way then you’re going to be out of luck, and it seems that educators have done a great job of keeping that information from you.

We educators are failing an entire generation of kids, and you, their parents, probably don’t even know about it. This is partly because these students have been bringing home As and Bs for mediocre and failing work ever since kindergarten.

According to Gallup, over 90 percent of parents believe their children are performing at grade level. But based on their test scores, only about 50 percent are. This disconnect is a direct result of grade inflation, and now, with the removal of failing grades, it is just going to get worse.

This complete degradation of the concept of a GPA and basic standards of success comes at a time when some top colleges are realizing what a mistake it has been to remove standardized testing. MIT removed its requirement for the SAT/ACT in 2020, only to reinstate it in 2022. Dartmouth has just done the same. Why? Because colleges need a reliable, objective metric by which to determine whether applicants will succeed or wash out. There’s no way of guessing whether their grades are reflective of their actual ability or performance.

The urge to give everyone an “A” is understandable. Good parents would do anything for their children. They want to alleviate their stress, and in any way they can. But part of growing up is to learn to fail — and frankly, this is a large part of what college is for.

If we have no metrics to measure success (and failure), then we are truly doing our children a disservice. We will not be here forever to coddle our children. At some point, they have to become productive citizens capable of earning a living. We owe it to them to teach them what it means to earn something.

The goal of a public education is to give all children, regardless of socioeconomic status, a chance at social and economic mobility — to break the cycle of whatever their socioeconomic status is at birth. Unfortunately, the kids who are going to be most hurt by this are the poorest.

When it comes time to get a real job, and they can’t cut it because the education system has spent two decades failing them upward, they will end up jobless and hopeless, wondering how this could be when they were “A” students all along.

Liberty Vittert is a professor of data science at Washington University in St. Louis and the resident on-air statistician for NewsNation, a sister company of The Hill.