Admissions Boards Face 'Grade Inflation'

This grade inflation is going on at the college level too -- it's bullshit, trite, feel-goodism that masks our students' and schools' failures and rewards mediocrity.

it's a trend that's been building for years and may only be accelerating: Many students are getting very good grades. So many, in fact, it is getting harder and harder for colleges to use grades as a measuring stick for applicants.

Extra credit for AP courses, parental lobbying and genuine hard work by the most competitive students have combined to shatter any semblance of a Bell curve, one in which 'A's are reserved only for the very best. For example, of the 47,317 applications the University of California, Los Angeles, received for this fall's freshman class, nearly 21,000 had GPAs of 4.0 or above.

That's also making it harder for the most selective colleges who often call grades the single most important factor in admissions to join in a growing movement to lessen the influence of standardized tests.

"We're seeing 30, 40 valedictorians at a high school because they don't want to create these distinctions between students," said Jess Lord, dean of admission and financial aid at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. "If we don't have enough information, there's a chance we'll become more heavily reliant on test scores, and that's a real negative to me."

 

Admissions Boards Face 'Grade Inflation'

High School Grades Keep Creeping Up, Challenging Colleges to Tell Applicants Apart

By JUSTIN POPE

The Associated Press

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2664278&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

Josh Zalasky should be the kind of college applicant with little to worry about.

The high school senior is taking three Advanced Placement courses. Outside the classroom, he's involved in mock trial, two Jewish youth groups and has a job with a restaurant chain. He's a National Merit semifinalist and scored in the top 3 percent of all students who take the ACT.