The GPA and standardized test scores swap places

Over the past few months, many colleges have stated they’re once again requiring the ACT or SAT as part of the admissions process. It’s expected that additional colleges will follow suit. In fact, it’s believed that not only will they be required but they’ll also carry a lot more weight with admissions than before, possibly more weight than GPA alone. How did we get to this point?

For years, GPA and standardized testing co-existed with each other. Both were measures of academic knowledge/achievement and college readiness. Not everyone loved standardized testing (we won’t go there in this post), but the two stood side-by-side as accepted measurements.

Covid put an end to that. Testing centers were closed. Students were unable to submit scores. And colleges jumped at the opportunity to make standardized tests “optional”, with some going so far as to not allow them to be submitted at all. And as Covid restrictions were initially lifted, colleges held their ground.

But here’s where things got messy. Covid also accelerated the trend of high school grade inflation. Teachers were more lenient in their grading policies, meaning more ‘A’ and ‘B’ grades and higher GPAs. Initially that sounded fair. But it didn’t stop. And now we’re at the point where GPA is so inflated there is an excess number of students with high 3 point something unweighted GPAs and 4 and 5 point something weighted GPAs (which is silly, because if a 4 or 5 is an ‘A’, how can you logically get beyond that? It’s like giving 110% effort).

Colleges now have a much larger percentage of students with inflated GPAs applying to their schools. How can they differentiate between those who benefited from grade inflation and those who would have earned an ‘A’ in the courses before grading polices became so lax? If only there were nationwide tests that could measure academic knowledge and couldn’t be subjectively graded by teachers ….

The pendulum is swinging hard and fast in the other direction. It used to be that if a student had an exceptional GPA but a less than stellar ACT/SAT score, colleges might look the other way, put more emphasis on the GPA and less on the standardized test (“maybe they’re just not good at standardized tests”). But now, with a plethora of students with inflated GPAs, colleges may use the ACT/SAT, not the GPA, as a primary factor for academic success. Students with high GPA but lower test scores won’t get the benefit of the doubt (“maybe their GPA is just grossly inflated and that’s why it’s so high and doesn’t correlate to their average ACT/SAT score”).

And this won’t stop until grade inflation is addressed and adjusted. But is that really ever going to happen? Most of us agree that it needs to - but let’s just wait until after our kids graduate high school with their stellar GPAs.