Gaming the System: Grade Inflation in Institutional Education
During my student teaching, I was interning at a metro-Detroit-area high school when the school administration announced a rather controversial change to the grading policy. The administration had decided to eliminate the zero from grades. Henceforth, the lowest grade any student could receive on any assignment was 50%. Even when an assignment was not turned in at all, the student still received a 50% grade.
The policy understandably caused consternation among the teachers, who thought it was profoundly unfair. “Why should a student get half of the credit for doing absolutely nothing?” they fumed. The administration had its arguments for the change. I remember attending a faculty meeting where the principal explained that the system of giving zeroes was unjust because anytime grades were calculated on averages, a zero skewed the average down too far in a way that was not reflective of a student’s actual performance, which could end up unduly harming the student’s academic profile. Everyone went round and round on the subject until the admins simply invoked their authority and foisted the new system on the teachers.
The rollout was chaotic and full of resentment because the teachers understood the real reason for the change: to fluff grades so the school looked more academically elite than it was. The school didn’t want the paper trail proving that an embarrassing number of students were academically. There had been discussions going around for some time about the school’s faltering academics, and it was clear this policy was meant to paper over the problem by administrative fiat—”Your son isn’t getting a 65% anymore; now he’s pulling a solid 85%!”
The Machine Has Its Own Priorities
The gap between the official explanation and the real one is something teachers, students, and parents encounter constantly in institutional schooling. It has a name, though nobody in that faculty meeting used it: grade inflation. Grade inflation is one of the many reasons more families are pulling their kids out of public schools entirely and opting for alternative educational models.
Schools, like all institutions, develop their own survival instincts. Administrators answer to school boards, school boards answer to state metrics, state metrics answer to federal funding formulas, and somewhere at the bottom of that chain is an actual child sitting at an actual desk. The policy at the school I interned at was a case study in how institutional self-interest often gets dressed up in the language of student welfare.
The principal’s argument—that zeroes skew averages unfairly—is not entirely without merit as a mathematical observation. But the solution revealed the priorities. If the concern were genuinely about accurate assessment, the school could have switched to a standards-based grading model, or a portfolio system, or any number of approaches that measure what students actually know. Instead, they chose the option that made the numbers look better on paper with the least effort. It was a profoundly bureaucratic solution that gave little concern to what was best for the students themselves.
The Student Perspective: Gaming the System
We can understand why the teachers were upset. They had not gone into education to dole out credit for work that was never done. Such a thing undermines the values at the core of the educational vocation. But what about the students? How did they feel?
It should be no surprise that the students loved the idea. As kids often do, they saw right through all the chatter to the fundamental reality—the policy allowed them to get away with doing less. I personally saw them doing the math and figuring out how many additional assignments they could not turn in without tanking their grade. From the student perspective, their response was entirely about how to best game the system to make their lot as easy as possible. But why wouldn’t they react that way? The admins were just trying to game their own reporting system, so why wouldn’t the student body respond in kind to such modeling?
Those are corrosive ideas to carry into adulthood. The working world does not give you fifty percent for nothing. Relationships do not function that way. Neither does health, nor finances, nor any domain where cause and effect still apply. When schools paper over that reality, they are sending students into adulthood with a faulty understanding of how the world actually works.
Why Parents Are Walking Away
The grading policy I witnessed was a single incident at a single school, but the pattern it represents is not isolated. Parents across the country have accumulated enough similar stories (in which the institutional logic clearly superseded educational goals) that a growing number have decided they are done with institutional education altogether.
Homeschooling in the United States has grown substantially over the past decade, and the pandemic years accelerated that growth dramatically. The reasons families give are varied: religious conviction, dissatisfaction with curriculum, concerns about the moral environment in the schools, bullying, and kids who need more flexibility or more rigor than a traditional classroom can offer. Each of these stories contains a version of the same fundamental frustration: the sense that the school is serving its own institutional needs while the child is somewhere further down the priority list. Many parents have therefore made the decision to remove the institutional element from education altogether.
The Homeschooling Solution
Homeschooling parents have only one party to focus on: their child. There is no school board to impress, no state ranking to protect, no optics to manage, no federal funding to grovel for. When a homeschooled student does not complete an assignment, the grade (or the consequence, or the resulting conversation) reflects that honestly. When a student masters a subject, that mastery actually means something because it was not inflated to meet a quota.
That is no small thing. Assessment, at its best, is simply honest feedback. It tells a learner where they are and what they still need. A system that distorts that feedback to serve institutional interests fails the student academically by teaching them that the numbers adults give them cannot be trusted. It fundamentally warps their conceptions of merit, accomplishment, and self-worth.
Homeschooling families, on the other hand, get to build an environment where grades mean exactly what they say—and that’s if grades are used at all! It creates a setting where the adults in the room are still telling the truth, and the child can actually learn how to work honestly instead of “gaming the system.”
What are your thoughts on this topic? I invite you to join other homeschooling parents and me in the Homeschool Connections Community or our Facebook group.
