As schools, colleges, and employers continue to rely on GPAs, recent research suggests that grades no longer accurately reflect students’ abilities, but are instead shaped by inflation, teachers, and shifting standards.
GPA is widely treated as the definition of academic success that several institutions rely on to measure students’ ability. Students are considered whether they are skilled or not based on their GPAs in many cases. However, I believe that GPA no longer accurately captures their ability.
This is also indicated through the data of how employers are starting to lose trust in GPAs. According to a Forbes article citing the National Association of Colleges and Employers, “Employers who screen applicants by GPA dropped from 73% in 2018-19 to 27% in 2022-23.” This cut of using GPA to screen candidates in nearly half highlights the declining confidence in GPA as a hiring tool. If GPA truly measures ability, employers would not be abandoning it but instead, they would utilize them to hire higher level candidates.
In addition, the fact that employers also no longer value GPA to determine candidates’ skills suggests how real-world performance matters more than just classroom grades. Once you have graduated from high school or college and start working, what matters the most is not GPA that shows your yearly effort in academics. It is about your ability to solve real-life issues and having the adaptability, which cannot be measured by GPA.
Furthermore, high GPAs do not equal work readiness. The Forbes article pointed out that “Only 13% of U.S. adults and 11% of executives strongly agree that college graduates are well-prepared for work.” This shows the disconnection between grades and real-world skills since GPA does not measure practical ability. GPA measures the limited performance in school or college that includes test performance, but problem-solving or adaptability.
Grade inflation has also changed what GPA means. Statistics from the Forbes article mentioned how “average high school GPA rose from 3.17 (2010) to 3.36 (2021),” and Harvard’s average GPA also rose from “2.8 (1996) to 3.8 (2022).” When grades rise across decades, GPA loses consistency. A high GPA today does not mean the same things it did in the past, which means that GPA reflects systems and norms and it is not just student ability.
Another factor that makes GPAs unreliable to measure student ability is how GPAs are shaped by teachers and grading practices. Fordham Institute article pointed out how ACT scores declined while GPAs reached record highs. Even students in the 25th percentile still earned GPAs above 3.0, and more A’s were awarded than C’s, D’s, and F’s combined. This data from the ACT show that while test performance declined in 2021, students recorded the highest GPAs ever, suggesting that grades are increasing without corresponding gains in academic achievement.
This suggests how grades are significantly influenced by how teachers grade students’ work. Each school has a different grading system and has different teachers. While some teachers are very strict on grading that would never give an A to students, others could give an A more easily. This contrast could increase some students’ GPA very high, but make others’ GPA lower even though the lower GPA students have more ability.
Students are compared and ranked under unequal conditions since teacher variability creates unfair advantages. Evaluating students based on GPAs is very unfair since everyone is differently graded on different standards.
In addition, it could also negatively affect students. If students with lenient teachers earned higher grades but learned less, those students would later perform worse in advanced courses or also could be in a different circumstance. GPA often reflects who graded the work and it does not show how well the student understood the material. It could even pressure students since they would chase grades more instead of learning in order to earn a higher GPA.
Some may argue that GPA is objective and standardized. However, research is indeed showing how grading standards vary widely. Grading inflation and teacher practices undermine consistency and objective does not mean comprehensive.
GPA can be one data point, but should not be the definition of success. Schools and institutions should focus on valuing growth, skills, and learning beyond exams since students are more than their GPAs, and education should measure learning –not just ranking.
