Is Academic Inflation Real? What I’ve Learned As A Teacher And Parent Of College-Bound Teens
Last month, I was shoving a crumpled granola wrapper into my bag after 12 straight parent-teacher conferences when Mrs. Lopez pulled me aside. She’d waited for everyone else to leave, and she held up her phone with two photos pulled up: one was a scan of her 1998 high school transcript, the other her 16-year-old son’s current fall report card.
“I got a B in Algebra 2 here, and that got me into the state flagship’s engineering program,” she said, tapping the first photo. “Miles has an A- in the same class, and his guidance counselor said it’s below average for kids applying to engineering now. Is this actually happening? Or am I just seeing all these overachievers on my Instagram feed and panicking for no reason?”
That question’s been bouncing around my head ever since. I’ve taught middle school math at a public suburban district for 12 years, and my oldest son is a senior wrapping up college applications right now. So I get to see this from two sides: the classroom where grades get handed out, and the dinner table where we stress about how those grades will read to admissions officers.
A few years back, I dug through my old filing cabinet to compare grade distributions from my first year teaching vs. that year. In 2011, 17% of my 8th grade algebra students walked away with an A. By 2022, that number was up to 32%. That’s not a mistake, and it’s not because kids are suddenly twice as smart as they used to be. Over the last decade, our district shifted to more retests, extra credit for extra work, and grading that weights effort as much as final test performance, all to cut down on our failure rate. It’s worked—fewer kids are failing, which is a good thing. But it’s also pushed more grades up to the A range, so an A doesn’t carry the same weight it used to. That part is real: academic inflation isn’t just an older generation’s myth. It’s a deliberate choice schools made to reduce harm, and it’s changed what grades mean.
But the internet has turned that small shift into a full-blown panic for most parents. Last week, my son came home from school white as a sheet, talking about a viral TikTok he saw where a kid with 12 APs and a 4.7 GPA got rejected from every Ivy League he applied to. “If that kid didn’t get in, what chance do I have?” he asked me. He has 4 APs and a 3.8 unweighted GPA, which would have been a fantastic profile when I was applying to college 20 years ago.
I told him to pull up the common data set for the state school he wants to attend—any college publishes this for free, it lists the actual GPA and test score ranges of accepted students. The middle 50% of unweighted GPAs for incoming engineering freshmen was 3.6 to 3.9. His 3.8 was dead in the center of that range. The kid on TikTok went viral because his rejection was an outlier. Outliers go viral on the internet; the thousands of regular kids with regular grades who got accepted don’t make for viral content. That’s the part that’s just an illusion. The internet doesn’t show you the average kid who takes 3 APs, gets a couple of As and a B, and gets into their first choice school. It shows you the extreme that gets clicks and likes.
When parents ask me what to do about this, I don’t give them some vague talk about loving your kid for who they are. I give them three small concrete things I do myself. First, if you see a “normal” kid profile online that makes you anxious, check what’s actually normal at your kid’s school. When I saw all those 10+ AP schedules on TikTok, I counted how many kids in my son’s graduating class of 320 were taking more than 7 APs total in high school: that’s 5 kids. Less than 2% of the class. That viral “normal” isn’t even close to actual normal. Second, instead of comparing your kid’s grades to your grades from 20 years ago, check what they can actually do. If your kid is in Algebra 2 and can solve the problems on the end-of-year review, that’s what matters, regardless of whether their grade is an A- where you got a B. Third, always check the college’s own common data set instead of relying on viral stories or what other parents say in Facebook groups. It takes 2 minutes to Google, and it tells you the real range of accepted students, not the outlier stories that stick in people’s heads.
I also tell them it’s fine to ask your kid’s guidance counselor to add a line to their recommendation noting if they’ve taken the hardest course load available at your school. Admissions officers know every high school grades differently, and that small schools don’t offer 20 AP classes. That one line takes five minutes for the counselor to write, and it clears up most questions about how your kid compares to their school cohort, no extra classes needed.
I still catch myself doing it, honestly. I’ll scroll through my feed late at night after my kid goes to bed, see a post from a college admission account about how “competitive” this year’s cycle is, and feel that little twist in my stomach, like we should have pushed him to take that extra online AP senior year. I know better, but it’s hard to unsee what you see online.
Last week, Mrs. Lopez texted me. She looked up the common data set for that same engineering program she went to, and her son’s A- in Algebra 2 falls right in the middle of the incoming class’s average GPA. They’ve stopped stressing about it for now, and they’re focusing on getting his personal statement finished. Academic inflation is real, it makes things a little more confusing than it was when we were applying to school. But most of the panic I see these days isn’t from inflation. It’s from seeing the 1% of outliers online and thinking we have to measure our kids against that standard. That’s the part that doesn’t have to be real, if you stop looking for it.
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