Is Academic Inflation Real? What Parents Need To Know About Grades And Online Comparisons
Last month, I sat in my 10th grader Lila’s AP Bio teacher’s classroom, twisting the crinkled progress report in my hand. She’d earned a B+. I was proud—she studies for an hour every night after her 10-hour shift at the downtown coffee shop, still remembers to walk our dog and quiz her 7th grade brother on his spelling words. Then I got in my minivan to drive home, pulled out my phone to check the school’s parent Facebook group for the upcoming bake sale details, and the first post stopped me: a mom bragging that her kid pulled a 4.8 weighted GPA this semester, with zero A-minuses. I sat there idling in the pickup line for five minutes, that old familiar worry creeping in: Is my kid falling behind? Is everything way more competitive now than when I was a teen, or am I just seeing all the perfect grades online and making a big deal out of nothing?
I met my sister Megan for coffee the next weekend. She’s taught 11th grade English at a high school 20 minutes away, has been in the district for 12 years, so I asked her straight out. She stirred her oat latte and laughed, said she gets this question from other parents every month. She said first off: Yeah, academic inflation is actually real, it’s not just a trick of your Instagram feed. When she started teaching, less than 30% of the grades given at her school were A or A-. Last year, that number was almost 49%. Colleges push for higher average GPAs to boost their national rankings, high schools bump up grades to keep their students competitive for acceptances, and more kids than ever take weighted AP or honors classes that pull up the overall average GPA. It’s not that kids are smarter now, or work harder—though plenty do work hard—it’s that the scale has shifted. She showed me a transcript from 10 years ago compared to one from last year: the same kid with the same class rank would have a 0.3 higher weighted GPA now than they would have a decade ago. That’s inflation, plain and simple.
But then she said the internet turns a small shift into a massive panic for parents. Before social media, you only knew the grades of your kid and their three closest friends. You didn’t scroll through a feed full of only the best results. No one posts their kid’s B- on the parent group. No one shares the story of their kid getting a 2 on the AP test or getting rejected from their safety school. We only see the highlight reel of the top 10% of students, and that makes us think that’s the new average. I thought about that pre-college program Lila applied to last summer: I had a 3.4 unweighted GPA when I applied to the same program 25 years ago, got in no problem. Lila had a 3.8 and got rejected. I was crushed until I saw the incoming class list the program posted on their Instagram: every kid listed had a 4.0 or higher. That’s when I realized it was both: inflation pushed the average up, and the internet made that new top end feel normal.
So what do you do with that? It’s not like we can fix academic inflation as individual parents, or make social media stop showing us only the good stuff. But I’ve tried a few small things that have taken the edge off, and they’re easier than you’d think.
First, I saved my school’s profile page from the guidance office to my phone. Every high school publishes their average unweighted GPA, average class rank, and average AP test scores on that page, it’s public for anyone to see. Instead of comparing Lila’s grades to the posts I see online, I compare it to that school average. Lila’s 3.6 unweighted is 0.4 above our school’s average, which puts her in the top quarter of her class—way better than I thought when I was staring at that 4.8 on the Facebook post. When Lila got upset last week after seeing her friend’s post about a 5 on her AP Chem practice test, I pulled up that page and showed her the average AP score at our school is a 2.8. Her 3 on the Bio practice test was above average, and suddenly that knot in her stomach loosened.
Second, when I’m looking up college stats for Lila’s applications next year, I go straight to the college’s public common data set instead of reading parent group posts. The common data set lists the actual middle 50% of unweighted GPAs for admitted students, no bias from people only posting their acceptances. For the state university Lila wants to go to, the middle 50% is 3.4 to 3.8, so her 3.6 is right in the middle of that range—perfectly on track, even if half the parents in the group are posting 3.9+ acceptances.
Third, I started muting any account or post that brags about grades or acceptances. It’s not rude, no one knows you’ve muted them, and it keeps that constant stream of perfect results out of my feed. I also started using one specific question with Lila instead of asking what grade she got: “Did you learn what you wanted to learn from this class?” If she did, even a B is fine with me. We have an unspoken rule now: she gets one free B a year in her hardest class, no nagging, no extra tutoring unless she asks for it.
I still get that twinge of worry sometimes, when I see a post about a 15-year-old getting into an Ivy League early decision. I still wonder if I’m letting Lila slack too much by not pushing her for every A. Academic inflation is real, and competition is stiffer than it was when we were kids. But it’s not as bad as the internet makes it seem. Most kids have average grades, most kids get into colleges that fit them, and most of the perfect posts we see are just the exception, not the rule. Next year when Lila applies to college, we’ll probably still have some panic attacks over her applications. But for now, we’re eating pizza on Friday nights, she’s still working her coffee shop shift, and we’re not measuring her success against what we see on a screen.
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