A new study has found evidence of inflation in high school GPAs between 2010 and 2021, suggesting that while American high school seniors are graduating with better grades, they also know less than the seniors of a decade ago.
The study was conducted by ACT, the nonprofit organization that administers the ACT college admissions tests. ACT’s researchers examined the data of 4.3 million high school seniors from more than 4,700 schools, who took the ACT from 2010 to 2021. They found that even though the test takers’ GPA increased during that period, their ACT scores continued to decline.
On average, high school GPAs increased by 0.19 points, from 3.17 in 2010 to 3.36 in 2021, according to the analysis. The grade inflation in the first half of the 2010s was rather moderate but saw a substantial increase between 2020 and 2021, during which many school districts, in their attempt to accommodate COVID-19 school closures, moved away from the traditional A-F letter grade system in favor of grading policies such a pass/fail grade or no grade lower than a C….