Success, failure, grades, and learning

Students earn letter grades in school. In each course, teachers award grades to reflect… well, what, exactly?

Each semester, most parents receive a report card — a formal assessment of their children’s school performance. Other than in the earliest grades, these marks are given as letter grades, A through F. The grades matter. Even at the elementary level, high marks might qualify a student to participate in selective activities or advanced classes. High grades play a big role in students' eligibilty for college and other opportunities.

Meanwhile, grades have become less meaningful over time. The education system includes many incentives to award high grades generously. There is no significant incentive to be a tough grader.

Grade inflation is a bad symptom of even bigger, badder problems. This post tackles it from many angles, starting with the basics: What is grade inflation? How does grading work, and why? How did the convention of letter grades become so pervasive? Why do we use A through F, skipping E? For whom is our current system working? What are the options for incremental changes? What are the options for big changes — and what are the risks?

What is grade inflation?

Class grades have risen over time, even as standardized test scores have remained steady or fallen. This phenomenon, known as grade inflation, suggests that grading standards have generally become more lenient. Virtually any letter grade awarded in schools today means less than the same grade did a decade ago.

What is the purpose of grading in schools?

The core problem is a lack of agreement about the purpose of grading.

Calibration, motivation, communication, placement

Calibration. Generally, a grade is meant to convey the quality of a student’s work, relative to some expectation or basis of comparison. Grades enforce the meaning of high-quality work from the perspective of the teacher who awards the grade. In California public K-12 schools, teachers have complete authority to award grades to their students as they see fit, without review, approval, or veto. There are few established rules for the calibration of grading except for high school courses associated with Advanced Placement.

Motivation. Educators use grades as part of their strategy to motivate students to work and learn. The connection between grading and motivation is complex, though, and frequently overestimated. Yes, many students will jump through certain hoops to earn credit, or to avoid losing it. But they learn more when motivated by authentic interest, or by esteem for their teacher.

Communication. Grades are sometimes described as a form of feedback from an educator to a student. This is an impoverished view of the meaning of feedback. There is plenty of research that students respond to grades differently — and more usefully — if they include even a small amount of constructive communication.

Placement. Schools use course grades in academic placement, the process of assigning students to classes and promoting them from one grade level to the next. This approach interprets grades as an indicator of subject-matter mastery or readiness. For example, a student who has earned acceptable marks in pre-algebra might be expected to be ready for algebra. Grades in high school are the primary factor that California’s colleges use to make admission decisions.

How does grading work in schools today?

There is no clear rule.

As noted above, teachers have very broad authority to award grades as they see fit. Different teachers take different approaches, with varying levels of transparency, and guided by different philosophies, concerns, and instincts. There is no rule, except in some advanced courses such as those associated with the College Board.

In many academic subjects, states (including California) have adopted standards that define what students should know and be able to do at each grade level. Based on these standards, in 2025 the state of California adopted fresh guidance for instructional materials, particularly in the area of reading.

With the guidance in mind, publishing companies develop textbooks, teaching guides, and learning materials. Each school district periodically selects and buys materials, providing them to educators with varying levels of training depending on the amount of change involved and the budget available. Teachers — ideally in groups — participate in the process of choosing the materials and rolling them out. The instructional materials often include teaching guides, sample assignments, scoring guides (called rubrics in eduspeak), and tests. Educators can use, modify, or disregard these materials in the process of teaching and grading each student.

Ask teachers how they determine grades — their answers will vary a lot. Many will have detailed answers involving assignments and tests of different value. Some teachers mark grades up in spreadsheets. Others use paper systems. Increasingly, districts ask or require their teachers to use an online Learning Management System (LMS) to keep track of assignments and grades, so that parents and students have access to the process along the way. The increased availability and use of LMS platforms systems, sometimes called portals, has pushed teachers toward grading in ways that emphasize procedural clarity.

What counts: mastery, effort, process… and vibes

At report card time, some teachers write notes to each student. Others simply let grades "speak" for themselves. Occasionally, teachers decide to revise a grade if a student or parent makes a case to do so. In practice, grading is a human process that depends on a combination of student work, teacher philosophy and vibes.

What is a mastery-based grading system?

Mastery vs. process

Imagine a school where the only thing that counts is mastery of skills and knowledge. This approach is familiar in other contexts. For example, Scouting America (formerly known as Boy Scouts) pioneered the approach of awarding badges for everything from knot-tying to public service. Many video games are competency-based, too — they permit you to advance to the next level only when you have mastered the current one.

What if schools were organized in a similar way? Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, is a prominent booster of mastery as the relevant goal of education. With this concept in mind, a group of highly-regarded education leaders created Mastery.org, a consortium of schools aiming to test this concept in practice.

High school courses and grade levels could be re-imagined as collections of skills and subjects. This is the big idea behind the XQ Superschool project, which breaks monolithic academic subjects into specific learning units. Each unit offers students ways to demonstrate their competency at different levels.

Equity-based grading

Could schools take a mastery approach without waiting for the whole school system to change around them? Joe Feldman, the author of Grading For Equity, argues that teachers can convert their classes to something approximating a mastery-based model by broadly allowing assignments to be re-submitted and re-graded for full credit.

Other teachers and commentators reject the pure emphasis on mastery, arguing that it creates unavoidable incentives for laziness and burdens the teacher. In this view, achieving and demonstrating mastery of a subject ought to be part of what determines a grade, but not an excuse for lax or inconsistent work.

In a perfect world, all students would study and complete their assignments on time. In practice, consistent grade-A execution can be disrupted easily. For example, it's not sufficient to understand homework and complete it — you also have to submit it. Ask a teacher if they know of students who did their homework but forgot to hand it in. For students with executive function disorders, this error is common. A penalty doesn't make it go away. What is the appropriate academic penalty for this error in execution?

It is increasingly clear that academic knowledge and skills aren’t the only competencies that count in life. In work, employers value capacities and character qualities that students might be more apt to gain through extracurricular activities and life experiences than through class work.

The problems with a 100-point scale

For convenience and communication, many teachers mark assignments and tests using the top portion of a 100-point scale. Scores of 90 and above might be considered the A range, 80 and above the B range so on. Many teachers and schools extend this convention using plus and minus indicators to signal additional differentiation. For example, a frequently used convention associates a score of 80-83 points with a grade of B- and a score of 87-89 points with a grade of B+. Again, this is a convention, not a commandment. Teachers often provide students with a rubric (a scoring guide) that helps clarify expectations and signal the value of each assignment in determining their grade.

In practice, scores on a given test or assignment rarely fall into a neat bell-shaped normal distribution on a 100-point scale. Some teachers formally grade on a curve, a statistical method to re-bench data and define cut-points between grades. More often, they just use their judgment to award points, then reference the scores when evaluating grades.

Educators and students often dislike grading on a curve because it explicitly puts students in competition with each other. It's also hard to prepare assignments and tests that are sufficiently difficult to distinguish authentic differences between students. If an assignment or test is easy for many students, grading on a curve will fail because the scores will be indistinguishable. Students who are anxious about their grades tend to avoid teachers that grade on a curve.

College-bound students can become obsessed with grades, and technology is partly to blame. As points and scores became normal in grading practices, procedures for calculating them gained attention. Controversy specifically erupted over the question of how a teacher should score and weight an assignment that a student fails to turn in. If the teacher (or the LMS) uses simple math to calculate the course grade, and if a missing assignment is scored as a zero, in practice it means that the effective grade for the missed assignment is much worse than an F. Many teachers found this penalty extreme and contrary to their intention, so they sought changes to mitigate it. One common approach is to set a default mimimum score higher than zero, or allow students to take a Mulligan. As of 2025, about a quarter of schools had adopted some form of a no-zeroes grading policy, according to survey research from the Fordham Institute.

According to the survey, teachers widely resent micromanagement of their grading practices. They mostly agree that teachers should have clear and consistent standards, but don't want to be told what those rules have to be.

Turning in assignments is partly an executive function

Disadvantages and disabilities play an unintended role in grading systems, especially in high-pressure college-bound schools and classes where students are expected to perform more or less perfectly. These conditions particularly penalize students that have underlying challenges like insecure housing, family conflict, or executive functionissues. If a student isn't turning in work, it's important to find out why.

Many teachers dislike grading

The grading process is burdensome and time consuming. It asks teachers to draw bright lines, setting aside sympathy or biases, based on distinctions so small that they can feel arbitrary. Grades can have real consequences for students, and teachers are humans.

Meanwhile, while some kids are motivated by grades, others just aren’t. As we explore in Ed100 Lesson 9.8, most high school students don't aspire to attend a selective college. It's the exception, not the norm. In 2025, the Public Policy Institute of California released a superb fact sheet about it, including this chart of the estimated share of high school graduates enrolled:

Relentless focus on grades is different from relentless focus on learning. As explained in Ed100 Lesson 2.6, too much emphasis on grades can actually undermine motivation. Grades can get in the way of real learning.

Grading less ≠ "gradeless"

Some educators argue that teachers should grade less frequently and less transparently to reduce the emphasis on the process. This approach is sometimes misrepresented as going gradeless.

Transcripts and Grade Point Averages (GPAs)

In early grades, many schools don't issue letter grades. Reports to parents include academic progress, but might also include feedback about interpersonal skills and social-emotional development. In middle grades, a transition to letter grades is the norm.

Why no E?
The use of letter grades roughly as we know them dates back to about 1897, based on a system established at Mount Holyoke college in Massachusetts. Originally, grades were ranked A-E, but in the 1930s use of the letter E fell out of favor, allegedly because F conveys “failure” more effectively than E, which in other systems was an abbreviation for “excellent.”

In high schools, course-level grades are summarized in a transcript, an official list of courses taken and grades awarded. Even further stripped of context, colleges evaluate applicants partly on the basis of Grade Point Average (GPA), a calculation that scores the academic value of a transcript based on course difficulty and the letter grades awarded. An "A" or "A-" grade is conventionally worth four points in the calculation of GPA, but some courses identified as academically challenging are given extra weight, adding an extra point. In high schools that offer many courses associated with Advanced Placement or other distinctions, top students can have a weighted GPA considerably higher than 4.0. For example, in 2025 the University of California, Berkeley reported that the average student admitted had a weighted high school GPA of at least 4.31. Essentially, only students with unblemished grades make the cut to be considered for admission.

How does pass-fail grading work?

In a system where signs of imperfection can damage your GPA — and with it your chances of admission to future opportunites — it is rational for students to avoid taking academic risks. One solution that allows students to feel safe branching out is to offer courses on a pass-fail basis. In this approach, traditional letter grades (A, B, C, etc.) are replaced with a binary grading system, usually known as pass/fail — or more accurately Credit or No Credit.

Pass/Fail works… sort of.

Some colleges (notably, Brown University, since 1969) allow students to take courses on a credit / no credit basis. There is evidence that this approach is effective at getting students to try courses that intimidate them, but it has a downside: students who take courses pass/fail tend to do only the minimum work required to not fail.

California school districts rarely allow pass/fail grading in high schools, partly because colleges and other programs are inconsistent. Some might accept these courses as credit-worthy, others might not. During the Pandemic, legislation allowed pass-fail courses in California high schools, but only temporarily.

In praise of tough teachers

Years of grade inflation have dimmed the signals that families need to know whether kids are on track. State tests, meant to help hold the system accountable for academic results, are proving insufficient to accomplish their intended job. They consistently show that the rising grades are an illusion, driven more by inflation than education.

Research confirms the obvious: students learn more from tough teachers than from easy graders. Grades continue inflating anyway. Teachers lack clear guidance about the purpose of grading — are they supposed to be objective referees, and if so based on what rules or standards? If a teacher is an easy grader, who is supposed to call them out on it, and through what process? The pressures to grade higher are obvious, but the incentives to keep a lid on them are basically absent.

Who wants to be the bad guy?

This post was updated in April, 2026.