By Zachary Burd ’19, Editor-in-Chief

Note: This article incorporates, builds upon, and updates content from a previous article of the same name by this author that was published online as part of a Minuteman set last May.

Each spring, a common problem among Newark Academy seniors is figuring out how to spend their newfound free time. Many choose Netflix or a new hobby, while others catch up on years of missed sleep.

Unfortunately, I’d already exhausted those sources of entertainment years ago during bouts of procrastination, so I went with my next best option: analyzing the grade and test score distributions of 14 prominent north New Jersey private high schools. Yes, I’ll stroke our collective ego and admit that NA is one of those top schools.

NA passed the comparison with flying colors—that is, in all but one category. In the category of grade inflation, it came in dead last, with significantly higher grades across the board than any of the other comparable schools.

According to last year’s grade distribution for juniors published in the Newark Academy Profile by the College Office, the most common grade in every academic department is now an A and the average grade is solidly an A-. Only about 6% of all grades received were below a B, the midpoint of the published grade range, while 67% were an A or A-.

And data from only 3 years ago (the 2014-2015 school year) indicates that grade inflation has increased significantly of late. The mean grade then was a B+ and the mode was an A-, with approximately 13% fewer grades in the A range.

Newark Academy has by far the worst grade inflation problem of the 14 schools—only Pingry comes even close, with 10% of their grades below a B and 62% of grades in the A range (an A+, A, or A- in Pingry’s system). Of the 13 comparable schools to NA I considered, 9 schools have grade distribution information posted online for public consumption. 6 out of those 9 schools have average grades of B+ or below, and 2 (barely) have an A- average.

It is important to note that each set of data only includes the grades of one class of students for one academic year, and that at least at NA, older students tend to get higher grades.

All of this is not to disparage the blood, sweat, and tears that many students pour into their classes. Undeniably, NA students have strong work ethics—all-night study sessions may be the only activity everyone shares—that manifest in widespread success in nationally recognized programs like the Scholastic Writing Competition and the National Merit Scholarship.

And many students, teachers, administrators, and parents don’t see everyone getting top grades as an issue. Humanities teacher Mr. Hawk says, “There is no broad agreement, either among schools, teachers, or students, as to grading practices. If you look at what is graded, how it is graded, and who is doing the grading, there is almost no agreement about what is appropriate. If you cannot agree on even the scale you intend to use, it is pretty pointless to start making fine comparisons or to claim grades are somehow inflated. Thus, while grades are a pretty terrific measure of achievement within one of my classes, it is pretty darn hard to use them for measures outside of my classes.”

Other people argue that NA students are by and large top students, and therefore deserve corresponding top grades. After all, Newark Academy has by far the highest average ACT and summed SAT scores of any of the 14 schools I considered in my analysis (33 out of 36 and 1470 out of 1600, respectively). Of the 13 comparable schools to NA, the average summed SAT score was about 1315, and the average ACT score was 29.

But I think the argument is more complex than that, as there are not one, but two, main purposes of class grades. While there is an external purpose of grades to signal to college admissions the qualification of an applicant (differentiating between students from different schools), there is also an internal purpose for assessing class performance (differentiating between students from the same class or grade). The debate, in my opinion, should be over how much emphasis to place on the internal vs. the external purpose of a grade.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where there can’t be both a set of internal and a set of external grades kept. Instead, schools have the option to adopt different grading philosophies or systems that reflect their decisions on how much to emphasize internal vs. external grades. Most simply, though, schools can reflect these varied emphases by deciding how much grade inflation they will tolerate. While the administration obviously does not control the exact level of grade inflation, it has the power to reign it in overall through faculty directives and departmental chairs’ cooperation.

More grade inflation would more closely align students’ grades with their qualifications compared to applicants nationwide (a more external emphasis). Otherwise, Newark Academy students with a B average might not be able to compete with other straight A students from other schools, both private and public. Of course, this scenario only works when we do not consider college admissions’ consideration of class difficulty or qualifications other than grades. Yet even so, this relationship between higher grade inflation and better college placement only applies to a certain extent, as it would soon hurt the students who would have earned top grades in the absence of any grade inflation—a demographic that would swell in size with each increase in grade inflation.

The problem with the glut of A’s is not that they make grades too high, but that they make them too similar. Grades, irrespective of whether they are A’s or C’s, lose their value if everyone gets them; a college admissions officer looking at our school’s grade distribution will likely not be impressed with a transcript with an A- average.

Part of this problem is that NA students are not being properly motivated to strive for the highest levels of success. Many students, with an eye on crafting a photogenic transcript, only work hard enough to get an A- for the year. The current grading system acts as their accomplice in this tactic, allowing someone with an 83 (B) in the fall and a 93 (A) in the spring to escape with an A- year grade. These students have no incentive to work harder, as someone with a 99 (A) in the fall and a 92 (A-) in the spring receives the same end grade. Meanwhile, someone with a B+ in the fall has no motivation to try for an A as opposed to an A- in the spring, as they will end up at an A- nonetheless.

The student handbook says in defense of the system, “The grade for the spring semester—due to its greater length and recency—will serve as the tie-breaker.” But there is something inherently wrong about our grading structure when both of these hypothetical students, with very different sets of grades, end up at the same place.

One proposal aiming to fix some of these problems is to transition to a grading system using both letters and numbers, where the weighted numerical average (based on the number of days in each term) is taken of the fall and spring grades, before being converted into a letter to go on the student’s transcript. This proposed system would make grades a better reflection of students’ true work in a class. It is not without administrative and ideological problems, and it would not address the majority of the grade inflation issue. However, it would solve the motivational problem by rewarding the students who get a higher numerical grade within the range of each letter grade.

The most obvious solution to grade inflation is forced grade deflation, a draconian measure where only a certain number of students can get an A per class. This would be unpopular and difficult to implement, though, not to mention arbitrary and unfair. Many people fear such a system would turn the academic atmosphere into a cutthroat one, where students are uber-focused on every decimal point of their grades. Parents—a vastly underestimated force in this decision—would also likely protest that they are spending $40,000 a year only for their kids to get B’s and C’s and potentially fare worse in the college process than if they had stayed in public school.

Another option is to add A+’s to the current grading system, which would fight grade inflation without artificially lowering some students’ grades, as students would no longer commonly receive the highest possible grade in their classes. Benefits of this proposal include better recognition for the top students in a class, as a 99 and a 93 average for the year reflect a vast disparity in academic success, but are represented by the same grade under the current system. It doesn’t make sense for a student to be hurt by falling below the A threshold of 93 but not able to benefit by greatly exceeding it, especially considering we already have both pluses and minuses for B’s and C’s. Other schools clearly consider A+’s to be a good idea; out of the 14 schools analyzed, MKA is the only school besides NA that does not have a higher grade than A.

Yet I still don’t love the idea of implementing A+’s. Perhaps it’s out of laziness—I don’t want to have to put in all that extra work to try to get the highest possible grade in a class. But more so, it’s the chance of A+’s worsening grade inflation. An A+ would be weighted over 4 in the GPA calculation (even if Newark Academy does not publish its GPA data, colleges will calculate students’ GPAs on their own), which might cause a higher average GPA for our school.

Even without A+’s, NA’s grade inflation is unparalleled among comparable schools, with over two-thirds of its grades an A or an A-. To some extent, standardized testing solves this problem in terms of college admissions by normalizing different schools’ class difficulties and grading scales. Yet this places undue pressure on standardized test performance, and colleges nationwide still say that the #1 factor in their admissions process is the student’s transcript.

Additionally, while colleges know NA’s prestige and the high quality of its applicants, they are sent the same school profile that I analyzed. The profligate grade inflation will be all too apparent to them, diluting the value of a top grade. Standardized testing doesn’t solve the negative impacts of grade inflation—it just slightly mitigates them.

It’s an unfortunate and unavoidable fact that in-school grades can’t be just that; they must also serve the college admissions gods. We can decide as a school, however, how much we wish to emphasize the internal vs. the external focus of the grades we give to students. And while higher-performing schools in general are going to have higher-performing students who receive on average higher grades, there is a point where the original internal purpose of grades is largely overshadowed and the benefits of grade inflation are outweighed by the negatives.

We are already at that point, and grade inflation seems poised to worsen based on the trend of the past several years.

I’ve proposed a few practical, and not especially radical, changes to the grading system that I believe will move our school in the right direction. This is a fight I’ve waged continuously for the past two years against faculty, administrators, and students who don’t buy into my arguments. To each his own.

But in a few months, I’ll be gone forever, so this is my last chance to bring the problem of grade inflation to light. For Newark Academy’s sake, I’m hoping this time it won’t fall on deaf ears.