Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average, is not in Minnesota, but in Arkansas – where every nine weeks the news about schools overflows with the names of students on the honor roll – and every spring half a dozen students qualify to be valedictorian of Woebegone high school.
Parents bust their buttons listening to six identical valedictory speeches remembering four years of straight A’s and B’s. No one mentions reconfigured grades when a classroom test average was too low or tests written to insure the least able will pass. Few realize that honor rolls increased after the universal grading system was established. This guaranteed that a grade of 90 earned an A, even though it was five points below the previous 95th percentile cut-off of many schools and all students moved one letter closer to the high honor roll.
Having experienced a similar grade conversion when my family moved, I know the benefits. At school 421, which used only numerical grades, my grade point average (gpa) did not qualify me for the honor society.
However, school ABC converted those numbers to letters and said I qualified to join their honor society. I wasn’t any smarter – I just looked like it on paper.
Would no one would dare say anything similar happens in Lake Woebegone, Arkansas? – that our honor students are not merely a reflection of the academic superiority of the schools? Someone said say exactly that. Sean Mulvenon, hired by the Arkansas Department of Education to compare gpa’s with standardized test scores, said there is “a pattern of grade inflation – the assignment of grades that misrepresents the actual ability or level of performance of students.” He studied the ACT scores of Arkansas seniors who earned a gpa of 3.0 or higher. His conclusion was that the gpa indicates a higher academic achievement than the ACT scores portray.What difference does that make? Mulvenon said, “it skews the parental perception and causes students problems.” When children bring home excellent grades, parents think the school is doing a great job and see no need for improvement in their school or to check their child’s academic progress.
The lie of good grades is not revealed until Johnny goes off to the state university, dragging his honor cords behind him. His high school transcript says he has completed, with honors, every math and science course available at Lake Woebegone, but his ACT score barely qualifies him for remedial Algebra.
Or if his ACT agrees that he is qualified for the honors Calculus course – but Lake Woebegone did not offer Advanced Placement Calculus, he will struggle to compete with classmates from high schools with an AP curriculum.
Been there and done that, too. I finally admitted defeat and asked to transfer from University Calculus to Advanced Trigonometry so I could catch up academically. But that is ancient history lived in another state. I definitely did not come from Lake Woebegone, Arkansas where all the children are above average … and the ACT scores validate that claim by qualifying a third of our students for the honor of remedial classes before they can enroll in credit level college classes.