138 - Too Many A’s Or Too Much Confusion?

About this episode

Sharona and Boz discuss the implications of grade inflation and the purposes of grading in education.

In “Too Many A’s,” Sharona and Boz revisit a popular media narrative about “grade inflation,” starting with a Harvard-focused story that treats “too many A’s” as a crisis—while quietly mixing two incompatible purposes of grading: ranking/sorting and communicating learning. They argue that if grades are meant to report mastery, “more A’s” isn’t a scandal—it’s the goal (with the important caveat that the bar still matters). From there, they dissect a recent viral article claiming “easy A’s” harm students’ long-term outcomes, and they do what they teach: go to the original research, separate correlation from causation, and interrogate definitions—especially a math-heavy “lenient grader” metric that depends on standardized tests and other inputs that may be misaligned, inequitable, or just plain bad proxies. Along the way, they call out how quickly commentary slides into storytelling (“the mechanism is not difficult to imagine”) and how often alternative grading gets blamed without evidence—ending with a clear takeaway: we can’t evaluate “too many A’s” until we’re honest about what grades are for, what evidence they should represent, and what data we’re willing to treat as…

People in this episode

Hosts: Sharona Krinsky, Robert Bosley

Topics covered

• grade inflation
• grading practices
• educational outcomes
• correlation vs causation
• alternative grading

Keywords

• grade inflation
• A grades
• educational outcomes
• grading practices
• correlation causation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Harvard, NY Times

More episodes of The Grading Podcast

• 152 - Alternative Grading, Reflection, and the Questions That Remain with David Clark · June 9, 2026 · 54 min
• 151 - Designing Impactful Courses Using Self-Determination Theory - with Dan Guberman · June 2, 2026 · 55 min
• 150 - Finding Joy in Teaching Again with Kimberly Ellen Hall and Dan Guberman · May 26, 2026 · 55 min
• 149 - Building a Classroom About Learning: Alt Grading in an Introduction to Theater Arts class with Teresa Focarile · May 19, 2026 · 1h 0m
• 148 - Oral Exams, Feedback Loops, and the Future of Assessment · May 12, 2026 · 47 min
• 147 - Equity Isn't Automatic: Lessons Learned from Specifications Grading · May 5, 2026 · 52 min