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…
More episodes of The Grading Podcast
- 145 - The Wrap-Up Dilemma: Turning Evidence into a Final Grade with Dr. Tim Monk
- 144 - Second-Order Change: Why Grading Reform Requires Leadership, Not Just Teachers
- 143 - Barrier or Breakthrough? Course Coordination and the Future of Grading with Deb Carney
- 142 - Please Harvard! Don't get it wrong this time!! What's wrong with a cap on A's - a discussion with Dr. Stephanie Valentine
- 141 - The Ungrading Spectrum: From Compliance to Student Ownership
- 140 - Beyond Labels: Specifications, Standards and Designing Better Grading - with Adriana Streifer
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