Are grades now meaningless?

Debates over “grade inflation” escalate at this time of year especially as the University of the Philippines (UP) system holds commencement exercises in its various campuses nationwide, and the number of Latin honors awarded is publicly reported.

Last weekend, the last of the UP campuses to hold its graduation rites, UP Los Baños (UPLB), completed the picture with 28 summa cum laude, 437 magna cum laude, and 649 cum laude. The total of 1,114 honor graduates comprised more than half (55 percent) of the 2,024 baccalaureate (bachelor’s degree) graduates of UPLB. A week before, the main campus of UP Diliman graduated 286 summa, 1,109 magna, and 788 cum laude, together comprising 62 percent of all baccalaureate graduates numbering 3,511. All UP campuses produced 344 summa, 2,142 magna, and 2,742 cum laude graduates, well over half of the total baccalaureate graduates in the UP system.

Seven years ago, even with just 37 summa cum laude graduates in UP Diliman, a social media user had already quipped that summa graduates were “sampu sampera” (10 for a centavo); the year before that, there were 30. The number started to exceed 20 in 2010, after averaging less than nine in the preceding decade, and less than four in the 1990s. Fellow retired UP professor and Inquirer columnist Randy David wrote two years ago on how in the 1960s, “there would usually be no more than 20-30 cum laude, two or three magna, and maybe one or not even a single summa” in a typical academic year (there were in fact only two in the 1960s). There was none in Diliman when I graduated in 1975, and only one in the entire UP system then (from UPLB).

To be sure, it can well be argued that there has also been a “brain boom,” and that young people have truly become smarter over the years for various reasons. But grade inflation was unmistakably behind the sudden ballooning of Latin honors at UP Diliman after the COVID-19 pandemic. While there were 28 and 29 summa in 2020 and 2021, respectively, the number ballooned to 150 in 2022, further doubling to 303 in 2023. But what defies logic is how magna cum laude graduates exceeded the cum laude ones starting in 2022. Also since 2022, there are now more UP students who graduate with honors than those who do not. The reasons can be readily explained. That was a period when a policy of leniency was mandated—not just in UP, and not just in college but in elementary and high school levels as well—and no failing grades were to be given to students, for humanitarian considerations. This was likely to have led teachers and professors to adjust by pushing grades up for the rest of students better than the “pasang-awa” (those passed out of compassion).

Even well before the pandemic, numerous international researches already documented and analyzed grade inflation, citing several explanations, including (1) wide availability and ease of searching for tools to help with course requirements on the internet, such as sample exams including specific professors’ past ones, relevant references for research papers, and more recently, artificial intelligence tools; (2) increased use of students’ evaluations as basis for faculty promotion, leading teachers to be generous with grades to gain favor, and (3) students deliberately engaging in strategic grade-raising behavior like opting for easier courses, avoiding challenging research topics, “shopping” for lenient professors, and more.

Grade inflation is a problem not so much because it “cheapens” Latin honors and removes the scarcity value in a title that accords prestige and elite status. What should worry us more is how it is symptomatic of the more fundamental problem of grading systems ceasing to be good indicators of students’ abilities, and at worst, becoming an outright obstacle to learning. Students’ (and even their parents’) behavior has come to be directed at getting high grades rather than acquiring the relevant learning they will need to secure their future—and the two are not necessarily the same. And where teachers’ performance and promotion are assessed based on their students’ grades rather than actual learning outcomes, the wider the two will diverge.

Research and consultations by the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EdCom II) have indeed witnessed this distortion, seen to be a major contributor to the country’s current education crisis. EdCom II sees the need for an independent body to assess actual learning outcomes of students in our schools well beyond numerical grades, or possibly even do away with grades altogether. Randy David may be right to suggest that we free education “from the thoughtless pursuit of grades” and “restore the joy of learning… [by] abolishing grades altogether.” As for Latin honors, they would be much more meaningful if based on more qualitative measures, rather than simply meeting numerical grade cutoffs.

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