James Piereson and Naomi Schaeffer Riley, in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece: “It might seem unfair that admissions officers place almost as much weight on a one-morning test as they do on grades from four years of high school … But there’s a simple reason for this emphasis on testing: Policy makers and educators have effectively eliminated all the other ways of quantifying student performance.”
“Classroom grades have become meaningless … Figures from the Education Department show that between 1990 and 2009, high-school graduates’ mean GPA rose 0.33 points for women and 0.31 points for men—even while their ACT and SAT scores remained the same … Since high schools are often rewarded for increasing their graduation rates, teachers are fairly reluctant to give out D’s and F’s.”
“‘Grades are increasingly a lousy signal,’ a sociologist explained, ‘especially at those elite places that just hand out the A’s.’ Standardized tests, for all their faults, are the only thing left to judge students by.”
