Grade Inflation & College Unreadiness
During primary and secondary school years, parents and students tend to focus heavily on course titles and grades/GPA, but the findings in a new internal University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Senate Admissions Working Group (SAWG) report suggest that they should instead be focusing on true learning and college readiness.
As Jesus Mesa stated in his November 11, 2025, Newsweek article “Students at California University Without 8th Grade Math Skills Skyrockets,” “A sharp rise in students entering the University of California [UC] system without middle school-level math skills is raising alarms among educators.” He pointed out that the aforementioned UCSD SAWG report “reveals that the percentage of incoming students scoring below Algebra 1 on placement exams—a math course typically completed by the end of eighth grade—has tripled over the past five years.”
What is even more shocking than that percentage tripling in just five years is that in fall of 2024, of the incoming students who did not have middle school-level math skills, approximately half of the students had completed Calculus or Precalculus in high school and more than a quarter of them had a 4.0 math GPA in high school!
What does that indicate? It indicates that course titles and GPA (and high school transcripts) have become unreliable predictors of college readiness.
There is a lot that parents can do to help ensure that their children are set up for success, not failure, at college. One easy thing that they can do is take a closer look at their children’s “A” work and ask themselves, “Is this ‘A’ work?” If it is not “A” work, then the next questions to ask are “Why not?” and “What can I do about it?”
If I hadn’t questioned the “A” that my son received on a paper that he wrote at the beginning of his fifth-grade school year and, in turn, identified the holes in his writing foundation and addressed them by providing him with writing instruction outside of school, he would not be the writer that he is today and would not have been able to confidently, independently, and successfully write the approximately 25 college papers that he has been required to write in just the first three months of his first year of college (yes, 25 papers in three months, and none of them were for an English course . . .).
By pausing and taking a closer look at my son’s writing when he was in fifth grade, I was able to change the trajectory of not just his writing education, but his overall education, ensuring true learning and college readiness.
High school course titles and A’s/high GPAs may help students get into college, but they are not going to help students succeed at college if true learning hasn’t happened and strong educational (i.e., math, writing, etc.) foundations don’t exist. And shouldn’t the goal be for students to succeed at college, not just get into college?
Founder & Owner of ★ W O R D S