The contrast between the Ontario high school curriculum and the University of Toronto is way bigger than I had thought. After COVID, teachers were put in bad positions. Many had to overhaul their traditional teaching style and start from scratch. The result is a sudden change and the constantly hovering fear of losing student attention. Rapid grade inflation occurred.

What is grade inflation?

Grade inflation, like other forms of inflation, is a vicious cycle of giving out higher grades, altering the student's perception of a "good grade". Then, universities see these grades, and raise their bar, forcing teachers to maintain their grade inflation under the fear of potentially barring their students from higher level schooling.

This is a problem, but depending on who you are, the magnitude of the problem is drastically different. For most, this is just life, it does not necessarily stop them from entering into their program of choice given they can still meet the requirements. But for a small but vocal minority, grade inflation is a boogie man blamed for all their problems.

These are academically gifted (or maybe not so, expanding on this later) students who aim high in their university choice and program choice. I was (and still partially) one of these students. They are constantly stressing over half marks, obsessing over tenths of percentages in averages, and having set their sights on an extremely competitive program.

For context, Ontario's grading system is a percentage mark, incorporating a mean of the top 6 required class grades and a mix of elective courses. In the past, averages and medians for class grades were around 70-80%, with 90%+ grades only making up a small number of academically gifted students. Currently, this is wrong. Many schools seem to have adjusted for others to allow their students to compete for top programs. Now, class averages seem to be hovering around 85-90% with some even higher. As a reminder, this is a percentage, meaning there is no higher grade than 100%. So classes are getting easier, and standards are getting higher, but how high can they get?

My grade average when applying to university peaked at 98%. This is ridiculous. Of course, I worked hard but achieving a grade like this meant the only difference between me and a perfect student was 2% across 6 grades. This means that school has changed from learning to minimizing microscopic errors. I think this is completely broken and can make people's lives actively worse.

Once again, this problem was only really felt in a meaningful way by the most sweaty students. But, that does not take away from the general problem of essentially capping the reward for students who achieve more than expected. I was not one of these "hyper overachievers". I am secure enough in my intelligence to realize that there exists a gap between me and some other students. But the fact that the separation was maybe a couple of decimals is insane.

How do we solve this?

This is a real chicken and egg problem. Universities have raised the bar for required grades because of high grade inflation, and teachers have given out higher grades to allow their students to meet those increased requirements. This problem must be solved through collaboration between boards of education and universities. A form of standardization could help but that comes with downsides. We could start giving wider access to AP and IB curricula to all schools, but this is expensive and runs into similar problems that arise in standardization.

Honestly, I have no idea what the solution is. To be frank, it is not that big of an issue, but it does highlight a potential future issue of skewing the goal of education away from learning to gaming the system.