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Slipping standards: Top US colleges under fire

Fox News senior national correspondent Rich Edson reports on findings about students’ preparedness for the next level on ‘America Reports.’

College application deadlines in January are approaching. As they do, students and especially parents are having tough conversations and revising their school lists and expectations in one direction: downward. Ninety percent of parents believe that their children are at or above grade level proficiency, yet, according to standardized measures, 12th-grade students have the lowest math and reading preparedness on record. Only 22% of 12th-grade students are proficient in math, and only 35% in reading. 

Typically, families only realize how inflated grades are when they start looking into colleges. For instance, in 2024, the average unweighted GPA of an admitted student to UCLA was a perfect 4.0. In other words, the average student had never received a "B" in any class throughout all of high school, and potentially never even an "A-minus."  

With that realization comes another one: how unprepared their "top performing" students are. As the owner of a tutoring company, I see and hear some version of the following countless times: "My kid just got her SAT score back, and it is much lower than we expected. She is a top performer at her school but scored in the 1100s." 

I'M A CONSERVATIVE STUDENT AND THE NO. 1 QUESTION I GET IS: 'HOW DO I SURVIVE LEFTIST PROFESSORS?'

SAT and ACT scores are a rude awakening, both because parents have been misled about the academic preparedness of their kids for so long and because it’s often too late to go back and relearn everything now. 

Students are discovering that high school grades might not tell them anything about how they will do in college. (iStock)

The University of California, San Diego’s latest research on the academic preparedness of its students highlights the danger: 25% of its incoming students who didn’t know how to do middle school math had perfect 4.0 GPAs in their high school math classes. Their grades did not reflect their knowledge at all, and thus, a top-performing student as measured by grades could just as easily be below the national average as above it.  

In that context, an 1100 on the SAT (which puts the student in the top 40% of SAT test takers) is actually a sign, not that the student scored lower than expected, but that the student with stellar grades performed according to expectations. But parents, who assume that an A-average means their child’s academic preparedness is above average, are duped into false expectations. 

The takeaway: grades alone often tell students, their parents and colleges very little about a student’s actual academic preparedness. 

But there is no easy way to now deflate grades. High schools that do so, especially while most colleges still have not returned to requiring an SAT or ACT for admissions consideration, would disadvantage their students with lower grades than those of other applicants. 

SLIPPING STANDARDS: TOP US COLLEGES UNDER FIRE