A week after the commencement exercises of the University of the Philippines, an article in Rappler by UP faculty member and proud summa cum laude graduate JC Punongbayan titled “Let’s discuss grade inflation in the Philippines” made the rounds in social media. 

It eventually reached my own Facebook feed because my newly graduated former students, many of whom are recipients of Latin honors themselves, shared their own views on the opinion piece that seems to be putting a question mark on the recognition of their academic performance (despite Punongbayan’s insistence that this is not his intention). 

The regrettable use of the term “grade inflation” suggests that measures of academic performance are analogous to market prices, ergo academic work is commodity production. The term also conjures up the idea of devaluation, which almost ensures a negative framing of the topic. Is Punongbayan really inviting an honest discussion? 

Frankly speaking, a cross-period comparison of grades done in the same manner as a cross-period comparison of market prices is of little analytic value because grades and the academic performances they purport to measure emerge from different contexts. Instead of viewing them as hard measures of a phenomenon, grades are better interpreted as discourses—narratives in quantitative form—that are products of a particular point in a society’s history.

Flashpoint

Let’s train the spotlight on the grades of the batch that graduated from UP in 2022, a year which Punongbayan identifies as a flashpoint of grade inflation because of the spike in the number of summa cum laude graduates. Punongbayan is not alone in voicing his grade-inflation sentiment; I distinctly remember many other faculty members at the time (and even to this day) raising this as a matter of concern. They ask: Are the faculty members becoming too kind and too lenient? Are we lowering our standards? 

A cursory scan of changes in Philippine higher education at the time can give us a number of tentative explanations for the higher grades of this cohort of students that seem more plausible than the implied explanations of the alarmists.

First, most of the college graduates of 2022 come from the first cohort of students who underwent the K-12 basic education program. They went through senior high school, so they had two more years of formal preparation for college education than the earlier batches of students. Aside from the additional years, they also went through academic tracks with specialized courses that aligned better with the degree programs they planned to take in college.

I remember my early encounters with these students who went through senior high school. I was pleasantly surprised that many already had some knowledge of C. Wright Mills’ “The Sociological Imagination” and the ideas of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim even before they took Socio 101 (general sociology). In the survey-methods classes that I have been handling these past few years, I had students sharing practical insights from surveys they implemented before college, leading to better research design in their class projects. 

Students who went through senior high school are thus better prepared for college education. That was the point of the K-12 reform, regardless of one’s position on its practical and moral necessity. Why then should we be surprised that better prepared students translated to better performance, which in turn translated to higher grades?

Second, in 2018, UP had a system-wide curricular revision of undergraduate degree programs in response to the K-12 transition in basic education. Most departments took this chance to formulate clear program learning outcomes and redesigned their courses to better align with the achievement of these outcomes. Faculty members were then asked to construct detailed syllabi to complement the curricular revisions. The days of faculty members handing out one to two pages of a list of topics or assigned readings masquerading as a syllabus were over. If the curricula of undergraduate degree programs and the syllabi of undergraduate courses were revised for improvement, shouldn’t a corresponding improvement in students’ performance be expected?

Third, during the pandemic, faculty members were asked to prepare detailed course packs. To facilitate learning in difficult remote conditions, we were asked to meticulously write in detail the learning activities, the expected outputs, and, most important, a clear rubric on how these outputs will be assessed and graded. With class expectations and evaluation criteria made explicit, the pathway towards high grades was demystified. 

Elitist gatekeeping

The requirement to spell out clear assessment criteria exposed how much of our previous grading practices were informed by misguided elitist gatekeeping posing as maintaining the high standards of our prestigious university. Some faculty members actually carry with pride the inability of students to get high grades in their class. Now, we can rightfully ask, WHY? The higher grades could then be explained not as a result of lowered standards but of greater clarity and accountability to students.

Lastly, even before the pandemic hit, the education system has increasingly acknowledged the validity of mental health concerns. Many faculty members are now more aware of the need to be attuned to the concerns and personal circumstances of students under their supervision. Students, on the other hand, have become less wary of openly acknowledging their struggles and asking for help. In this regard, the claim that faculty members today may be kinder could be true. 

But what’s wrong with that? Is the emergence of a more nurturing and caring learning environment a bad thing? I guess only in the minds of those who think good grades helped in part by a better understanding of mental health is a sign of declining academic excellence.

Many grade-inflation alarmists are obsessed with the presumed linkage between grades and academic performance. The ironic thing is, if such a linkage is substantive, why is it that a numeric grade is not used in the assessment of a doctoral dissertation or a master’s thesis, the pinnacle of all academic student output? Is it because a numeric grade, a crude representation that lacks depth and humanistic quality, cannot capture the excellence, the effort, and the passion poured in such academic work? 

Instead of discussing grade inflation, why don’t we instead discuss why we still use numeric grades? Imagine a system where, instead of using numeric grades, we certify students as achieving specific outcomes, signaling that they learned what they needed to learn and thus are ready to take the next step in their educational journey. Imagine a system that is focused solely on ascertaining that learning took place and not on ranking and pitting students against one another. Bragging and unhealthy competitive behavior would not be reinforced in school. Solidarity between students may actually have more chances of taking root by designing outcomes that can only be achieved through cooperative effort, something which would be harder to do if ranked assessment systems remain in place. 

In closing his piece, Punongbayan eventually blurted out his real concern about grade inflation: “Persistent grade inflation will likely devalue grades and honors as useful signals of merits and skills outside the university.” If one performs a functional analysis of modern society, the education system does fulfill the function of a caste system. Through numeric grading, Latin honors, and university rankings, we comfort ourselves with the “legitimacy” of the way we decide who ends up with precarious slave-like jobs with barely livable wages, who ends up in choice positions that profit off the hard work of others, and who falls in the middle with the duty of ensuring the smooth operation and reproduction of this modern-day caste system. 

What better way to perpetuate the legitimacy of hierarchic societal organization than to embed and normalize it in our system of education in the guise of numeric meritocracy?

Erwin F. Rafael is assistant professor of sociology at the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of the Philippines Diliman.

Read more: Surviving burnouts as a UP student and cadet officer