Study Finds Disparities In Academic Testing and Pass Rates in Georgia High Schools

A new report says high school students in Georgia are failing academic tests each year, but still frequently making good enough grades to pass.

The study raises concerns that students in Georgia are entering college unprepared for the coursework there, and getting state-funded HOPE scholarships even though they may not otherwise qualify for them.

Students must graduate from high school with a B average to qualify for HOPE funding.

"If students are receiving the HOPE scholarship based on inflated grades, they're going to be much more likely to have to give it up," says Christopher Clark, a faculty member at Georgia College and State University who conducted the study. Clark says that based on the study, it appears that school systems are essentially giving passing grades to students who have not mastered the coursework.

"They'll be much more likely lose it, not retain the HOPE scholarship after, say, their first year, and they're much more likely to need to take remedial courses while being funded for the HOPE scholarship," says Clark.

The report compared students' grades and pass/fail rates with their scores on academic testing held at the end of each course in 2007. The tests are supposed to determine if students have mastered the course.

Some examples:

In 11th grade economics classes, about 35.85 percent of students failed testing on the subject matter, but only 5.87 percent failed the course, a gap of about 30 percentage points.

In biology, 41.62 percent of 11th graders failed that test, but only 16.77 percent failed that course, a gap of nearly 25 percentage points.

"The HOPE scholarship places a very, very high economic premium on achieving good grades in high school, and high school teachers themselves are in a situation where it's easier to feel greater pressure than university faculty would feel about the economic consequences of a grade," says Dr. William Bloodworth, the president of Augusta State University.

"Before the HOPE scholarship, there was no particularly direct dollar consequence to a grade, whether the grade was an A or B or C, and now there are such consequences," says Bloodworth. "There's a very strong suspicion that the HOPE scholarship has indeed in one way or another caused the teacher to be a bit more sympathetic to students and, on occasion, give grades that are higher than the grades that might have been given before the HOPE scholarship.

Clark's concern about apparently inflated grades is not new. And the scholarships, funded through the state lottery, have had their share of controversy.

Critics have argued that the scholarships have contributed to lowering Georgia's ranking in the U.S. on SAT scores, and that students who would not normally go to college now do so since it's affordable.

Clark acknowledges that more study needs to be done to determine if school systems are indeed inflating grades. The study only compared the grades and test scores. It provides no qualitative data of what schools are specifically doing in relation to the grades. Nor does it look at scores from previous years, or retention data from the scholarships. Clark also acknowledges that some courses require more subjective grading, which could, in part, explain the disparity.

But in his study, Clark asserts that school systems appear to be inflating the grades. State officials say that's because the coursework and the tests are based on the same performance standards by the state, and that, as a result, both grades and test scores should be consistent. Clark encourages further study on the issue.

The Georgia Association of Educators, however, argues that the coursework and tests don't always match. The association, which represents the state's teachers, also says no empirical data on apparent grade inflation exists and deny that teachers are intentionally misrepresenting student progress.

To see the study on the web, go to www.gaosa.org/research.aspx.