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Each spring, Patrick Kelly hears the same complaint from teachers in his state of South Carolina: Too many students, particularly in high school, stop doing any schoolwork.
Students know they can pass their classes anyway because of school policies known as “grade floors.” Schools adopted grade floors — which require teachers to give students minimum grades, commonly a 40 or 50, instead of zeros — to keep GPAs from being dragged down by a few missed assignments. But in practice, they’ve allowed students to scrape by all year and still end up with a passing grade, said Kelly, director of governmental affairs with the Palmetto State Teachers Association and a high school history teacher.
“At any high school graduation, I promise you, there will be a child who walks across the stage where every teacher in the room is going to go, ‘Wait, how did they graduate? They didn’t do anything,’” said Kelly.
In May, the South Carolina Legislature passed a law banning minimum grades, or grade floors, in K-12 schools in an attempt to crack down on grade inflation. The law comes at a time when many people are wondering what an A actually stands for. The infiltration of artificial intelligence into school work and lenient grading policies that are a holdover from the pandemic have added to the skepticism, experts say. South Carolina is among the first states to attempt to tackle the problem through legislation, following a similar law passed by Texas in 2009.
Studies show that although classroom grades and GPAs have been rising for decades, scores on standardized tests have stagnated or fallen. The average high school GPA in 2021 was 3.36, up from 3.17 in 2010, according to a study done by ACT, the company behind the college admissions test. While GPAs were rising, test scores on the ACT actually fell.
Grade floors are just one piece of the grade inflation trend that is “diminishing the value of a high school diploma,” Kelly said.
It’s a problem that colleges are increasingly wrestling with, too.
Two days after South Carolina’s grade floor law was signed, faculty at Harvard University passed a policy capping the number of students who can receive A’s to 20% of an instructor’s class plus four students. The move was a response to perceived grade inflation in the aftermath of the pandemic: A report from the college showed A’s made up two-thirds of the grades given to undergraduates at Harvard in the spring of 2025.
Some education experts blame grade inflation in K-12 classrooms for contributing to the problem at the college level.
“It’s hard to hold the line at the higher ed level if you have kids coming into higher ed who are less prepared than they used to be,” said David Griffith, national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning think tank.
Educators fear no-zeros policies ultimately hurt students
This spring, testimony from educators and advocates on grade floor policies alarmed South Carolina legislators. The state is “hurting these kids” by having grade floors in schools, Rep. James Teeple, a Charleston Republican, said during a committee meeting.
In 2025, South Carolina’s high school graduation rate was 87%, a high point for the state. At the same time, only 33% of seniors were considered college ready by graduation — a metric on the state’s report card based on college admissions test scores and advanced classes. More than 1 in 5 students in the state were chronically absent from school — nearly double the rate of chronic absenteeism in the state prior to the pandemic.
At least 22 districts across the state had official policies preventing students from getting zeros, according to an analysis by Palmetto Promise Institute, a conservative think tank. But other schools also had informal grade floor policies, many of which prevented students from receiving below a 40 or 50.
One high school teacher in the state, who did not want to be named for fear of reprisal, said half-a-dozen seniors passed his class despite not doing any school work this spring because of such a policy. “It’s our fault. It’s not the kids’ fault for figuring out how to beat the system,” the teacher said.
Giving younger students minimum grades could mislead parents into thinking their children aren’t struggling when they are — studies have shown that parents are more likely to trust their children’s report card grades than test scores. It’s also likely to leave students less prepared for schoolwork as they age, said Dena Crews, president of the South Carolina Education Association, which represents teachers.
“If you’re giving them the minimum of a 60, by the time they’re getting to middle and high school, they’re taking those gaps and deficits with them when they could have gotten the extra help and extra support in the early childhood and elementary grades,” Crews said.
The new law, which went into effect this school year, threatens districts that don’t comply with the minimum-grade ban with the loss of 10% of their state funding. It also requires that students turn in any missing assignments before they become eligible for credit and content recovery programs — courses that allow students to make up sections of a class or to pass a class they initially failed. Critics of these programs say they enable students to do no work all year and still pass.
A section of the law also instructs schools not to count most benchmark tests — standardized tests given throughout the year to track student progress — toward a student’s final grade, except under specific circumstances. Eric Duncan, director of P-12 policy for the national nonprofit EdTrust, applauded the legislation for separating benchmark tests from the grading process and encouraging schools to be more transparent with parents.
“It’s very thoughtful about how important it is for teachers and schools to guide the instruction,” Duncan said. “It’s all part of being honest about where students are and what they need to do to get to grade level.”
Teachers in the state have broadly supported the legislation, according to Kelly.
“South Carolina teachers would tell you that policies like grade floors, credit recovery and content recovery — in the way that they’ve been implemented — are leading to students getting diplomas that have no value beyond the paper they’re printed on,” he said.
Grade floors can stop ‘in-school dropouts,’ supporters say
Greenville County Schools, the largest district in South Carolina, first instituted its grade floor policy more than a decade ago. It prevented elementary and high school students from getting below a 50 on each of their quarterly report cards. For middle schoolers, the district later banned grades below 50 on all assignments.
Proponents of these policies say the 100-point scale unfairly gives students a bigger opportunity to fail than succeed, since any grade below 60 is a failing one and just one zero can depress even a strong student’s average. Grade floors are also meant to prevent “in-school dropouts” — students who do so poorly at the start of the year that they are mathematically unable to pass even if they ace the rest of the course.
Cinnamon Stetler, a parent of two children in middle and high school in Greenville County Schools, can understand why schools might introduce a grade floor policy for younger students.
“Students should still be allowed to make mistakes and figure things out and develop an understanding of how to do school and how to learn, without it being so much an emphasis on what number you have in a subject,” Stetler said.
But for high schoolers, GPAs matter — to college admissions, for example — and inflated grades have “ripple effects,” Stetler said. And there should be consistency in grading across schools within the same district and state, she said.
“If you go to a different school where the inherent value of that same mark reflects something different, that’s not a reliable measure,” Stetler said. “It’s problematic for the students; it’s problematic for the parents.”
Susan Stevens, assistant superintendent for school leadership in Greenville, said the district had already planned to eliminate the middle school policy this year before the state passed its grade floor ban. It had not planned on getting rid of the grade floor on report cards, though Stevens said the district will abide by the new law. But she is concerned about other changes in the bill, such as the rule about students completing coursework before they are eligible for content recovery classes. That could result in more students failing altogether and dropping out, she said.
“We will have to look at how we can support students who are at risk or students who have additional challenges to help them avoid failure,” Stevens said.
Pandemic fueled lenient grading policies
Grade floor policies started gaining traction in the 2010s alongside a movement known as “equitable grading.” The idea was to remove educator bias from grading and give students chances to recover from low scores. Equitable grading policies, such as grade floors, spread more rapidly when schools went remote during the pandemic as students faced barriers to learning from home, said Griffith of the Fordham Institute.
“The pandemic supercharged it. Frankly, teachers didn’t have much choice. What were they going to do, flunk every kid in America?” said Griffith. “Some level of standards lowering was basically inevitable under the circumstances.”
But even after schools returned to in-person learning, many schools kept the lenient grading policies adopted during the pandemic. A national survey of teachers published last fall by RAND and the Fordham Institute estimates more than one-quarter of teachers work in a school with a “no zeros” grading policy. A separate study of Washington state’s school policies found that 70 school districts had “no zero” policies in 2024-25, up from 30 districts in 2015-16.
“Once you’ve lowered the bar, it’s hard to raise it again,” Griffith said, noting that the use of artificial intelligence by students has made it more difficult to determine the accuracy of classroom grades.
Minimum grades are just one piece of the larger grade inflation problem. Educators said they also feel pressure from both school leadership and parents to give students grades that are higher than what they earn. Tough graders can expect pushback from everyone, Griffith said, because parents, students, and principals are incentivized by higher grades.
There are a lot of incentives for schools to perform well on their state report cards, too, said Derek Lewis, a former school board member of Greenville County Schools and father of a high school student in the district.
“If the number of students failing hurts your school, every school is going to look at how we address that issue, even if maybe the solutions don’t necessarily equate to better learning,” Lewis said. “We focus on what we measure.”
Banning minimum grade policies won’t completely solve the problem of grade inflation, but it gives educators more autonomy to honestly grade students’ work, Kelly said.
The high school teacher who did not want to be named criticizing their district said they didn’t know a single teacher unsupportive of the law.
“No child wants to fail, but if we keep saving them, why should they try?” the teacher said.
Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at gilreath@hechingerreport.org.
This story about elementary and high school grade inflation was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
