The transcript is not the student
High school grades have never been higher, academic proficiency has never been lower. Admissions offices know this, and they are reading transcripts accordingly.
A note before you begin: this issue draws on verified data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, ACT Inc., the National Center for Education Statistics, and peer-reviewed research. No opinion, no conjecture, just what the data actually shows about the gap between what a transcript says and what a student knows, and what it means for the students applying to college.
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In today’s issue (free analysis):
The grade inflation data: what ACT’s November 2025 research report shows about the widening gap between transcript GPA and actual academic proficiency
The 2024 Nation’s Report Card: what historic lows in 12th-grade math and reading mean for students entering college in 2025 and 2026
The college readiness reality: what ACT’s 2025 graduating class data shows about how many students are actually prepared for first-year college coursework
How admissions offices are already adjusting for grade inflation and what they are using instead of raw GPA
For paid subscribers:
The school profile audit: what IECs should know about their clients’ school profiles and how admissions offices are reading them
The transcript diagnostic: how to identify the specific students in your practice most exposed to the gap between their reported GPA and their actual college readiness, before they arrive on a college campus and find out themselves
The academic preparation conversation: how to have it with families without damaging trust, and what to recommend when the gap is real
How IECs can position themselves as the professional who sees the whole picture, not just the application, but the student’s readiness for what comes after it
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The data that admissions offices have and most families don’t
A November 2025 ACT research report (R2432), published by ACT Inc., tracked high school GPA and ACT composite scores across graduating classes and found that mean high school GPA increased from 3.17 in 2017 to 3.38 in 2022, while ACT scores declined across the same period. The finding confirmed and extended a trend ACT has been documenting since 2010. ACT CEO Janet Godwin summarized the organization’s conclusion plainly in earlier research that this updated report built upon: “Grade inflation is real. It is systemic, and it weakens the value of student transcripts as a measure of what students know and are able to do.”
A separate ACT study published in August 2023 examined grade inflation by subject across a 12 year period from 2010 to 2022, covering more than 4 million students. Average adjusted math GPA increased from 3.02 to 3.32 over that period, the highest rate of inflation of any subject, while ACT math scores declined. The percentage of students reporting an A grade in math increased by 11.4% over the same 12 years. Critically, ACT’s research found that grade inflation occurred for all students, with similar rates across all family income groups, meaning the phenomenon is not confined to any particular socioeconomic segment. What varied was not whether inflation happened but how it interacted with actual academic preparation. Grade inflation was more pronounced for students with moderate and lower ACT composite scores than for students with higher scores, meaning the students whose grades were inflating most were not necessarily the students whose capabilities were strongest.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, administered by the National Assessment Governing Board and known as the Nation’s Report Card, is the country’s longest-running common measure of student academic performance. In September 2025, NAGB released the 2024 results for 12th grade mathematics and reading, the first such assessment since 2019, and the findings established new historical benchmarks in the wrong direction.
Average 12th grade scores in both math and reading declined 3 points since 2019, with the 2024 averages representing the lowest scores ever reported on each assessment in the history of the NAEP. Only 22% of high school seniors achieved proficiency in mathematics. Only 35% achieved proficiency in reading. In both subjects, the 2024 results represent the largest percentages ever recorded of students scoring below NAEP Basic, the floor benchmark, not the proficiency target. In math, 45% of seniors scored below basic. In reading, 32% did. The achievement gap between the highest-performing and lowest-performing students in 12th grade math is wider than in all previous assessment years.
US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon stated in response to the NAEP release: “Nearly half of America’s high school seniors are testing at below basic levels in math and reading. Despite spending billions annually on numerous K-12 programs, the achievement gap is widening.”
The NAGB’s own analysis of the 2024 results added a specific and important data point for the college admissions context: testing officials estimate that 33% of students from the class of 2024 were ready for college-level math, down from 37% in 2019, even as the percentage of 12th graders who reported being accepted to a four-year college was higher than in 2019. More students accepted to college, fewer prepared for it.
The college readiness data in 2025
ACT’s most recent graduating class data, released in late 2024 for the class of 2024, with 2025 class data confirming the same pattern, is unambiguous. Only 30% of 2024 high school graduates met three or four of ACT’s College Readiness Benchmarks in English, math, reading, and science. Only 57% met even one or more benchmark. The national average ACT composite score for the class of 2024 was 19.4, identical to the 2023 class average, and significantly below the pre-pandemic hovering point of around 20.7.
The ACT College Readiness Benchmarks are data-driven predictors: meeting a benchmark means a student has approximately a 50% chance of earning a B or better, and a 75% chance of earning a C or better, in the corresponding first-year college course. ACT data from prior graduating classes shows that 84% of students who meet all four benchmarks graduate with postsecondary degrees within six years. Among students who meet zero benchmarks, only 38% graduate in that timeframe.
Put those two numbers together: only 30% of 2024 high school graduates met three or four readiness benchmarks, and 70% of students meeting no benchmarks will not graduate within six years. The students arriving at colleges and universities with transcripts that do not reflect genuine academic preparation are not merely facing a difficult first semester. They are at statistically significant risk of not completing their degrees.
The ACT composite score trend tells the same story from a different direction. For any given ACT score, student grades rose significantly over the 2010-2022 period. A student who scored a 25, which is among the top 25% of test takers, had an average GPA of 3.5 in 2010, but a 3.7 in 2021 for the same performance level. A student with a solid B (3.0) average was likely to have had an ACT score of 19 in 2010, but only 15 in 2021. The grade a student earned and the capability it represented have moved systematically apart.
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What happens when the transcript meets the first semester
The remediation data translates the NAEP and ACT findings into institutional consequences. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, drawing on the 2019-20 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, the most recent comprehensive national survey of this kind, 65.4% of first-year undergraduate students reported taking a remedial course in math, and 42.1% did so in reading or writing. The American Enterprise Institute, citing the same NPSAS data, reported that roughly one in three college students take remedial coursework before progressing toward credit-bearing courses, rising to nearly 40% for students in two-year public programs.
Acknowledging a nuance in this analysis: These figures represent the most recent available national data. The NPSAS is conducted on a multi-year cycle, and the 2019-20 edition predates the pandemic’s full effect on academic preparation. Given the NAEP 2024 data showing continued declines in 12th-grade proficiency since 2019, there is no basis in the evidence to assume remediation rates have improved in the intervening years.
The consequences of remediation are well-documented across multiple studies. Students placed into traditional multi-semester remedial sequences face a compounding disadvantage: they pay full tuition for coursework that does not count toward their degree, spend additional time before reaching credit-bearing courses, and face higher attrition rates at each step of the sequence. Research published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in November 2024 cited a landmark analysis finding that nearly four in ten remedial students in community colleges never complete their remedial courses, effectively ending their college careers before credit-bearing work begins. Louisiana’s data from students participating in corequisite math in 2023-24 showed pass rates of 52% for credit-bearing math, compared to just 11% for those in traditional remedial sequences in 2020-21, illustrating both the failure of the traditional model and the relative effectiveness of reform approaches.
The student whose transcript showed a 3.6 GPA, who was admitted to a four-year institution, who places into non-credit-bearing math before she can take a course counting toward her degree, is paying full tuition for work her transcript implied she had already mastered. Her GPA was not falsified. It was operating in a context where the relationship between grades and preparation had drifted far enough apart that the transcript was no longer reliable information.
What the gap looks like in the high school context
The grade inflation phenomenon is not distributed evenly, which creates a specific challenge for counselors trying to understand where a student actually stands relative to what college will require.
ACT’s 2023 subject-level study found that grade inflation was similar across family income groups, but the interaction between inflation and actual preparation is not uniform. ACT’s research found that grade inflation was more pronounced for students with moderate and lower ACT composite scores. This means the students whose transcripts are most overstating their preparation relative to what a calibrated external measure shows are the students in the middle and lower portions of the academic distribution, not the high-scorers whose grades and test results tend to align more closely.
The ACT R2432 report also noted that the number of students failing to report their high school GPA to colleges increased from 19.0% in 2017 to 37.5% in 2022 for graduating classes. The growing absence of self-reported GPA data further complicates the picture for institutions trying to assess academic preparation accurately and underscores why admissions offices have moved toward contextualizing all available signals rather than relying on any single measure.
How admissions offices are already adjusting
Selective admissions offices have been adaptive to this dynamic. The adjustment they have made is not to ignore GPA, GPA remains the single most heavily weighted factor in admissions across the vast majority of institutions, but to contextualize it more aggressively than they did a decade ago.
The school profile, the 1-2 page document that accompanies every transcript sent to colleges, is the primary mechanism through which admissions offices contextualize a student’s grades. Every high school’s counseling office prepares and updates it annually. Admissions officers use it as a lens: a 3.8 at a school where 20 AP courses are offered and the median GPA for college-bound seniors is 3.85 is read differently than a 3.8 at a school where no AP courses are offered and the median GPA is 3.1. The same number, in different contexts, represents different levels of demonstrated academic engagement.
College Board’s Landscape tool provides admissions offices with additional contextual data about applicants: neighborhood income, high school college-going rate, participation in AP courses relative to what the school offers. Institutions using Landscape as part of holistic review are making explicitly contextual judgments about academic preparation rather than evaluating raw GPA against a universal standard.
The return to testing requirements at selective institutions, which we covered in detail in our recent issue on the test-optional landscape, is partly a direct response to the grade inflation problem. When GPA became a less reliable signal because grading standards across high schools drifted in different directions, admissions offices that retained or reinstated standardized testing did so in part because test scores remained a consistent, cross-institutional measure of a specific kind of academic preparation. Dartmouth’s own faculty research, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that SAT and ACT scores explained approximately 22% of the variation in first-year college GPA at Dartmouth, compared to 9% for high school GPA. The predictive gap between the two measures describes exactly the grade inflation problem: if high school GPA were a reliable measure of academic preparation, it would predict college performance more strongly than it does.
Course rigor has consequently become more important in admissions evaluation than raw GPA in isolation. An admissions reader who sees a 3.7 GPA with a rigorous AP and honors course load at a school where fewer than 30% of students take AP courses is reading a different document than a reader who sees a 3.9 GPA with minimal advanced coursework at a school where nearly every college-bound student takes multiple APs. The shift is toward GPA read in context, a more information-dependent evaluation than the raw number alone.
The accumulating picture
Put the data together and what emerges is a system under significant and widening strain. High school grades are at historic highs by average GPA. 12th grade academic proficiency on the gold-standard national assessment is at historic lows. Only 30% of the most recent graduating class met at least three of ACT’s four college readiness benchmarks. A third to two-thirds of first-year college students, depending on institution type, require remediation per the most recent available federal survey data. Admissions offices are adjusting how they read transcripts in response to a signal they know has become less reliable.
And the students sitting across from IECs are operating, in most cases, on the assumption that a strong transcript means they are well-prepared for college. The data does not reliably support that assumption. The IEC’s professional position in this landscape is unique and consequential. An IEC who works with a student across the application process has access to a more complete picture of that student’s actual academic preparation than any admissions office will ever have from a transcript and school profile alone. The question is whether IECs are using that access, whether the conversations happening in practice go beyond application strategy to include an honest assessment of whether the student will be ready for what the application is designed to get her into.
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