This week I want to share something a little different: a piece I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle published this past Tuesday.

It started with my daughter and a stack of test scores she barely looked at. Nines across the board on the Comprehensive Testing Program, the highest possible score, and her reaction was a shrug. "No one else sees that," she said. "They just see your class grades." That one sentence from a 13-year-old opened up something I had been circling for a while: grades have stopped telling us what we think they tell us, and AI is accelerating that.

Colleges know it too. It's part of why some University of California faculty are pushing to bring back SAT and ACT requirements, a standardized test is harder to inflate than a transcript. And the transcripts are inflating: at Harvard, roughly 60% of grades given are now A's, a number that's been climbing for years. Put those two things together and you get a system under real strain, GPAs so high-stakes that students feel pressure to produce them by any means necessary, and teachers find it harder and harder to tell submitted work apart.

That matters for every family raising kids alongside AI tools that can produce polished work in seconds.

The question in front of us is not whether to allow AI or ban it. It is what we actually want to know about our kids, and how we find that out when the paperwork can no longer tell us.

Here is the piece in full.

Note: This article was originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle. The online version headline is: “Grade inflation and AI are creating a perfect storm for today’s students”. The print version headline is “Students can still learn in Age of AI”.

OPEN FORUM

Students can still learn in Age of AI

Schools need to teach kids to think for themselves

By Amy D. Love, Contributor

My 13-year-old daughter tore open the envelope from the Comprehensive Testing Program, scanned her results and set them down on the counter without much ceremony. She had scored 9s across the board, the highest possible score on the standardized assessment, and I waited for her to smile, to show a hint of happiness or pride.

"No one else sees that," she said dismissively. "They just see your class grades."

Those scores showed mastery, I countered. She shrugged and walked away.

A few days later, the news broke that more than 1,400 University of California faculty members were urging the system to bring back SAT and ACT requirements, particularly for applicants planning to major in science, technology and math. A 2025 report from the UC San Diego Academic Senate found that the number of incoming freshmen testing below high school math levels rose nearly 30-fold in recent years, forcing professors to teach remedial content in university-level courses. Grade inflation and artificial intelligence-assisted work, faculty argued, had made high school grade point averages an unreliable signal of whether students were actually ready.

I knew my daughter's shrug was a much bigger story; I talk about it often with parents.

The truth is, grades have been losing their meaning for a long time.

At Harvard University, for instance, A's climbed from 24% of final grades in 2005 to 40.3% in 2015 and then to 60.2% by spring 2025, according to a recent piece in Harvard Magazine. Strip out pass-fail courses, and nearly two-thirds of all letter grades at Harvard are now A's.

When everyone gets the same top mark, the mark no longer tells you anything. When A's are everywhere, you don't feel successful for earning one. You feel exposed for not having one. The grade shifts from being proof of achievement to being a floor you can't afford to fall below. One Harvard dean described it as "the most stressed-out world of all."

My daughter feels a similar pressure at Stratford Middle School in San Jose. Parents feel it at the kitchen table. It has soaked into the whole system. And though AI didn't create this problem, it has made it much, much worse.

Ashanty Rosario, a senior at a public high school in New York, wrote about this recently in The Atlantic. She watched a classmate discreetly prop a laptop on a crossed leg during a class discussion of "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" and paste an entire chapter into ChatGPT. Annotations generated, discussion joined, assignment submitted. In Algebra II, she saw a peer photograph a worksheet and upload it for step-by-step solutions before the period ended.

Her concern wasn't just cheating. It was that nobody seemed to think twice about it anymore.

"Many of us are so accustomed to outsourcing," she wrote, "that we're dulling the very instincts that we need to prevail in life: grit, critical thinking, and the ability to function smoothly under stress."

Harvard's own faculty subcommittee has proposed capping A grades at 20% of students per class. It's not a radical idea. When I attended Harvard Business School, the highest grade you could earn was a 1, representing the top 5% to 10% of the class; 80% of students received a 2.

A 1 meant something because not everyone could have one. That friction, that honest differentiation, is part of what makes an evaluation worth anything.

What worries me most isn't the grade inflation itself. It's what gets lost when we stop expecting students to prove what they know. The ability to sit across from someone, explain your thinking and hold up under a follow-up question, that matters enormously.

My daughter's test scores told us something real: that she has absorbed the material and is not just managing her grades. Yet she walked away from those results feeling like they didn't matter.

That gets the whole thing backward. The question for parents now is not whether to allow AI or ban it. These tools are already everywhere and are not going away. The question is what kind of people we want our kids to become in the age of AI. From my perspective, that means tailoring an educational system that produces students who can think, who can struggle with something difficult and come out the other side with real capability. Who can walk into a college interview, a job or a hard conversation and show what they actually know.

T.S. Eliot, one of the great American poets of the 20th century, received a B on a paper in his first-year writing class at Harvard. An honest, uninflated B. His grades were not the end of his story.

Neither are your child's.

Amy D. Love is the founder of Discovering AI, a nonprofit focused on helping families navigate AI and raise future-ready kids. She is the author of "Discovering AI: A Parent's Guide to Raising Future Ready Kids."

Please take just a moment to reserve your spot for the 2nd Annual National Back-to-School Family AI Game Plan event. It’s free, but we expect to hit our Zoom registration limit - so confirm your spot today

With you on this journey,

Amy

*** This Week's MindSpark™

This week's MindSpark, The Two-Minute Proof of Learning Challenge, takes this idea straight into your living room. It gives your family a way to test real understanding instead of relying on a grade to do it for you. It comes out this Friday and is sent directly to all subscribers.

*** 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐈: Igniting Human Potential

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