How Does Anyone Stand Out Anymore on College Applications?

My schedule, since ninth grade, has looked roughly the same five to seven days a week: up at seven, home well past eight in the evening, and that’s before homework. I’m not complaining, exactly — I know I’m lucky to have the time, the transportation, and the stable home life that let me fill that schedule with sports, volunteering, and every other line item a college application seems to demand. What I’m describing is what it now takes to differentiate yourself when almost everyone around you already has the grades.

Grade inflation — colleges and researchers define it as assigning higher grades than a student’s actual mastery would warrant — has made the A the default outcome of an American high school education rather than a distinction. According to research on high school transcripts, the share of students graduating with an A average rose from roughly 39% in 1998 to 47% by 2016, the most recent year for which comprehensive data exists. Average GPAs climbed alongside it, from about 2.6 in the mid-1980s to roughly 3.1 by 2020.

Teachers, for the most part, aren’t the ones driving this. One of my own teachers told me once that he “couldn’t fail a student if he wanted to” — not because of the student’s work, but because of the pressure from parents, administrators, and school boards to avoid it. Grading increasingly rewards effort and compliance — time spent, boxes checked — rather than actual mastery of material.

The trouble is that grades are supposed to be a signal, and inflated signals stop working. Standardized test performance offers a colder read on the same students: several recent analyses of school district data have found math and reading scores declining even as GPAs rise, and the mismatch shows up starkly once students leave high school. At UC San Diego, one of the more selective public universities in the country, administrators have found that nearly one in eight incoming first-year students arrive with math skills below high school level. If grades no longer indicate readiness, parents lose the early warning system that used to tell them their child was falling behind, and students who look like they’re thriving discover, often for the first time in college, that they aren’t.

Colleges know this, which is why the modern application has stopped being just a report card. It now includes an implicit expectation that a student captain a sport, hold leadership positions, volunteer visibly, and do all of it while maintaining the 4.0 that’s no longer distinguishing. That expectation is not evenly distributed. A student with an hour-plus commute, a part-time job, or family caretaking responsibilities does not have the hours in the day that I do. The same is true further down the list of differentiators: strong teacher recommendations require a teacher who actually knows you, which gets harder in large, under-resourced classrooms, and SAT preparation is well known to favor students who can afford tutors and test-prep courses.

Test-optional admissions, which many schools adopted to soften exactly this inequity, appears to have done the opposite. Harvard, in explaining its decision to reinstate standardized testing requirements, has said the SAT functions as “a real lifeline for people who don’t go to elite high schools” — because without a common numerical benchmark, admissions officers lean more heavily on precisely the inflated grades, curated extracurriculars, and polished essays that already favor students with more resources. And essays themselves are now an increasingly unreliable signal in their own right, given how easily AI tools can produce a passable one.

None of this is really an argument for finding new ways to help students stand out. It’s an argument that the standing-out itself has become the problem — an arms race that has very little to do with learning and a great deal to do with who has the time and money to compete.

A more honest fix starts with what colleges ask for. A required portfolio of student work — papers, projects, research, whatever a student actually produced — would let admissions officers evaluate the work itself rather than the grade attached to it, and would be considerably harder to inflate than a GPA. Pairing that with a cap on how many schools a student can apply to, similar to the UK’s UCAS system, which limits students to five choices, would help too. In the American context, a slightly wider cap — say, five public and five private universities — would still force applicants to choose deliberately rather than blanket-apply to thirty schools, while giving admissions offices enough breathing room to actually read a portfolio closely instead of skimming a transcript. Reintroducing interviews, which many schools dropped for the sake of efficiency, would add a final piece: a chance to see how a student talks about their own work, in real time, without a chatbot’s help.

None of these fixes are perfectly equitable — a portfolio can still be polished by a family that can afford enrichment programs, and interviews still favor the socially confident. But they would measure something closer to what a grade was originally supposed to measure, instead of measuring who had the most hours in the week to spend chasing one.

If an A no longer proves that a student has learned something, the answer isn’t to invent new ways for students to prove it elsewhere. It’s to rebuild a system where learning is what gets measured in the first place.

Zoe Seltzer is a senior at the American School in London.