Are grades now meaningless?

August 6, 2024

MANILA – Debates over “grade inflation” escalate at this time of year especially as the University of the Philippines (UP) system holds commencement exercises in its various campuses nationwide, and the number of Latin honors awarded is publicly reported.

Last weekend, the last of the UP campuses to hold its graduation rites, UP Los Baños (UPLB), completed the picture with 28 summa cum laude, 437 magna cum laude, and 649 cum laude. The total of 1,114 honor graduates comprised more than half (55 percent) of the 2,024 baccalaureate (bachelor’s degree) graduates of UPLB. A week before, the main campus of UP Diliman graduated 286 summa, 1,109 magna, and 788 cum laude, together comprising 62 percent of all baccalaureate graduates numbering 3,511. All UP campuses produced 344 summa, 2,142 magna, and 2,742 cum laude graduates, well over half of the total baccalaureate graduates in the UP system.

Seven years ago, even with just 37 summa cum laude graduates in UP Diliman, a social media user had already quipped that summa graduates were “sampu sampera” (10 for a centavo); the year before that, there were 30. The number started to exceed 20 in 2010, after averaging less than nine in the preceding decade, and less than four in the 1990s. Fellow retired UP professor and Inquirer columnist Randy David wrote two years ago on how in the 1960s, “there would usually be no more than 20-30 cum laude, two or three magna, and maybe one or not even a single summa” in a typical academic year (there were in fact only two in the 1960s). There was none in Diliman when I graduated in 1975, and only one in the entire UP system then (from UPLB).

To be sure, it can well be argued that there has also been a “brain boom,” and that young