To crack down on grade inflation, the South Carolina legislature in May passed a law banning minimum grades in K-12 schools, according to an article in The Hechinger Report. The law arrives as questions about grade minimums and permissive grading policies are growing nationwide. Texas passed a similar law in 2009.
Classroom grades and GPAs have been rising for decades, according to studies. But scores on standardized tests don’t mirror that trend. The average high school GPA in 2021 was 3.36, up from 3.17 in 2010, according to a study by ACT. Test scores on the ACT fell as GPAs were rising.
Grade minimums are part the grade inflation trend that is “diminishing the value of a high school diploma,” says Patrick Kelly, director of governmental affairs with the Palmetto State Teachers Association and a high school government and politics 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,’” says Kelly.
In 2025, South Carolina’s on-time high school graduation rate was nearly 87 percent, a 10-year high point for the state. But only 33 percent of seniors were considered college ready by graduation — based on college admissions test scores and advanced classes. More than 1 in 5 students in the state were chronically absent from school.
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. Other schools had informal policies that prevented students from receiving below a 40 or 50, Kelly says.
Giving students minimum grades could have parents thinking their children aren’t struggling when they are. Parents are more likely to trust their children’s report card grades than test scores, studies have shown. Grade floors also can leave students less prepared for schoolwork as they age, says Dena Crews, president of the South Carolina Education Association, which represents teachers.
The new law goes into effect this school year and threatens districts that don’t comply with the minimum grade ban with the loss of 10 percent of their state funding. It requires that students turn in any missing assignments before they become eligible for credit and content recovery programs. These are courses that allow students to make up sections of a class or to pass a class they initially failed. Critics argue these programs enable students to skip work during class and still pass.
Schools are also instructed not to count most benchmark tests — standardized tests to track student progress — toward a student’s final grade, except under specific circumstances. The legislation encourages schools to be more transparent with parents.
“It’s all part of honesty about where students are and what they need to do to get to grade level,” says Eric Duncan, director of P-12 policy for the national nonprofit EdTrust.
Teachers broadly support 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 says.
Grade floor policies gained momentum in the 2010s along with the “equitable grading” movement. The idea: remove educator bias from grading and give students chances to recover from low scores. Equitable grading policies, such as grade floors, increased during the pandemic. But after the return to classroom learning, many schools kept the lenient grading policies.
In 2025, more than one-quarter of teachers worked in a school with a “no zeros” grading policy, according to a national survey of teachers conducted by RAND and published last fall by the Fordham Institute.
“Once you’ve lowered the bar, it’s hard to raise it again,” says one educator, who adds that the use of AI by students makes it harder to assess the accuracy of class grades.
Minimum grades are part of a larger grade inflation problem. Educators feel pressure from school leadership and parents to give students grades that are higher than what they earn. Tough graders can expect pushback from everyone because parents, students and principals are incentivized by higher grades.
Schools have many incentives to perform well on their state report cards, says Derek Lewis, a former school board member of Greenville County Schools in South Carolina 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 says. “We focus on what we measure.”
Banning minimum grade policies isn’t the big-picture answer to grade inflation, but educators face less pressure and have more autonomy to honestly grade students’ work, Kelly says.
A high school teacher who did not want to be named criticizing their district says they didn’t know a single teacher opposed to the law.
“No child wants to fail, but if we keep saving them, why should they try?” the teacher says.
The Hechinger Report
