William Marvel: Inflatables

Late last summer, The Daily Sun published Kennett High School’s fourth-quarter honor roll for 2022, carrying 278 names from an enrollment of 725 students. Another edition should appear soon, but the KHS honor roll has lately seemed less useful as an indication of academic achievement than as an example of using arbitrary measures to exaggerate educational performance.

A decade-old article in West Lebanon’s Valley News on the worth (or worthlessness) of high-school honor rolls reported that in 2012 Hanover High School listed 67 percent of its students on the honor roll, and Lebanon High School 63 percent. A skeptic might suspect that such impressive figures result from internal grade inflation, and skepticism is perhaps the most important virtue for any analyst. Standardized test scores nevertheless corroborated such a crowded honor roll at Hanover High, where juniors that year showed 85 percent proficiency in reading, 66 percent in math, and 62 percent in science.