Indianapolis Public Schools can hand out zeros again. On August 27, 2026, the Board of School Commissioners unanimously passed Resolution No. 8111 (PDF File), amending Board Policy 5421 and ending the district’s six-year-old no-zero rule for grades 1 through 12.
The policy changes exactly one thing in the grading table: the F band moves from “50-59%” to “0-59%.” That single edit reopens a debate around grade inflation nationally, and it sits behind reports that high GPAs are masking weak college-level math skills.
Under the revised policy, students who make a real attempt still earn at least 50%. A zero is reserved for work a student never attempts after repeated opportunities and documented teacher support. The resolution requires documented interventions before any zero is entered and carves out developmentally appropriate handling for K-5.
IPS chief learning officer Lela Simmons framed it as a middle ground driven largely by teacher feedback. The rest of the IPS scale is “normal”: A is 90-100%, B is 80-89%, C is 70-79%, D is 60-69%. A student at 70% in Indianapolis gets a C-, which most parents would view as a traditional grading scale.
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Why It Matters
The original no-zero policy was adopted July 30, 2020 in the middle of pandemic remote learning, when a missed week of quarantine could bury a student under unrecoverable zeros.
The math behind it is real. On a 100-point scale, a single zero costs the same as five Fs, and one blown assignment can sink a quarter grade past recovery.
Six years later, teachers reported students were using the no-zero policy as a way to pass by doing nothing. The end result of nearly six years of this has been rampant nationwide grade inflation and a cohort of freshman college students that are ill-prepared for the realities of college and the real world.
IPS Goes To Traditional Grading, While Other Districts Remain Lax
In contrast to IPS, San Diego Unified School District has continued to maintain their lax grading policies. Under AR 5121, academic grades “shall be based solely on students’ current levels of mastery of the Board-adopted standards and shall not be influenced by behavior or nonacademic measures.” And while the district themselves does not publish percentage equivalents of their lax grading scale, numerous reports have surfaced of individual campuses showing what this conversion looks like in practice.
This conversion is where the real concern lies. Dana Middle School (a school in the San Diego Unified School District) has a conversion chart that shows the following scale:
- 4 (A) at 88-100%
- 3 (B) at 67-87%
- 2 (C) at 46-66%
- 1 (D) at 25-45%
- F below 25%.
When you compare Indianapolis to San Diego, the gap is hard to miss: 70% is a B in that San Diego classroom and a C- in Indianapolis. A 50% is a C in that San Diego classroom and an F in Indianapolis.
Neither district is wrong that letter grades are a crude instrument for measuring what a 13-year-old knows. But at the same time, passing along underprepared students just does the student a disservice. This gets magnified when a student believes they are ready for college, only to find themselves struggling and dropping out with the burden of student loan debt.
The Grade Inflation Problem
ACT research published in 2025 (PDF File) found average adjusted high school GPA climbed from 3.17 for the class of 2017 to 3.38 for the class of 2022. That is 0.21 points in five years, over a stretch when test scores did not follow.
The bigger finding is what inflation does to the signal: two students with identical 2.5 GPAs had predicted first-year college GPAs differing by 0.37 points depending on how inflated their high school was. ACT composite scores held their predictive value across the same range.
A GPA increasingly tells you which school a student attended, not what that student can do, which is part of why test-optional admissions has produced its own measurement gap.
How This Connects
The big issue here is that great inflation is creating a false sense of academic preparedness, which, in turn, is having dire financial consequences after high school graduation.
A grade that overstates academic readiness follows a student into a college, then into remedial coursework that carries full tuition and no degree credit, and into borrowing for a degree that takes five or six years instead of four. Or even worse, dropping out.
With the average cost of college rising more than 2.5% per year, every extra semester is real money. And the worst outcome is leaving college with student loan debt and no credential: the financial hit from dropping out is a loan payment attached to none of the earnings premium.
So is Indianapolis promoting accountability? Partly. Restoring the zero for work never attempted closes a loophole students had clearly learned to use, and the 50% floor for genuine effort keeps the original protection intact for kids who try and struggle. That is a defensible middle.
What it does not fix is the larger issue neither district has solved: a grade that stops meaning the same thing from students around the country. And thats why colleges nationwide are bringing back test requirements for college admissions.
Robert Farrington is the founder of The College Investor and is widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading voices on student loan debt and saving for college. He holds an MBA from UC San Diego Rady School of Management and has spent over 15 years researching, writing, and advising on student loans, 529 plans, financial aid programs, and saving and investing for young professionals.
Robert has been featured in the The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, NBC News, and Forbes, where he has been a regular personal finance contributor for over a decade. His work combines both professional expertise and personal experience – he successfully navigated his own student loan repayment journey and has helped thousands of readers do the same.
He is committed to making the intersection of personal finance and education transparent and accessible. You can learn more about Robert on the About Page or on his personal site RobertFarrington.com.