John Turner wonders about people who complain that student grades today are inflated. His small rural school in east Texas gave him A’s for doing very little, he says, while his son Stephen, a junior at Langley High in Fairfax County, Va., has to master “math and chemistry at the level I had in my freshman year at Rice University.”

Wanda Radowitz feels the same way. Her ninth-grade daughter at Georgetown Day School in Washington has been writing research papers with bibliographies and footnotes since the fourth grade. When Radowitz was in high school, she spent her study time doing her hair, listening to the Beatles and reading CliffsNotes to get B’s. Now her daughter and friends “form study groups to review French verb tenses or to discuss themes and characterization in ‘The Odyssey.'”

Most experts agree that colleges have let grading standards slip, but many teachers and parents believe that it’s tougher to get a good grade in high school these days – and a new study seems to back them up.

After examining mathematics grades and standardized test scores of 23,900 high school students, researchers for the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Rand Corp. found “no large-scale, substantial grade inflation, at least in mathematics, between 1982 and 1992.”

In another study, Clifford Adelman, a U.S. Education Department senior research analyst, reviewed 20 years of transcripts for more than 20,000 college students and concluded that there was no way to assess whether grades are inflated. “What you and I and our next-door neighbors understand by inflation in our economic lives cannot be proved in the matter of human intellectual performance,” he wrote.

In the end, experts say, grade inflation depends on the students being graded and the philosophy each teacher brings to the process.

The top students are earning their A’s and B’s and getting a solid public school education, said Jim Perry, a philosophy professor at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa. However, the less accomplished students he sees in his classes have graduated from high school with good grades for little work and have to take remedial courses.

Certain kinds of students, particularly those from high-income families and those in urban public schools, seemed to receive higher grades between 1982 and 1992, according to the Rand research. A soon-to-be released College Board study found signs of grade inflation among A and B students after 1988, based on comparisons with SAT scores.

Many educators support the view that any student who reaches an accepted high level of achievement should get a good grade, a perspective reinforced by the new standards movement. Others prefer to use grades as sorting and motivational devices: Whoever gets the highest score deserves an A. Whoever finds himself in the middle of the pack gets the C.

Daniel Singal, who teaches history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., said he doesn’t use grades “to register whether kids are at or near accepted standards, but rather as a tool at my disposal to coax the best possible performance out of my students.” He said he often shocks students with a C on their first exams or papers, and the result is often extra effort, “proving that the student can do it if only someone holds his or her feet to the fire.”

Some students say they see a lot of generous grading. Kevin Chang, a junior at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md., said some teachers give B’s for showing up and A’s for doing homework.

Chuck McWilliams, a student at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, said that in high school, “I came to class every day, did the required homework and never once opened a book to study.” He graduated with a 3.6 grade-point average.

Some experts applaud the new emphasis on reaching a standard, rather than giving the bottom students D’s and F’s and the top students A’s, no matter how high or low the level of the class.

“Some people think grades are actually a measure of the competence of the teacher, not the student,” said Rick Palmer, a consultant with the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of North Carolina. “If a teacher is really, really good, why shouldn’t we expect everybody to learn what they’re supposed to learn? Why shouldn’t everybody get an A?”