With talks of raising the minimum average for academic honors, students are starting to ask a simple but important question: does setting higher standards actually improve learning, or does it just push us further into chasing grades over understanding, especially in a system that’s already struggling with gaps in resources and support?

Based on supplementary materials provided by the Department of Education (DepEd) for orientation purposes, there is a possible shift being discussed in academic recognition, particularly raising the minimum average for ‘With Honors’ to 95 and above. These materials also make it clear that everything is still subject to updates as official DepEd orders are released. So while this is not the final policy yet, it has already sparked conversations and concerns among students.

At present, the award system used in basic education under DepEd follows a clear range: 90–94 for With Honors, 95–97 for With High Honors, and 98–100 for With Highest Honors. So in a way, a 95 threshold is not new since it already exists in the system. But what matters here is the possibility of shifting how that range is emphasized or interpreted, because even small changes in recognition can change how students see achievement itself.

On paper, raising standards sounds like a step toward excellence. It is often linked to concerns about grade inflation, where high grades become more common even if actual learning does not necessarily improve. Because of this, some education systems adjust grading policies to make sure honors truly reflect exceptional performance.

But that leads to a bigger question: are we actually improving learning, or just making it harder to be recognized?

In many classrooms, grades already take up a huge part of the learning experience. Students end up tracking averages, computing what they need to maintain, and aiming for specific numbers just to stay ‘safe.’ If the bar is raised even higher, that pressure does not disappear. It just grows. And instead of focusing on understanding lessons, students might find themselves studying just to hit a target.

Supporting this, according to achievement goal theory in educational psychology, particularly the works of Carol Dweck and Carole Ames, when grades and performance are heavily emphasized, students are more likely to shift from deep learning to surface-level strategies. In simpler terms, they start focusing more on what gets them the score rather than what helps them actually understand the lesson. It is a shift from learning for mastery to learning for performance, and that shift changes the entire experience of education.

But it is not just about how students study. It is also about where they study.

We cannot ignore the bigger structural issues in education. Public schools in the Philippines continue to face long-standing challenges such as classroom shortages, large student-to-teacher ratios in some areas, and uneven access to learning materials and technology. According to DepEd, earlier estimates have placed the classroom backlog at around 100,000 to 165,000, with many schools still relying on double or triple shifts just to accommodate students. On top of that, public school classrooms often handle around 30–35 students per teacher on average, and even more in heavily populated areas.

These conditions directly affect how students learn every day. Yet despite these differences, they are still measured by adjusting the grading system.

So it is hard not to ask: if the system itself still has gaps, if students are learning under unequal conditions, why is the immediate response to raise the standard instead of first addressing the root of the problem?

It sometimes feels like instead of going deeper into what is really wrong, the solution is to adjust the outcome. But education reform does not work that way. It cannot fix learning by only changing the finish line. It also has to look at what is happening along the way, including teaching conditions, access to resources, and how learning actually takes place inside classrooms.

Before changing what it means to be an honor student, maybe the first step is making sure every student is actually given a fair chance to reach it. Because education should not just be about setting higher numbers. It should be about building a system where those numbers actually mean something.

And until that happens, raising the bar might not solve the problem. It might just make the broken floor more visible.

The Frontman