Criticism

HOPE has largely been blamed for increased levels of grade inflation in Georgia schools, with instructors feeling pressured to give their students higher grades to maintain the necessary GPA for the scholarship.

Some critics have claimed that the HOPE scholarship disproportionately benefits students from wealthy school districts, because they tend to do better academically. The HOPE scholarship is funded primarily through income from lottery ticket sales, and people who buy lottery tickets tend to be from lower economic classes. For these reasons, critics claim that the scholarship represents a type of "welfare" for wealthy citizens, paid for by the poor.

HOPE's existence has also been cited as a factor in the state of Georgia consistently having low average SAT scores relative to the rest of the nation, based on the idea that students who would not normally attempt to go to college now decide to do so based on the affordibility factor provided by HOPE rather than their academic performance. The argument holds that these students, who generally must take the SAT to enroll in college, bring down the state's average with their scores. This theory has not been tested.

Statistics from a survey question asking students their High School GPA from the College Board SAT test are available on page six of this document (PDF format).