Grade Inflation at Harvard

[Hornbein]

Last October, the FAS released a report that quantified the change: solid A’s made up 24 percent of final grades in the College in 2005, 40.3 percent in 2015, and 60.2 percent by the spring of 2025. (Eliminating non-letter grades like pass-fail from the calculation makes the problem even more stark: nearly two-thirds of all letter grades are currently A’s.)

Harvard Magazine. A report from the frontlines. Well worth reading.

One enterprising freshman, seeking assurance that his A was nigh, looked me up online and realized I was a resident tutor living in one of the Quad houses—a good distance from the freshman housing in the Yard. On the night before the final version of his paper was due, he knocked on my bedroom door well after midnight, covered in sweat. He had hoofed it all the way from the Square, draft in hand, hoping to convince me to check it for remaining deficiencies before he turned it in for real nine hours later.

In 1907, freshman TS Eliot got mostly Ds.

In the 1970s, almost 30 percent of Harvard College first-year students planned to concentrate in the humanities. By 2022, according to the Crimson’s freshman survey, that number had fallen to 7 percent.

 

[mathwonk]

I think this is a difficult problem. As a student at Harvard in the early 1960’s, when maybe 15% of grades were A’s, I got a lot of well deserved D’s, until I eventually learned from them to improve my study skills and concentration. I feel now that receiving low grades for mediocre work was essential in helping me improve. If someone gets an A from day one, they stay at the same level as when they came in, so the schooling is not beneficial. Students then who entered at A level, were forced or encouraged out of lower level classes into more advanced, even graduate classes appropriate to their preparation. Today it seems teachers giving mostly A’s have abandoned the goal of helping students realize their potential, in favor of not harming their initial job prospects.

Unfortunately one cannot easily go back to when a C at Harvard was a decent grade, and an A or B was a sign of real achievement. Now that high grades are the norm, it is indeed true that anything less than an A is interpreted by outside evaluators as a sign of poor qualifications. I have had the painful experience of condemning my own good students to loss of opportunities by giving them honestly strong, but not ridiculously stellar recommendations. I never forgot the comment of an honors student, one of the very best in the class, upon receiving an A- on the first test: “I don’t like the direction this is going”, before dropping back to non honors. To my chagrin, admissions officials at top schools in fact did not give my students the benefit of being recommended by a candid, qualified advisor, but punished them for not being gushed over.

Harvard’s currently proposed solution is to me also flawed. This is to limit A’s to 25% of the class, with another 4 of them optional. This locally competitive ranking is meaningless without a knowledge of the average strength of the class, and has no relation to mastery of the material in the class. It is meaningful to have a solid grasp of 80% or 90% of the syllabus, but not just to exceed the amount grasped by 75% of the class, which even at Harvard, might consist of incompetents or geniuses.

Moral: If one aspires to be forthright in an environment of puffery, one needs strong communication skills to avoid being misunderstood, which is not easy.