To the Editor:
Re “Harvard Just Killed the Easy A,” by Jason Furman and David Laibson (Opinion guest essay, May 22):
These faculty members argue that Harvard’s new 20 percent cap on A grades will encourage learning. However, as a student at one of the nation’s most academically rigorous STEM high schools, I believe that harsher grading systems create more harm than benefit.
Students at top high schools already face disadvantages in college admissions because their G.P.A.s are often lower than those of students at less competitive schools. While tough grading standards pushed me, the pressure was unhealthy. Fear of slipping behind my peers motivated me, rather than excitement for learning. These grading policies only intensify stress and cutthroat competition.
As an immigrant from South Korea, I have seen the effects firsthand. Korea’s education system is built on ranking students against one another, contributing to a suffocating school atmosphere and one of the world’s highest student suicide rates. Students routinely attend private academies until 3 a.m. after a full day of school, driving themselves into physical and mental exhaustion to stay competitive.
Schools should provide an environment for intellectual curiosity, not turn learning into a battleground for top grades.
Cailyn Oh McLean, Va.
To the Editor:
The arguments for caps on A’s and more stringent grading make sense. After all, why should someone in the top 5 percent of the class receive the same grade as someone in the top 30 percent? Where is the incentive to create exceptional work? When high grades are expected rather than earned, grades do not meaningfully reflect distinction.
Still, grade deflation worries me. As a student at a competitive high school, I remember moments when peers withheld help, avoided answering questions directly or offered intentionally vague guidance. The solutions to grade inflation seem to turn success away from mastering the material and toward outperforming peers. What scares me is that efforts to restore academic rigor may also unintentionally weaken the openness and collaboration that help students learn from one another.
Some of my most eye-opening experiences have come through discussion with other students: exchanging ideas, approaching problems through different lenses and teaching one another. Do efforts to curb grade inflation encourage toxic competition? Can universities preserve academic rigor without turning classmates into competitors?
Diya Sundaresan Brambleton, Va.
To the Editor:
We are living through an age of anti-intellectualism, and our universities must address this by maintaining high standards and pushing their students to learn more. We all should celebrate efforts to address grade inflation as a step forward for our students, prospective employers and higher education professionals.
Yet Harvard’s proposal not only ignores a growing problem; it even exacerbates it. We have all but lost the virtue of a liberal arts education that encompasses a wide variety of subjects. This proposal encourages students to take only classes in which they are equipped to be in the top 20 percent of their class.
No aspiring Milton scholars will attempt basic chemistry, and no physicists will dare learn about Descartes. In taking this approach, we risk losing what made American education unique and successful, and we push students further toward treating their education like a job training program.
Vander Ritchie Cambridge, Mass.
To the Editor:
The new grading policy represents a small step in the right direction, but I also wonder how it will affect student evaluations of faculty members. In my own case, my evaluation numbers declined toward the end of my teaching career even though I believe my teaching abilities improved.
Students, especially those in business statistics courses at Cal Poly and N.Y.U., did not appreciate that I assigned grades consistent with what was appropriate in the 1980s. I gave relatively few D’s and virtually no F’s, but was quite stingy with A’s and A-minuses.
As a department chair, I saw how faculty members could manipulate their student evaluations by being generous graders. This was especially true of lecturers and nontenured faculty members, whose job security depended on getting positive feedback from students.
Jay Devore Los Osos, Calif. The writer is a retired professor of statistics at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.
To the Editor:
You note that Harvard will now allow no more than 20 percent of grades in a section to be an A. In my opinion, Harvard gets an F for this effort. It has put a Band-Aid on a wound that is not there.
The University of Maryland Global Campus, where I teach online, measures a student’s writing against published criteria, not against the work of other students in that same class section. This is because students are assigned randomly to our sections.
Comparing students’ work with that of their peer group does not make sense since prospective employers are more interested in what students actually know, rather than how those students compare with the student in the next seat.
Incidentally, my lowest grade at Harvard was a D in Humanities 5, but that did not hold me back in law school, where I graduated in the top third of my class.
Larry Gillis Cape Coral, Fla.
To the Editor:
My professor of religious education at Stony Brook University, Thomas J.J. Altizer, told his class on existentialism on Day 1 in 1969 that everyone in the class would be getting an A.
No one needed to come to class. So the only people who would come were those who really wanted to learn. It was the most pivotal course of my life. I learned who I was, and I knew that I’d be happy the rest of my life and that whatever direction I chose would come from the authentic me.
Robert J. Bernstein New Haven, Conn.
To the Editor:
The writers do not mention one of the principal uses for grades — as feedback to students, telling them what they’re good at, or, more important, what they’re bad at.
I was good at math in high school; my father was a physics major. One semester of the Harvard intro physics course informed me in no uncertain terms that this was not the path for me.
Stephen Brown O’Fallon, Ill.
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