I know I’m old because I remember when a B+ was a respectable grade.
Now it’s more like an indictment. I’m a masochist if I hand down too many of those.
The students getting them may fill out negative course evaluations, which could mean empty seats in my future classes and professional grief. Some students will show up in my office to argue for a more generous appraisal, forcing uncomfortable conversations. That’s not because they’re snowflakes or brats but because they’re smart, motivated, self-protective denizens of a higher-education system in which so many professors dole out so many A’s that even an A- is a setback, and a grade-point average of 3.8 instead of a 3.9 can mean rejection from law and medical schools.
They’re just trying to keep their most deeply felt ambitions alive, and a B+ is a dagger in hope’s heart. Do I really want to wield it? And be the assassin of their dreams?
This month marks my five-year anniversary on the faculty at Duke University. I arrived as more and more Americans began to look askance at higher education, which was often cast in caricature. It’s untrue, for example, that professors tiptoe across a minefield of microaggressions, at the mercy of humorless students itching to cancel them for insufficient wokeness. The overwhelming majority of the young people I teach are just earnestly trying to figure out the world and their places in it. They’re more curious than censorious.
But grade inflation is as bad as they say, and it drains students’ transcripts of meaning, deprives professors of agency and turns schools into approval factories. We should be ashamed, and we should fix it.
To do that, we must recognize why it happens: The incentives to join the affirmation jamboree dwarf any incentives not to. There’s no punishment, only reward, for being the kindly professor with a goody bag of easy A’s.
In my time at Duke, I’ve had several colleagues tell me that they’ve awarded all or all but one or two of the young people in their 12-student or 15-student seminars A’s — and I do mean A’s, no minus attached. Not one of those colleagues mentioned, or seemed to fear, being questioned about their munificence.
Then again, they didn’t see it as munificence. They claimed that all of the assignments they received were superb, and they pointed to Duke’s acceptance rate, which is down to about 5 percent, as a reason that such uniform greatness should be no surprise. I don’t buy it. It contradicts what I’ve seen, which is work of widely varying quality from students who are gifted in some but not all subjects, who have diligent semesters and lazy ones, who struggle with certain tasks, who were evaluated for admission on a range of criteria beyond just scholastic aptitude.
Duke, to its credit, makes its grading data publicly available. Enough Duke students attain a near-perfect or perfect cumulative G.P.A. of 4.0 that last May, seniors needed at least a 3.947 to land in the top 20 to 25 percent of their class in the university’s college of arts and sciences and graduate cum laude (“with honors”) or higher. (At Duke, as at most schools, an A is worth 4.0; an A-, 3.7; a B+, 3.3.) Assuming a Duke student took a common allotment of 32 courses over four years, the student could afford only two B+ grades if the other 30 were A’s and only five A- grades if the other 27 were A’s.
Duke isn’t an outlier. According to a May article by Sarah Rivas in The Yale Daily News, Yale College students needed at least a 3.91 G.P.A. to graduate with some form of Latin honors (cum laude, magna cum laude, summa cum laude), which distinguished the top 30 percent of the class. The article also noted that a 2023 report by a Yale economics professor showed that more than 75 percent of the grades routinely given to Yale College students were either A or A-.
Harvard’s cornucopia of A’s prompted a recent vote by its faculty to limit the number of A’s in a given course to 20 percent of the students, with an allowance of as many as four additional A’s. That’s not so strict: In a seminar of, say, 15 students, nearly half the class — or seven students — could still get A’s, and the other eight could still receive grades of A-, for which there’s no limit. But in a lecture course of 100, only 24 students could get an A.
It’s a start, and other schools should follow Harvard’s lead with restrictions and prescriptions of their own, which are a necessary counterforce to the dynamics fueling grade inflation.
It’s obvious how we got here. Over recent decades, colleges began to compete ever more aggressively for top students, sprucing up campuses, spicing up dining options and layering on all sorts of amenities to justify price tags that, at some private schools, are near $100,000 a year for tuition and living expenses. Tough grading isn’t much of a come-on and doesn’t go over well with customers forking over that much.
Also, child-rearing increasingly stressed positive reinforcement. Then the pandemic hit, professors rightly treaded more carefully and supportively than ever and we got stuck.
Once everybody starts dispensing A’s like so many Pez, everybody else is pressured to do likewise: If they don’t, they’re giving grades that no longer communicate — to students, to prize committees, to graduate schools — what those grades were intended to signify. I may personally consider an A- a compliment, but if the culture regards it as a gentle remonstration, am I stubbornly choosing to speak an extinct language at my students’ expense?
To what benefit? No department head or dean will compliment me on my high standards. No formula will interpret and adjust my course evaluations for how generous or stingy I was with A’s. My courses will be less appealing. And school administrators generally prefer professors who attract students to professors who repel them.
But fewer A and A- grades wouldn’t turn them away if they understood that as a new norm reflecting new limits placed on all faculty. When I taught at Princeton for one semester in 2014, its grading policy — since abandoned — insisted that no more than about a third of the 16 students in my seminar get A or A- grades. As a result, I was able, assignment by assignment, to give many a B+ and even a B without students feeling victimized and freaking out. I could make important distinctions that showed them precisely how well they were performing, exactly how much they could improve and what true excellence was.
Princeton abandoned that policy shortly after I left; the school and its “grade deflation,” as students called it, were hanging out there alone. But if Princeton and Yale and Duke and other renowned universities now emulate Harvard — if enough schools band together — no one of them will feel exposed and need to fret that its students are being disadvantaged, that its campus has become less appealing, that its applications will drop. A 3.5 G.P.A. will be the new 3.9. The law and medical schools will know that.
And at each school, professors will be able to grade students in a more discerning way that treats them not only as customers to be satisfied but also as conscripts to be seriously challenged. Grade deflation would counter many Americans’ cynical takes on exclusive schools as permissive playgrounds, better prepare students for the dispassionate and even tough judgments of many workplaces and endow an A with more meaning than it currently has.
Because I want my own students to stretch and because I want an A to make them robustly proud, I’m sparing with that mark, at least by today’s standards. I typically award A’s to no more than a quarter of the students in any class. But I give A- grades to too many of them, and I often feel obliged to tell students, at the start of the semester, that if they’re intent on a G.P.A. close to 4.0, I’m not a safe bet. A few drop the class, and I respect that. Most stay — but they stay knowing what’s what, which saves all of us awkwardness and bitterness.
I shouldn’t have to issue that warning. I shouldn’t be giving only a handful of B+ and B grades. I should be distributing a diversity of marks that speak to the many variations in student performance, even at Duke. It’s not that I want to be harsher; I want to be honest. Isn’t higher education about the pursuit of truth?
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For the Love of Sentences
The world has reached peak soccer obsession. The newsletter is obliged to dwell for a spell at base camp.
In The Times, Sam Anderson studied the controlled, precise movements of the Argentine superstar Lionel Messi: “He spends most of his time on the field just straight up strolling like a retiree. Head down. Little choppy steps. Fifteen feet one way, 15 feet the other. You half expect him to start scattering birdseed for pigeons.” (Thanks to Harry Flamm of Cambridge, Mass., and Donna Triptow of Baltimore, among others, for nominating this.)
In that same article, Sam surveyed other standouts in the World Cup, including “Erling Haaland, the giant Norwegian demigod who lives inside a haunted volcano and celebrates goals by swallowing opponents whole and spitting out their bones to spell insults in Viking runes.” (Rasma Haidri, Askøy, Norway, and Bill Nigut, Atlanta)
In The Wall Street Journal, Ben Cohen and Joshua Robinson traced the demigod’s origins: “A soccer dome opening in the hometown of Erling Haaland when he was a toddler was the equivalent of the Cavern Club opening in Liverpool when the Beatles were teenagers.” (Pamela Finkelman, Wilmington, Del.)
In The Atlantic, Sally Jenkins mulled the myriad joys of the tournament: “Its 39 days afford you the time to develop unreasonable affections for teams not your own. You don’t need to know a thing about France, or tactics or formations, to fall under the spell of the team’s sorcery with a ball, or to see its potential for world dominion, or just to love how its players flip their sweat-soaked hair.” She declared herself French for the World Cup’s duration, praising “a team that scores goals as easily as guys named Didier blow smoke from Gitanes. Is that a cliché? Well, the word cliché is French, is it not? As am I.” (Kathy Conry, Tulsa, Okla., and Daniel Kelly, Daly City, Calif.)
And in The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Cathal Kelly remarked on some soccer lovers’ wariness about traveling at this juncture to America, where many World Cup matches are being played: “People came anyway, and a strange thing happened. Once ensconced in Kansas City and Atlanta, European fans began to carry back tales of rural chain restaurants and the strange beauty of tract housing. Every summer, the kids discover some cool, new thing. This year, it was Flyover Country.” Such infatuation proved fragile. “And then, as it so often does, America America’d itself,” Kelly wrote. (Stephen Willcock, Ottawa, Ontario)
He was referring to President Trump’s meddling in the tournament, which resulted in a previously disqualified member of Team U.S.A. being able to play in its match against Belgium. “The last time this many people cheered on a Belgian resistance, it was 1914 and the Germans had just crossed the Meuse,” Marina Hyde observed in The Guardian. (Rich Delmar, Arlington, Va., and Sidney M. Gospe Jr., Durham, N.C., among others.)
Ah, America. We just celebrated our 250th birthday. In The Times, Richard Fausset reported from Washington: “The nation’s capital, mired in septic politics, has struggled to pull off a big Fourth of July party. There is algae in the Reflecting Pool, acrimony in the air and a sense, in some quarters, that America is in deep peril if it cannot persuade the ’80s poodle-rocker Bret Michaels to sing for its official 250th birthday celebration.”
“But beyond Washington,” Richard noted, “thousands of Fourth of July celebrations will run today on an old, familiar muscle memory, unblemished by scandal, factionalism or questions about the attendance of boldface names.” (Julie Eagle-Cardo, Boca Raton, Fla., and Keith Campbell, Mars Hill, N.C.)
In his newsletter, Dean Blundell offered a simple, unassailable explanation for poor turnouts at Trump-affiliated events: “The crowd is just the polling wearing shoes.” (Steve Mershon, Manhattan)
Rick Wilson, in his newsletter, beheld Trump’s televised exhibition of narcissism on a day that’s really about all of us: “At one point the cameras caught Trump watching Fox watching Trump, a recursive loop of self-regard so perfect it should hang in the Smithsonian next to the Saratoga flag.” (Helen Scott, Queens, N.Y.)
On Defector, David Roth nailed the president’s style of, um, oratory: “Things come out of Donald Trump’s mouth, then just keep on coming out of it.” And Trump has wed incontinent words to incoherent actions. “The sum of the wreckage this has made is staggering; fixing it will take a long time, or not happen at all. This is just one of those things you have to walk around knowing.” (Nicholas Gatti, Dumont, N.J.)
In The Times, Stephen Marche gazed at that mess through the prism of international affairs: “The post-American reality is not a world without America, of course. As a geopolitical actor, the United States has become a kind of lumbering zombie — a beast that can be startled into reflexive actions but lacks higher functions.” (Paula Maloof, Salt Lake City, and Jim Stout, Seattle)
Also in The Times, Michelle Cottle examined Republican scare tactics: “Each week I receive between a dozen and a thousand over-the-top warnings from the G.O.P. and its allies that boil down to: Give us $20 right now or Barack, Hillary and A.O.C. will send their baby-eating, terrorist-coddling, devil-worshiping minions to your house to imprison your family and turn your dog into a Communist.” (Elaine Lahue, Galway, Ireland)
And Alex Williams remembered that Bonnie Tyler, a Welsh singer (“Total Eclipse of the Heart”) who died last week, had “a gravelly voice that could match Rod Stewart or Kim Carnes pebble for pebble.” (Bob Marino, Paris, and Larry Zar, Ottawa, Ontario, among many others)
In The Wall Street Journal, Michael J. Lewis paid tribute to the crown of the Chrysler Building in Manhattan: “The play of sharp angles against smooth curves is discordant, like that of the flattened third in music. It reminds us that this is, after all, a building of the Jazz Age, a 1,046-foot-high Rhapsody in Chrome.” (Ronn Lipkin, Los Angeles)
And in The New Yorker: Julian Lucas looked at literature: “What’s a novel but a big score of details burgled from the world? And what’s a novelist but a fence, furnishing imaginary scenes with choice pieces of reality while obscuring their provenance?” (Gary Bergera, Salt Lake City)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
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