About two-thirds of grades at Harvard College last school year were A’s. That doesn’t count A-minuses, which were another 18 percent, meaning fewer than one in six grades were a B-plus or lower.
You might have guessed grading at Ivy League schools was lenient, though not this lenient.
There’s a thoughtful solution on the table. Unfortunately, amid a student revolt last week, Harvard’s faculty postponed a vote to impose a cap on A’s. Forging ahead with the plan anyway would send a promising signal about merit and competition in American higher education.
Grade inflation — like the inflation of a currency — is a collective action problem. Professors increase the share of A’s they hand out because they know other professors are doing so and breaking from the herd would have costs. Just 35 percent of grades at Harvard were A’s in the 2012-2013 academic year, but the number climbed at a rapid clip and then surged during the covid pandemic.
The result is a collapse in the informational value of grades, especially at the high end. “As GPAs accumulate against the wall of 4.0,” a Harvard faculty committee report noted earlier this year, “the small numerical differences that remain are less reflective of genuine variation in academic performance than random noise in the grading process.”
The proposal under consideration would cap the share of A’s an instructor can give to 20 percent of the class plus four students. That means that in a large introductory course, the share of students who could get A’s — 24 out of 100, for example — would be lower than in smaller courses, which tend to be more advanced. Up to eight A’s would be available in a class of 20.
The overall effect would be to cut the share of A’s in half from the last academic year, to around a third, according to the Harvard Gazette. There would be no limit on A-minuses.
This effort matters because Harvard has the stature to prompt similar changes across the rest of higher education, where grade inflation has also been rampant. Princeton and Wellesley both tried to respond to grade inflation with caps but abandoned their efforts in 2014 and 2019, respectively.
The subsequent explosion of A’s has further eroded the incentive to excel and sent the message to America’s emerging elite that distinctions in talent and effort are undesirable.
One of the reasons professors have become reluctant to give low marks is because they don’t want to disadvantage their students applying for graduate school against competitors at peer institutions who are getting easy A’s. Students are also less likely to sign up for classes where the teacher has a reputation as a tough grader, which helps spur the race to the bottom. This is why it’s good to tie the hands of professors, which levels the playing field.
A major objection from students at Harvard is that going back to grading on a curve will discourage them from participating in extracurricular activities. But the core purpose of campus life is learning, not socializing or networking, and academics have been excessively devalued at Harvard in recent decades. This would help restore the balance.
Therapeutic culture is another factor driving the relaxation of standards. Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s undergraduate dean, noted last year that the college “has been exhorting faculty to remember that some students arrive less prepared for college than others, that some are struggling with difficult family situations or other challenges” and that “many are struggling with imposter syndrome.”
Many professors try to show compassion with higher grades, but that doesn’t ultimately ready the beneficiaries for the real world. It also does a disservice to the students who are burning the midnight oil in the library to master the course material. Finally, handing out the very best grade as a default denies important information to employers during the recruitment and hiring process.
Easy monetary policy is also intended to boost morale in the short run. But in the long run, confidence in the system erodes. Restoring the grading standards of 15 years ago won’t fully restore American higher education’s reputation and standing, but it would help.
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