We as Harvard College students are on an amazing jaunt of achievement, but too often we fail to stop and question what about the College is aiding or hindering us in this pursuit. And for those on the outside of Harvard’s bubble, let me let you into a now better understood secret: Harvard’s letter grading system is unsatisfactory, to the point of it being quite the joke.
The effective application of letter grading at Harvard belongs to an era of the past. The mission statement of Harvard College, as outlined in 1997, is that it “strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities.” Recently attention has been drawn to our rampant grade inflation, in which the average grade awarded was an A-, and the most common grade is an A, and thus demonstrates that the kind of letter grading Harvard employs is a road-block to our mission. Instead, Harvard College’s administration should use a non-traditional grading system like that successfully employed by Yale and Harvard Law Schools, in which students are assigned an honors/pass/fail grade.
Grade inflation is a symptom rather than a cause of the problems of academic accreditation at the college. As the nature and the structure of our student body and experience has changed, so our letter-grading system has become less appropriate, and so grade inflation has raged. Firstly, the academic competitiveness of our classes has skyrocketed over the decades. As David Brooks writes in a New York Times article ‘The Chosen: Getting In,’ in 1950 out of 278 students from elite prep schools who applied to Harvard, 245 were accepted. From the 1960s and 1970s onwards, the time that grade inflation began to creep in, the old Protestant elite began to be replaced, with more and more academic competition for admission.
The SAT score of our classes rose remarkably, and admissions rates dropped like a stone to today’s 5.8 percent and just 3.8 percent in the regular decision round. For the class of 1954 it may have been the case that wide divisions in aptitude were enough to warrant a full letter grading system, but over the decades it has become harder and harder to justify a wide-ranging, deflated grading system as admission to Harvard College has become increasingly competitive.
Often the divisions in achievement that do exist originate from the immense socio-economic and educational diversity of the college. Nearly 60 percent of Harvard students receive financial aid; about 20 percent of Harvard families pay none of the cost of attendance. The Crimson’s Class of 2017 survey showed that 61 percent of the class went to public school versus 38.2 percent who attended private school, and 13 percent of the class come from families in which they are the first to attend college.
Though not overtly glaring, it is impossible not to be cognizant in any Harvard class of the vast range of educational and family backgrounds students originate from; this has been true of my own experience while taking small humanities classes. Though nowhere near an iron law, it is plainly obvious who has been exposed to more literature and better high school writing programs. It’s also plainly obvious who is most used to speaking up in a competitive small-class seminar environment, and those who have been accustomed to such behavior can get ahead in grading. Now, those from poorer families can have an incredible command of writing, and some from the preppiest prep school cower in class, but too often my own experience of grading is that it can easily allow those from more privileged backgrounds to finish ahead— and so of the little diversity in grading that does persist, some can be laid at the door of diversity in background.
A maxim at Harvard that seems to reverb around me is “I will not accept less than a B+/3.4 GPA.” The treadmill is real: In the post-financial crisis age of career worry, anxious students pressurized to be admitted into their dream graduate school or realize their dream job have previously been the unrelenting product of success. Successful parents, successful friends, successful siblings, huge expectations of their success, all equate to failure— in any meaningful sense— not being an option. Harvey Mansfield, the principal faculty critic of grade inflation is right to suggest in essence that instructors, fearful of their students, are loath to weaken their transcripts.
The Q, Harvard’s official student course assessment guide, has become Exhibit A in the race to secure classes with the easiest grading policy. The course ‘Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory’ is applauded for its ease, with quotes such as “this has to be the easiest, most painless way to fulfill the Moral Reasoning requirement.” Similarly, the general education courses “Nutrition and Public Health” is said to be “great for being super easy and not taking up a lot of time” as well as being “near impossible to fail.” Who can blame students for playing a system in this self-interested way? They are concerned with achieving the highest GPA because employers and post-graduate opportunities take averages incredibly seriously.
One basic argument in favor of letter grading is that in a crude carrot-and-stick way it pushes student’s work to become more excellent. This is simply not true. The grading of courses either leaves one feeling dejected for receiving ‘low grades’ (and by that I mean B+ or lower) or unrealistically affirmed by a high ones. For example, in some Economics courses, students who are able to cross-apply existing math or physics skills perform amazingly on assessments. They may feel that they hold an excellent understanding of economic theory far beyond what is actually the case.
Grades on my own papers can fluctuate based on the silliest of factors: a positive meeting with a Teaching Fellow, a friend’s birthday party, happening to find a perfect source in the library or a laptop malfunction. None of these things really gauge my level of attainment at Harvard.
Some of America’s best law schools are ahead of the curve. Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard and Yale’s law schools have all moved to similar pass/fail systems. At Yale Law, the first set of classes is taken on pass/fail basis. Later academic performance is evaluated on a scale of honors/pass/low pass/fails with no caps. Students of Yale Law graduate with remarkably similar transcripts, as it is said that “the vast majority of Yale graduates have a transcript littered with Hs (honors) and Ps (passes)” and thus students attempt to differentiate themselves via other methods—for example success in the Yale Law Review.
Whether we include a distinction for low passes, or include caps or the exact point of which we assess a pass/fail performance will need further studying. The law schools themselves have developed their own distinct models. Ultimately though they chose to move to such a system for similar reasons, and for reasons we can observe at play at Harvard College. An incredibly competitive admission, great economic, social and educational diversity, a hugely fearsome job market and a fundamentally different view of the culture behind education and student motivation.
A new grading system would be highly beneficial to the College. We college students would be freer, liberated from the treadmill we are too accustomed. We could more often practice the true liberal arts education we speak so highly of; we’d be more intellectually adventurous in selecting the disciplines we study, we’d experiment more with our pedagogy, be unafraid to take the classes that interest us and focus on learning for learning’s own sake as opposed to jumping through hoops on the way to a higher GPA.
