The Grading System: Its Defects Are Many

"Grades in courses are a necessary evil, but for the exceptionally qualified student they might not be necessary"--Kenneth B. Murdock '16, vice-chairman of the Committee on Educational Policy.

"People are examined too much and too frequently"--Richard T. Gill '48, Senior Tutor of Leverett House and a member of the CEP.

"Brilliant students can be ruined by a police-type exam given in great detail because of the grading system"--Paul H. Buck, former dean of the Faculty.

"Too few students realize that God is not grading their blue books"--Wallace MacDonald '44, director of freshman scholarships.

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These opinions represent in various ways the attack on grades in Harvard education, part of a broad challenge to the University's educational philosophy.

The issues came into the open a week ago when the Faculty adopted Dean Elder's proposals to reduce course requirements in graduate study. The conflict will recur, for the feeling grows that Harvard's educational methods are unimaginative and old-fashioned, that some or even many students are retarded by the complex of exams, papers, grade-sheets, and course requirements.

Grades draw much attention because they underlie the whole system. Excepting tutorial, all formal education in the College is graded. Lectures, reading assignments, quizzes, 1500-word papers, are all treated as things to be marked, or the stuff from which to make an examination.

A Poor Substitute

If grades themselves spurred students to intellectual achievement, this approach would be reasonable. They are in fact only a poor substitute for personal criticism from a respected teacher, the best incentive to thoughtful learning.

Grades suggest immediately that the ideas and facts taught are not in themselves interesting or at least are not interestingly taught. Grades also bolster the dubious idea that what is worth knowing about a given subject has limits, and that these limits are easily attained. The A symbolizes them, and may thus discourage further study.

Sophisticated students may speak with contempt of the A and those who seek it, but when they accept a lower mark, perhaps a B-, as minimal for self-respect, they still operate under the same false standards. They are misled into believing that B-stands for some important, measurable level of learning.

Grades, courses, and the other IBM-directed trivia of Harvard education actually inhibit a third type of student, the individual whose desire to study some problem deeply is thwarted by the feeling that he must make high marks in all courses, for the sake of the Scholarship Committee, or for a graduate school, or for his parents.

Emphasize Memory

Harvard's emphasis on grades can show worst in the examination which ends the course and completes the process of grading it. Finals can and should be educational tools themselves, but they now tend to emphasize memory, not thought, and to allow for a liberal amount of vaguely knowledgeable generalization.

The exceptional professor may require the student to discuss this sort of statement:

American culture in the fi,fties has at last achieved unity. The break between mass culture and high culture that occurred around the turn of the century, culminated in the cold war of the twenties between the intellectuals and the rest of society. Now that war has been healed by the international crisis, which has placed us all in the same sinking boat, by the spread of liberal education, and by the comforting new ministrations of religion and political philosophy. Today, out of many, we are one. This reunion may have enriched the common stock, but it has also certainly eliminated the cream.

This question takes a stand, and, if perceptively graded, will force the student to do some thinking about two months of a course. With lenient grades, he might get by without saying anything, but that cannot be blamed on the question.

Much more typical is the question that asks for a discussion of a small part of a course, covered by a lecture or two and perhaps a chapter in the reading. These demand no more than memory, even for the strictest grader, although the student who had thought about the problem or done some extra work might get an A or even an A+ on a rare exam.

Rationalizing Sloth

The fact-memory exam has one justification--that grades are intended only to show how much has been learned, and that consequently the examination itself need not be a learning experience. This argument rationalizes sloth in writing an exam, but even at its best it has gross defects. The most serious is that it presupposes accuracy of grading. Examinations with meaningless grades still have a point if the test itself teaches; if the exam is only a measuring rod, then it stands or falls with its accuracy.

The pretense of accuracy can be challenged on a wide front. The best witness against it is the student who knows that his B+ in one course represents less understanding than his classmate's C+ or his own C in another course. Even teachers and administrators doubt how well grades do measure, and begin to question exactly what they measure too.

A traditional complaint against grades--their psychological effect of continual measuring--is noted here but hardly becomes an important argument. Some personalities are certainly injured here when grades become ends in themselves, and the Psychiatric Service offers disturbing reports of insecure students stealing notes and telephoning top students early in the morning to lower their efficiency for that day's exam.

Freshmen suffer this most, says Wallace MacDonald '44, director of freshman scholarships. Adjustment to college is made more difficult, he says, by a feeling of frustration if the student cannot get good enough grades to please the host of outside observers pressuring him. University Hall asks for grades in freshman courses four times a year, and this intensifies the problem. Grades here may serve, asserts Dr. Dana L. Farnsworth, director of University Heath Service, to "reactivate old conflicts" by emphasizing competition.

But competition is really insignificant among the objections to grades at this time. Most would still agree with President Lowell's belief that competition stimulates better academic work. Lowell wrote in the June, 1909, Atlantic Monthly:

A young man wants to test himself on every side, in strength, in quickness, in skill, in courage, in endurance, and he will go through much to prove his merit. He wants to test himself provided he has faith the test is true, and that the quality tried is one that leads to manliness; otherwise he will have none of it. Now, we have not convinced him that high scholarship is a manly thing worthy of his devotion, or that our examinations are faithful tests of intellectual power.

This belief was one of the primary factors in Lowell's advocacy of fields of concentration to replace free electives, and there appears to be no specific disaffection with competition now. When grades present individual psychological problems, the College will offer advice, and psychiatric help if necessary, but it will scarcely discard an entire educational framework to solve problems it considers essentially personal. Any change must come because teachers, and even students, feel that more will be learned without grades, but not because of current psychiatric evidence.

The student's discontent with the system, except for imprecision, is difficult to judge. He has no Committee on Educational Policy to express his grievances, and while the subject might possibly be treated in a Student Council report, it is probably too broad and involved for that group to handle.

Vocal Damnation

One of the few vocal expressions of dissatisfaction was last June's i.e., a general damnation of Harvard education which suffered because its heat was more apparent than its reason. On grades, i.e. said:

There is something destructive in all grades whether they be A's or B's. It is their inarticulateness. They are the stuttering of a powerful Jehovah. Learning is not interested in being told how good or bad it is; it is interested in being responded to, in being shown what is being done wrong. Let us look at the question logically. Socratically, what is the point in telling a student he is stupid if he is stupid; and if he is not stupid, what is the point of telling him that he is?

This insistence that learning craves response, however imperfectly put, is the best contribution in i.e. It will come up later in considering alternatives to present methods; the trouble with this polemic issue of i.e. was that it did not study other ways. Even so, its blunderbuss onslaught was useful in stimulating thought, especially among some students who would ordinarily never think about education and what it ought to mean.

By and large the student's complaint is that grades are inconsistent and inaccurate, and that they do not measure the most important parts of a course. This student frankly does not care to read everything on a reading list with the same degree of attention, and he resents the College's willingness to single him out as less educated than others on this account.

There are two main lines of defense for the system of grades. One, unquestioned, is that grades stimulate work which would not be done if grades were removed. The reformers contend that a different system could produce superior stimuli and render grades unnecessary. Such arguments vary, depending upon the reform.

Leighton Defends

The other defense upholds the importance and validity of grades, as they are. Dean Leighton says, "You must have some measure of academic performance," and he believes that grades are perfectly suitable. Showing grade curves which correlate with scores on Scholastic Aptitude Tests. Interpretations of this sort do not go unquestioned, however, for John U. Monro '34, director of Financial Aid, argues that while the percentage of students on Dean's List has risen over the years, it has not kept pace with the concurrent rise in SAT scores.

All these statistics actually reflect is the quality of prediction afforded by SAT scores, in terms of later grades. They say nothing about what a grade is intended to measure, or how consistently it measures even that unknown.

College administrators and graduate school admissions officers appear to be satisfied with grades as forecasters. Yet they insist they do not rely entirely on grades to judge people, saying that when they know someone competing for a fellowship or prize, grades become secondary to personal appraisal. They explain this apparent contradiction by arguing that only grades can work on a large scale, because of the idiosyncrasies of far-flung deans making recommendations.

They believe that grades have a great prediction value, and they will not readily discard them. Some, like Education School Dean Francis Keppel '38, doubtless feel "that American education is not only a system of education, but of selecting people for various walks of life."

Inherent Dangers

The belief that grades must be retained rests upon more than the fear that without them there would be no criteria for awarding fellowships or admitting students to graduate schools. More important is the apprehension that without a recurrent check in the form of grade-sheets there would be no impulse for students to do any work at all, and the structure of Harvard education would come tumbling down.

The status quo faction may concede some faults in the system, but ultimately it will argue, as Keppel does, that students who allow low grades to become ends in themselves are immature. He says, "The dangers of the grading system are inherent in the immaturity of the people operating under it. In removing the grading system you do not remove the immaturity that leads students to seek unworthy objects."

European students may survive without frequent grading but some feel that the different cultural background of the American makes this impractical. As Monro notes, "people have an awful time shedding their grade consciousness when they get here, after having it through their earlier schooling in the form of report cards, achievement tests, vocational tests, scholarship tests, and College Boards." He points to some high schools where competition for college admission is intense and observes, "This is where the gradefactories really begin."

On the other hand, systems without grades, or with greatly deemphasized grades, have worked in American college education.

At two small colleges, Reed (570 students) and Bennington (309 students), grades are kept but not communicated to the students. Reed students do not learn grades unless some of their work is unsatisfactory, in which case they are told C or above is "satisfactory," C- is "barely satisfactory," D is "barely passing," and F is "failing," telling the students in words, not letters. Students and instructors confer regularly about the course work, and Reed avoids public recognition in the form of Dean's Lists, prizes, etc.

Some Reservations

Reed is not certain that its system is best, but the Dean of Students, Ann W. Shepard, writes, "While I frequently have real doubts of the wisdom of our closed grades, I still feel they probably do as much as can be done to under-emphasize what is after all an arbitrary symbol of an instructor's best estimate."

Grades at Bennington are kept only for graduate school references, without even the cryptic sort of communication to students Reed may employ. Written reports and weekly meetings with a counselor tell students of their progress.

Dean Thomas P. Brockway says, "There is no doubt that there are students here who are working in one or more of their courses because they want a favorable report at midterm and termend. But I should say that these reports can be ends in themselves to a much lesser degree than the old A, B, C, or 70% and better or worse."

Swarthmore's System

A somewhat larger college, Swarthmore, discards course grades completely for one group of students, juniors and seniors in "honors," who take only seminar. 200 of the school's 900 students take this program, chosen because of interest and course grades in their first two years. (A laboratory science or a thesis may replace one of the seminars for some individuals.)

These seminars, meetings of five or six students with an instructor, are held weekly, and students write papers every other week for each seminar, or one a week per student, since two seminars are taken every term of the last two years. Ordinarily one seminar falls in the student's own field, with the other in a related subject. A typical honors program might include four political science seminars, two in history, and two in economics.

For these seminars the students are not graded, but instead they take a heavy battery of general examinations, both written and oral, in the spring of their senior year. These examinations are prepared not by the Swarthmore faculty but by outside examiners, who serve to prevent academic inbreeding. Students have high praise for the system, saying, "it means you're working with an instructor, not against him," because he neither writes not reads their examinations.

Demonstrate Capability

What Swarthmore, and to a lesser extent Reed and Bennington, have done is to demonstrate that an American college student is capable of excellent work without constant pressure from grades. Most educational institutions in the country do not recognize this.

But the fine record of their graduates, even when measured in such strictly academic terms as high per cent of graduate school admissions or fellowship awards, does not establish the applicability of their system to large numbers of students. Swarthmore's the most thorough in its discard of grades, includes only about 200 students, and these are drawn from a group of 900 which is already about as highly selected as Harvard's 4400.

One of the factors that makes the Swarthmore program particularly interesting for Harvard is that Swarthmore itself has recently experienced difficulties in keeping up the interest of nonhonors, or "course" students. The school, under President Courtney C. Smith '38, a Harvard Overseer, is currently working to reduce the stigma of not going out for honors, for by setting off half its upperclassmen in a distinctive program, Swarthmore has created morale problems for the others.

The relevancy of these programs to Harvard is decreased by another factor; the faculties at these institutions are excellent teaching faculties, but while they include individual scholars of renown, they are not centers of research. Even within this teaching framework, counseling duties, when added to the normal routine of life in a college community, constitute a severe drain on time and energy. At Swarthmore, the teacher performs in both seminar and course, and this can result in a schedule requiring the equivalent of five half courses and two one-term seminars in a year, or an average of up to thirteen hours teaching per week. With time allowed for preparation, this figure may almost preclude a research faculty.

The most significant lesson that can be drawn from these experiences does not suggest transplanting their systems to Harvard, but shows that students, especially superior students, can grow in education without frequent prodding from grades. Such ideas are also accepted at an institution more readily comparable to Harvard.

Yale Enters In

Yale agrees that the student may not need grades, and the experiments in New Haven are especially interesting because they show several different programs operating at once under the faculty and one administration, and used by individual students according to their individual needs.

An overwhelming number of Yale students still take the ordinary course system, modified as it is by some General Education ideas of President A. Whitney Griswold. But there are programs which permit individuals of proven ability to work with increased degrees of independence and responsibility.

The first of these is the Scholar of the House program, in which courses are optional for a group of about twelve exceptional seniors. They hold biweekly meetings, and read papers to each other, while pursuing reading and writing under the guidance of a person who is equivalent to a tutor.

Another experiment is the Divisional Majors Honors Program. This is something of a History and Lit approach to the Swarthmore honors program, though in some fields it is not restricted to honors candidates. The student takes seminars that cut across departmental lines in each of his last two years, with tutorial work, some additional reading, and possibly course work on the side. This program leads to an important series of Comprehensive Examinations. Grades are not given.

Course Reduction

This program is growing, but it will never include too large a number of Yale students, though it will certainly have wider application than the scholars of the House plan.

Yale uses these forms of independent study to work for realization of President A. Whitney Griswold's hope that "just as democracy puts the fulfillment of opportunity up to its citizens, the new Yale College program puts the fulfillment of opportunity up to its students." The Scholar of the House program goes further, but both support Griswold's idea that for "the student of unusual maturity and ability... nothing short of maximum challenge will evoke a maximum response."

Just how much is Harvard doing to evoke such a response?

Tutorial for credit and course reduction offer gradeless, relatively independent study for some students. The line between between them is vague, and it is difficult to assess the extent to which tutorial for credit suceeds when it is anything besides a thesis course. Not too many students avail themselves of this privilege, and it is not vigorously pushed by many departments.

Statistics demonstrate the insignificance of course reduction. It was first aailable in the spring of 1955, when ten students made use of it to eliminate one half course in favor of independent study. In the fall of 1955, 19 students used it, and in the spring of last year, 17. Nine participated last fall, and while 20 are now under the program, there is no sign of any consistent upward trend, or any especially meaningful number using the program.

No Supervision

There are certain peculiar aspects to the program. The first is that the student is usually without supervision, once he has been accepted in the program. His Department, usually History or History and Literature, recommends him for the program on the basis of a suggested project of study which is paralleled by no course in the University. The Committee on Advanced Standing will usually accept the petition. All the student does from then on is up to him, and if he has many outside interests or three-time consuming courses, he may do nothing at all with his advanced standing. Harlow P. Hanson '46, director of advanced standing, does not regard the failure to study under course reduction as too grave a problem. He says, "Intellectual worth can be derived from a slackening of pace. Too many people here are tying their shoelaces while they run."

Hanson has discovered that many of the students who had course reduction regretted the lack of direction in the program. They would like some formal supervision for their work, to prevent neglect of their projects. Hanson, however, feels that this is purely a departmental problem.

Another serious handicap to course reduction is its lack of publicity. Students can learn about it in various official