The Honors Rat Race: Chasing a Summa

A SUMMA CUM laude degree looks impressive in a Who's Who listing, although this academic distinction is awarded no more prominence than its somewhat less impressive little brothers magna and cum. But in the Harvard academic family, the summas command the most respect, and when the family gets together for its annual commencement gathering, the summas--not the magnas and the cums--will garner the most praise.

So after the summa graduates receive the pat on the head from Mother Harvard and move out into the real world (some eventually returning to the University as professors to procreate more summas), they run into other summas and spend a night or two over a few drinks recalling the good old college days.

But few of these academic wizards actually know how they managed to reach the pinnacle. They understand little of departmental politics or the standards that each department uses to calculate honors, and probably they don't even care. Only the elite make it, and once they get there, the agony and the sweat of four years seems to have been worth the trouble.

The intense drive to make it to the top of the academic ladder is inexplicable at best. Departmental honors and undergraduate theses make little or no difference in determining an undergraduate's future: by the time departmental honors are awarded and the theses are graded, graduate schools have sent out their acceptances. In some cases, a high grade on the undergraduate thesis will help in getting into a second graduate school, but even in this instance, the master's work done in the first grad school is the primary factor.

Over the last ten years, a wave of grade inflation has hit Harvard. It is difficult these days to end up with a grade lower than a B minus in most social science and humanities courses. But as the grading of course work gets easier, the granting of departmental honors remains much the same, and undergraduates who do well in their courses feel slighted when Mother Harvard comes around to handing out summas to its children.

In most departments, course grades count only one-third toward determining the kind of the degree which the department will award. The thesis and written generals make up the other two-thirds. Some departments use orals in borderline cases, although a few (History and Literature, for one) require orals to graduate, regardless of the degree awarded.

WHAT ALL THIS means is that each department grants its honors in its own way, so it is not only difficult to understand why one particular student received a summa and another a magna, but is impossible to equate a summa in one department with a summa in another department.

The intricacies and idiosyncracies of the system are so complex, that often strange cases become academic horror stories. These apparent inequities seem unavoidable under the present system, a system that relies on the personalities of the department Faculty and the numerical scale which is used to calculate honors.

In the social sciences and humanities--the two fields where honors are granted in a necessarily subjective manner, despite the numerical scale--departments must be classified into three types: small departments, the honors fields, and large departments. The small departments like Classics and the Languages must be considered alone, for they operate as close knit groups on a very personal level. Classics Faculty members know everyone in the Department, and although an effort is made to keep thesis readers unaware of who is reading what thesis, the smallness of the department makes total secrecy impossible.

The honors departments--History and Literature, History and Science, and Social Studies--are also a bird of a different feather, primarily because they demand more of their students in terms of the variety of requirements. These fields limit the number of concentrators and contend that they provide more rigorous training, and, therefore, one would expect some consistency in the number of summas and magnas they award. But the departments show little statistical consistency in the granting of honors.

Last year, History of Science awarded six summas, one magna plus, and 11 magnas to a graduating class of 28. Similarly, in 1972 Social Studies awarded six summas, no magna pluses, and 18 magnas to a class of 44. The same year, History and Literature awarded one summa, no magna pluses, and 19 magnas to a class of 56.

It doesn't take a mathematical genius to figure out that percentage-wise, these statistics don't compare. History and Science, with a graduating class exactly one-half as large as History and Lit, granted six times as many summas.

But 1972 was an unusual year. Today, two History and Sciences seniors will get summa, and four History and Lit graduates will leave Harvard with summas. So, the system fluctuates, and every up and down on the honors seismograph is carefully watched by honors-conscious seniors. But it appears that in the honors departments, no set standard exists that dictates how many will receive honors each year.

The most peculiar aspects of the system occur in the largest departments, specifically History, English, and Government. For years, academics have questioned the validity of subjectively grading honors theses in English, maintaining that it is nearly impossible to accurately judge the quality of a literary work. This logic seems to be borne out in the English Department. According to sources in the Department, there have been at least three theses for which one reader gave some form of summa and the other reader marked it with some degree of cum.

John M. Bullitt, senior tutor in English, says, however, that only a high magna-low cum discrepancy occurred this year. Bullitt may be technically correct after a fashion. But sources said that in two cases, submitted grades were changed before the final thesis grade was calculated.

Most large Departments assign theses to readers in a similar manner. A master list is circulated to the Faculty, and the members of the department check the theses in which they are interested. Two readers are then chosen. A third reader is called in when a discrepancy results, although most departments require a third reader whenever a thesis has received two summa readings.

Usually, the departments go to extraordinary lengths to keep the readers and their grades secret from the third reader. The Government Department is particularly careful about secluding its readers, while the English Department not only permits the third reader to know the other two grades (which is not too important, since there ordinarily is not a third reader unless there is a grade discrepancy), it allows the reader to know the identities of the other readers.

Usually, when grades differ by more than one distinction--summa to magna, magna to cum, or summa to cum--a third reader is called in to render another opinion. In most departments, the third grade is averaged with the other two, but in the English Department this year, the three readers held a meeting with Alan E. Heimert '49, chairman of the Department, to determine the final grade.

Bullitt denies that any thesis grade was changed for appearance's sake, but he not only admitted that some grades were altered, he defended the right of a Faculty member to raise or lower a thesis grade that he gave. "Sometimes a professor is feeling particularly dispeptic, Bullitt said, "and after he goes home, he thinks it over, and comes to me the next morning to change the grade."

Bullitt argued that there is nothing wrong with changing one's mind, but according to the sources, the grade-changing was not of the type that Bullitt described. The sources said the alterations came after the meeting with Heimert, and usually the graduate student was the reader who lowered the grade.

Graduate students feel pressure in thesis grading, primarily because in most departments, the other reader is a senior Faculty member, and a grad student's future depends on senior Faculty in the department. Bullitt says that Heimert attended the meetings to protect the grad students from pressure, but he scoffed at the possibility that Heimert's presence--that of a third senior Faculty member and chairman of the department--would add more pressure, not less. "If a graduate student can't stand by his grade," Bullitt said, "he doesn't deserve to read theses."

DESPITE BULLITT'S noble expectations, the grad student thesis reader does feel this pressure, although it is unlikely that any grades were changed because of direct pressure from the other readers. Still, Graduate students say it is unfair to expect them to pretend that senior Faculty members do not affect how they read a thesis.

In English this year, one student's thesis was graded summa minus by a graduate student and no distinction by a Faculty member. The professor awarded no distinction because of what he considered an incorrect citation. After the graduate student was told of the possible error, the sources said, she changed her grade to no distinction, thus removing any hope that an honors grade might be salvaged.

Originally, the incorrect citation was considered to be an example of plagarism, but the Administrative Board ruled that plagarism was not involved. Reportedly, the Faculty member objected to the student's use of paraphase, which he said was too similar to the original, even though the student had cited accurately the source and the page number.

In another English Department case, a thesis received a magna plus from one reader and a cum from the other. After the two readers met with the third reader and Heimert, the sources said, the magna plus was lowered to a cum plus, and then a final grade was hammered out. In other departments, the three grades are usually averaged, but Bullitt says that numerical averages are too arbitrary, so the English Department decided to hold meetings instead.

The Department also made other changes this year. Specifically, it required the graders to write signed comments. In past years, the criticism has been for Department-eyes only, and Bullitt says this system allowed readers to give a very high or very low grade without providing a coherent critique.

Departments refuse to admit that a set number of degrees in each classification--summa, magna, and cum--are granted each year, and that this number is arbitrarily imposed. In the Government Department last year, however, of approximately 100 honors candidates, about 36 received magnas or higher. This year, only 78 people stood for honors, and the Department discussed the significant drop at their degree meeting.

The Department dismissed the possibility that the decline in honors candidates meant that there would be less cum awards, and decided that the "22 dropouts" had possible summas and magnas as well. So the Department went on to decide that less magnas and summas should be awarded--about 26 were granted--yet it continued to assert that distinctions are not given arbitrarily.

No department has a monopoly on quirks in the honors-thesis racket. In History, a graduate student in the Department says, there was speculation that one thesis might be rejected because its author had failed to divide her bibliography into primary and secondary sources. The thesis was ultimately accepted. "Technically, the Department could refuse to accept a thesis when it is handed in," John Womack Jr. '59, head of the Department's Board of Examiners, said last week. All of the History theses were accepted this year, but Womack said that next year, any thesis that comes in late will not be read. One History thesis was six days late this year, and it was almost rejected.

In most departments, a late thesis means a penalty of one full distinction. A Social Studies thesis--more than a month overdue--which received a summa minus was dropped down to a magna plus. Few undergraduates complain about penalties for extremely late theses, although there is always annual speculation about what might happen if a student misses his 5 p.m. deadline by 12 minutes.

So the academic rat race continues, and as long as the departments stress the thesis so heavily, undergraduates will strive to beat the deadlines, to write the summa paper, to make their Who's Who's listing more impressive. Although the thesis only counts one-third toward the degree award in most departments, an inordinate amount of importance has been placed on its quality. As a result, undergraduates have become increasingly aware of the inequities of a system that can probably never be equitable, and the cries of anguish have grown louder in recent years.

STILL, in a University beset with political problems, few people, if any, have charged that the system contains any political bias. Radicals like Herbert I. Gintis say that radical theses receive high honors. But he explained that the system is biased toward certain forms of academic discipline. An accepted mode of academic work usually receives some form of magna, while an experimental thesis runs the risk of offending its reader.

And where does it all get you? Into the little summa section in the Tercentary Theatre and a one-line insertion in Who's Who. But that's about it. Even the personal pride--the only reason to work so hard and so long for the summa distinction--gets lost somewhere between that first reading and that third reading.