Grade Inflation--Life Without Ds

If you give a student too high a grade, it leads to kind of corruption...which is bad for him,' says professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield.

Last June, over 82 per cent of Harvard undergraduates had achieved a cumulative course grade average of B- or better. In June 1969, only about 70 per cent fared so well. Deeply concerned by the "high rate of increase" in Harvard grade-point averages, Henry, A. Rosovsky, dean of the Faculty, brought the problem to the attention of the Faculty in November, calling for quick remedial action. Rosovsky pointed out that despite a decline in their SAT scores, Harvard students were receiving higher and higher grades. For whatever reasons, it was becoming obvious that more and more "A"s were being given out; many course curves had shifted rapidly upward until they reached a point at which there were virtually no grades below C.

Lord Keynes would undoubtedly have spotted the problem right away. Like the penny, the low grade has apparently outlived its usefulness; both have fallen victim to the all-too-familiar phenomenon of inflation, if we are to believe some of the more outspoken critics of the recent upward swing in grading.

And the grade spiral is by no means confined to Harvard. In fact, stories coming from other campuses of late make this University's grade inflation seem quite tame by comparison:

* The dean of Dickinson College recently did away with the school's dean's list after close to one-third of the student body achieved the 3.5 GPA necessary to qualify.

* At Stanford, the average GPA is reported to be 3.54 and rising. One reason for this might be that the school has discontinued using "D" and "F" grades entirely.

* At Dartmouth last year, 81.1 per cent of all grades received by graduating seniors were in the A-B range.

* At Amherst, over 85 per cent of all grades were "A"s or "B"s.

* At Yale last semester, only 19 failing grades were given; only 39 "F"s were given all last year.

Boston University, Temple, Vassar, the University of Vermont, Brown: the list of schools that have acknowledged problems with grade inflation is enormous.

Perhaps one of the most outspoken critics of grade inflation has been Harvey C. Mansfield '53, professor of Government. Mansfield, who is quick to acknowledge his own "evil reputation as a hard grader," believes that the University should return to a system of "fair" grading.

"By fair grading I mean giving a student what he or she actually deserves," Mansfield says. "I don't mean hard grading, or grading someone lower than he deserves."

Mansfield, who graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, argues that a system "corrupted" by grade inflation will ultimately hurt the student a good deal more than it will help him.

"If you don't have a less inflated grading system, the rewards that are given out will go on the basis of some kind of favoritism, and I think that is clearly wrong," he says. "Also, if you give someone too high a grade, and he is in the habit of getting too high grades, it's a kind of flattery and it leads to a kind of corruption in the student which is bad for him."

One section man in Professor John Finley's Humanities 103 (formerly Humanities 3), a course which many believe has done more than its share to promote "inflated" grades at Harvard, offered a summary indictment of the University's grading system.

"The student is the proverbial donkey," the section man said. "But Harvard offers too much carrot, and not enough stick."

Who, then, has been responsible for fattening the carrot and shortening the stick?

Mansfield maintains that "the social sciences generally have not been at the rear of the movement toward grade inflation."

He cites an inevitable "bad conscience" among students responsible for pressuring their professors into giving them "better grades than they deserve by making the argument that they need them to get into graduate school."

"There is, of course, apart from this, an ideology which I guess comes from the left, which you could hear a lot of a few years ago during the student movement, that competition is a bad thing, and that a 'new society' must be constructed which would be quite utterly lacking in competition," Mansfield says. "And the symbol of competition, of course, is the grade."

Among the causes of grade inflation cited by students and faculty members over the past few years are the increased availability of pass-fail fourth-course options, more lenient course grading policies, and, according to Mansfield, "the increased publicizing and patronizing of easy graders."

"I think a publication like The Crimson Confidential Guide would do a much greater public service if it publicized easy graders less, and, more importantly, didn't behave as if it were the thing for a professor to be popular," he says.

Dean K. Whitla, director of the Office of Instructional Research and Evaluation, says that at Harvard in recent years, instructors have tended to grade students in small courses--tutorials, for example--higher than those in average-sized or larger courses.

Yet a more basic reason for an increase in the quality of grades at Harvard and elsewhere is often overlooked. With the waning of campus political activism, many students have simply been working harder. Teaching methods have improved (we are told); course requirements have been relaxed. The increasingly pre-professional orientation on college campuses has been responsible for an increasing focus on course work and achieving high grades.

"Why shouldn't students who are now working themselves sick instead of occupying the dean's office be rewarded with higher grades?" asks one member of the Harvard faculty.

And despite the ongoing dialogue on grade inflation, many are convinced that the trend is grader is, if anything, in the other direction.

Students in many Harvard science courses are often shocked to find that their grades are much lower than "large-scale grade inflation" would have indicated. Chemistry 20a's first semester median grade was a C+. In Natural Sciences 3, the lowest-level chemistry course at Harvard, students were promised "a substantial percentage of grades above B+," What many failed to anticipate was the equally substantial percentage of grades below B+.

As Jonathan Williams '78, who plans to concentrate in Psychology, puts it, "I don't think we have any grade inflation at all. If anything, we have deflation--I haven't seen anything close to an A yet."

In fact, Yale recorded a reversal of sorts in its grade inflation this fall--only 36 per cent of grades were "A"s, down 4.5 per cent from last spring's all-time high of 40.5 per cent.

And Whitla optimistically adds, "A Harvard "B+" is just as good as it ever was."

Nonetheless, the corrective action against grade inflation suggested by Rosovsky in November may soon be forthcoming.

Mansfield suggests that action should come in the form of an enforced "grade quota, or semi-curve," similar to the one he and Michael Walzer, professor of Government, have used in "promoting some uniformity between sections" in Government 10.

Whitla, however, says that "nobody wants to legislate grade distributions, really," and instead sees the effective countering of grade inflation as coming "through voluntary faculty adherence to some general established standards of grading."

He adds that recent moves by the Faculty to stiffen honors requirements here represent the most tangible offshoot of the growing sentiment against the grade-inflationary trend.

Many schools, including Harvard, have undertaken extensive investigations of grade inflation, but reversing the grade spiral may ultimately cause more damage than has been incurred during nearly five years of the inflation. Many have argued that selective implementation of grade-deflationary policies at certain schools will only serve to hurt students at those schools, while others reap even greater benefits of inflated grades elsewhere.

However, until a coherent, nationwide policy aimed at grade deflation can be implemented, or until students decide that they've had it with intensive pre-professionalism, higher-than-usual grades probably will persist. As one student puts it. "It's as though the administration were throwing us a bone in the form of high grades. As long as we stay in the classrooms and out of their offices, it'll keep getting bigger."