Confer Honors Consistently

Just when you thought there was a chance of graduating Harvard with highest honors, the Faculty Council is now talking about clamping down on the number of summa cum laude degrees awarded. With a dramatic increase in the number of students receiving summa designation last year, there is fear among some in the faculty that the jump is the result of something other than a marked upswing in the intelligence of the Harvard student body. Instead, the grade inflation phenomenon, the creeping of grades towards the high end of the range, has been blamed widely. Even as we acknowledge the negative effects of grade inflation, we hope the Council will not act hastily and that whatever changes it proposes to the Faculty do not have the effect of taking summa degrees out of the hands of deserving candidates.

The number of highest honors degrees--awarded on the basis of grade-point average, thesis quality and departmental recommendation--rose to 115 last June, nearly 50 percent more than there were in the Class of 1995. And according to Professor of Chinese History Peter K. Bol, a member of the Faculty Council, the number will continue to rise. "It seems not to be a one-year blip," he explained. "There's evidence based on juniors that this is going to continue." Some in the Faculty believe that rising GPAs, spurred by grade inflation, are responsible for the recent increase.

But if grade-inflation is the source of the jump in the number of summa degrees, raising the GPA cut-off--one of the ideas forwarded at last Wednesday's Faculty Council meeting--is certainly not the solution. One of inflation's most unfortunate consequences is that as grades are concentrated in an increasingly narrow range, the distinctions among levels of academic achievement become blurred, rendering grades a less effective means of measuring performance.

This is precisely why tinkering with percentage points in the summa standards is ill-advised: students in the running for highest honors have extremely close cumulative averages as it is. With the value of grades as a measuring stick diminished by inflation, notching up standards cannot be seen as a legitimate way to separate those deserving summa cum laude designation from their undeserving peers. There is just not enough integrity in the difference between an A-and a B+ in Expos to make this distinction more important in separating the wheat from the chaff.

If anything, the Faculty Council should suggest that departments be vigilant in their recommendation of candidates and critical in their evaluation of theses. Departments should be advised to consult past precedent in order to solidify standards for summa recommendation, insuring that the same criteria that applied in the past continue to apply to today's students.

Luckily, if the Faculty were to make such recommendations, its membership--made up of the very professors who award summa designation--would be in a prime position to see that the recommendations are carried out. Ultimately, the trick is getting members of the Faculty to bring their behavior in line with their rhetoric.