Worries About Summa Integrity Drive Downsizing Reform

"Summa cum laude" is the highest honor a graduate can receive. A summa from Harvard is one of the most impressive and coveted titles of all, making the achievement of such an honor hard to come by.

So when 115 seniors--36 more than the year before--received this distinction last year, Faculty members began to worry that "summa inflation" was on the rise.

The unusual number of summas followed closely on the heels of changes in the government, history and economics departments--three of the College's largest departments. Both the government and history departments abolished general exams, and the economics department established a non-thesis cum laude track.

Concerned about what appeared to be summa inflation, the Faculty voted in several new changes this year.

As a result of the Faculty vote, elective grades will now count as part of the summa consideration.

Secondly, guidelines were set to keep summa requirements to 4 to 5 percent of all degree candidates. Last year, the summa degrees were awarded to about 7 percent of the graduating class.

"The 5 percent reflects the strong Faculty consensus that that is about the right fraction for the class as a whole," Dean of Undergraduate Education David Pilbeam wrote in an e-mail message.

Pilbeam adds that he hoped that the stricter attention to the percentage of summas would also filter down to the recommendations for magna and cum laude degrees.

Stricter Guidelines

Many key departmental administrators admit that they are being stricter this year in recommending summas.

In the past, "I inherited the policy that any student with a 14.0 [GPA] or above would be recommended," says James E. Davis, the head tutor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

Last year, the chemistry department awarded 18 summas; this year, it recommended four, Davis says.

"I'm sure there are disappointed people with grade point averages above 14.0. But it wouldn't be fair for as to give 18 summas when other departments give two or three," Davis says. "But there was such a big gap between the four [who were recommended] and the rest. It was an unanimous decision."

Honors inflation is closely related to grade inflation, Pilbeam says. (See story, page B-11).

"We noticed in our departmental deliberations that when we looked at our written criteria for honors--high honors and highest honors--we didn't really have many students [who] we thought were truly excellent, although many of them had excellent grades," Pilbeam says.

GPAs can no longer be the defining factor in summas because of a trend toward grade inflation, says Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Education Jeffrey Wolcowitz.

"There's a sense that there is the ability to differentiate, yet you don't find that in the grades," Wolcowitz says.

"It's a problem if it sets up wrong expectations," he says. "Increasingly, students expecting high honors based on GPAs are finding that their theses and general exams aren't judged on the same level. Ultimately, they're disappointed in the end."

Other head tutors agree.

"We spent probably more time this year than in previous years [considering candidates] so that candidates don't have problems with the Faculty later," says Professor of Linguistics Susumu Kuno, the head tutor for the department.

Linguistics also has had an unusually high number of summas granted in the past few years. Last year, two out of six graduates received the summa distinction, and the year before, four out of 10 received summas.

But Kuno says that, in general, "my feeling is that for particular candidates, [departments] will make safer decisions, downgrading candidates rather than upgrading them."

Maintaining High Standards

Other head tutors say that the change in requirements has not affected their policies.

In fact, Assistant Professor Andrew Metrick, the head tutor in the economics department, says that their decisions on honors have "not at all" been affected.

The economics department has not had a history of summa inflation and did not change its policy, Metrick adds.

"There's just not a tradition of these candidates getting kicked back [to magna grants]," he says. "We are tougher on summas than any other department at Harvard."

Professor of Sociology Mary C. Waters, a member of the Faculty Council subcommittee on summas, says that the policy changes will not translate into a definite reduction in summas totals.

"It may be that there were just an amazing number of strong candidates last year and if this is the case this year, I don't think we would do anything," Waters says.

The Faculty subcommittee will review the summa recommendations from each department this year and the full Faculty then has final approval on summas awards.

However, many students dislike the changes to the Faculty policy.

"It is unfair that seniors this year have a smaller probability of getting summas than seniors last year," says Marc R. Talusan '97, an English concentrator.

Summa nominee in social studies Jedediah S. Purdy '97 agrees.

"Students should not be answer-able to standards they weren't aware of when they began their academic careers," he says.

Purdy also says he dislikes the Faculty's decision to factor elective grades into summa considerations.

"It tends to penalize adventurous people who take electives outside their field of strength," he says.

A General Problem?

An additional concern has been the value of general exams, which some individuals now regard as archaic.

Last year, the government and history departments both abolished general exams from their honors requirements.

"There has been a steady trend to abolish generals over the past twenty years," Pilbeam wrote in an e-mail. "This reflects a growing liberalization and specialization within concentrations [because] students take quite disparate course schedules within concentrations and...there is no overall syllabus for a particular concentration."

Other departments are faced with the question of changing their traditional systems.

About one-third of all undergraduate English concentrators sent in a petition this year asking the department to abolish general exams. Talusan, one the organizers of the petition, says that "the idea of a unified canon is obsolete."

He said the generals unfairly judge the quality of a program based on the obsolete "great books" academic standard.

"My program of study is just as valid, just as rigorous as any other," he adds.

He says he was down-graded to cum with summa ratings in everything else because he wrote a protest essay instead of answering the questions in his generals.

Other Honors Requirements

Summa inflation was not the only concern of the Faculty. Others have also noted a concomitant rise in the number of students who get magna cum laude and cum laude.

Graduating with honors has now become the norm rather than the exception, says former Dean of Undergraduate Education Lawrence Buell.

"This is perhaps due more to the quality of students rather than inflation," Buell says. "I think anybody that is smart enough to get into Harvard certainly is potentially honorable."

Buell says, with a few exceptions, the honors track has not changed over the years.

"The rigor of honors track stipulations has not changed over time except very locally like economics going the way of not making cums do theses," Buell says.

In response, Metrick says that the change in the economics department did not contribute to honors inflation.

"We made the decision [to establish the separate track] completely independent of honors inflation," Metrick says. "Every single one of [the people who got honors under the new track] are people who would have gotten honors anyway."

Summa nominee in economics Davis J. Wang '97 agrees that the new track permits more flexibility in a plan of study.

The track helps "seniors who choose other options to pursue different visions of a liberal arts experience, taking graduate level courses for example," he adds.

"Those people who could easily attain magna or summa need to be recognized for high level achievements," Wang says. "Cum is the minimum they should receive."

Wang also notes that very few ambitious thesis writers want to take the non-thesis writing track, because there is no possibility of magna or summa.

"Most certainly write the thesis wanting to learn something from the experience," he says. "Those who write it for honors are most often hoping for honors above the cum laude level."

The Value of a Summa

The impressive aura of a summa rating still has not been tarnished, Purdy says.

"I think the summa still carries a certain cache," says the social studies concentrator.

Other students say they feel that being awarded a summa is not very important.

"Certainly, it's a high honor within academia for excellent work," Wang says. "Outside of academia, we need to prove our worth again and any sort of honor or achievement we have is not something we should sit back on."

In fact, most of the Faculty and students agree that the differentiation in honors levels does not matter much outside of academia.

"In the world at large, that doesn't matter," Buell says. "The Harvard degree matters. [And] the Harvard name still means what it once did."