Hard Core

Along with John Lithgow '67 acting as the marshal for Arts First, there is at least one other Harvard universal.

Two papers, a mid-term, a final and section participation.

The Core.

On the first paper, you get a B-, maybe a solid B if you are lucky. Then comes the mid-term. The teaching fellow warns you she'll grade harshly. She usually does.

Then there's the second half of the semester, and suddenly, magically, your grade rises. By the end of the class, you've managed to extract an A- or B+. Sanity intact.

But unless professors deem it so, there are not any hard and fast rules governing Core grading, according to Susan W. Lewis, the director of the Core program.

"It has been our experience that a range of grading practices exist but that individual faculty do not have one way of approaching grading in their Core courses and a different set of practices for their department courses," she says.

Indeed, say professors and teacher fellows teaching the Core, there is so much variation between academic subjects that some courses cannot help but use different criteria to grade.

Class participation in Senior Preceptor Marlies K. Mueller's popular Foreign Cultures 22: "La critique sociale a travers l'humour," is based on in-class skits, dialogues and enthusiasm. In math-oriented Science cores, it is often based on showing up to section and turning in homework assignments.

As with all courses which use teaching fellows to grade students, the Faculty pressures professors to make sure students are fairly evaluated.

"I would hope all of our professors in the Core work to insure uniform grading standards across the sections in their classes," writes Dean of Undergraduate Education William M. Todd in an e-mail message.

"Professors will establish grading standards which may, in some cases, be lower than those the teaching fellows were prepared to apply," he writes.

But there are some differences in standards that students seem to notice.

"I think in the Core there is a little more pressure to have grade distributions be consistent across courses, so that students are not rewarded or punished for choosing, for example, one Moral Reasoning course over another," writes Joel Johnson, a graduate student in government who served this year the head teaching fellow for Moral Reasoning 22: "Justice," in an e-mail message..

"In departmental courses, there seems to be a bit more leeway; there is not the same amount of concern over whether departmental course x is grading on the same scale as departmental course y."

Teaching fellows who have taught both Cores and departmental classes say that they do not grade papers differently in either type of courses--but many say they keep in mind the obvious--that, English concentrators, for example, may write better English papers in Literature and Arts A courses than will biochem concentrators. So they say they adjust accordingly, careful not to punish students who have never taken a literature course.

"The main challenge in grading Justice papers is that most of the students are from concentrations other than Government, Philosophy or Social Studies," Johnson says. "I try to keep this in mind as I grade, and limit the use of jargon in my comments."

However, some students still say that it seems as though the curve in some classes is unnecessarily harsh. An oft-mentioned Annenberg rumor holds that teaching fellows have been told to crackdown on grade inflation.

Elizabeth R. Kessler '02 says the perceptions do not come from the anxious void of student experience--though she says that she has not personally experienced teaching fellows avoiding the standard Harvard grading paradigm.

"I have sensed certain professors or teaching fellows in the Core might grade harsher in an effort to emphasize that their course is in fact not easy and not 'just a Core,'" she says.

Administrators and teaching fellows deny these claims.

"From time to time the faculty has discussed grade inflation, but I have not heard about teaching fellows being told to 'crackdown on grade inflation,'" Lewis says. "I think that I might have heard if such directives were being issued in Core courses."

Social Analysis 10: "Principles of Economics" administrator Judith A. Li, who is an assistant professor of economics, said the College's most heavily-attended course has not changed its grading policies in the recent past.

"[I]t would be difficult to say that we have participated in a 'crackdown' of grade inflation in the last few years," she says.

A final factor that may contribute to the perception that Core grading is only fuzzily tied to achievement: size.

Dean of Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles says that he thinks that, all other things being equal, big classes have lower grades then small ones, regardless of whether they are part of the Core program.

"Although I don't have the data, Lewis says, "I believe that the grades in large courses tend to have slightly lower grades than small courses."

"In large courses with lots of different TFs you have to address the question of common grading standards, so that all students are getting equivalent grades for equivalent work," says Elizabeth B. Clark, the head teaching fellow for Historical Studies A: "Women Feminism and History."

Easy As ABC

Indeed, Lewis says, they are required to be accessible to students who do not have a college background in that area.

"This means that a Core course in a foreign literature can not, for example, assume that students have a reading knowledge of the language in which the texts were written and a Science A Core course can not presume that students have completed Math 1b or are taking Math 21 simultaneously as department courses in those areas might," she says.

Accessibility, however, does not equal easy, say those who teach Core classes. In fact, if anything, they can be more difficult.

"First of all, Core classes are not always scaled down in difficulty and intensity," says Todd. "My Literature and Arts C-30 [How and What Russia Learned to Read: The Rise of Russian Literary Culture], for instance, has more readings and more assignments than the departmental course it replaces, Slavic 145A."

Clark says though Core classes are introductory in terms of content and method, they still may present difficulties to students.

"For some of the students enrolled, a Core can be more challenging than their other courses because it's in a unfamiliar field," Clark writes in an e-mail message.

Johnson says that at least in terms of the Moral Reasoning discipline, the skills demanded are not based in specific knowledge.

Moral Reasoning 22, Johnson says, tries to teach students to construct well-reasoned arguments about moral issues--skills which a chemistry concentrator might master as easily as a women's studies major.

Other students cite Core workloads, which are often full of the 'great books' and introductory texts in certain fields, as being as reason why Core courses can be especially challenging.

"I think Core classes are not easier," says Chun-Der L. Li '02. "They are more work, because of all of the reading and the papers that we have to do."