A Collapse of Critical Judgment

“Generally speaking, A and A-minus represent work whose excellent quality indicates a full mastery of the subject and, in the case of A, work of extraordinary distinction,” according to page 58 of the Harvard College Handbook for Students.

But is this really true of today’s Harvard?

Grades have risen almost every year since the beginning of the 20th century. But this epidemic has gained more attention as grade inflation intensified during the 1990s to the point that Cs have become virtually nonexistent. Today, only 6 percent of grades are below a B-minus, while almost 50 percent are As or A-minuses.

The quality of Harvard’s students has increased over the past hundred years, as Harvard has gone from a college for the wealthy New England elite to an international university drawing the best students from dozens of countries. But this alone cannot account for the drastic rise in grades. There has been only a marginal increase over the last 15 years in students’ SAT scores, for example, which cannot account for the fact that the mean Harvard grade point average rose an entire point over that period.

So why, if the quality of students has not noticeably improved over the last 15 years, have grades risen so much? We believe much of the blame falls, as Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 wrote in an e-mail to Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. ’53, on a “collapse of critical judgment” in evaluating undergraduate coursework. Harvard’s standards have atrophied to the point where mediocre work receives a B, and merely solid work receives an A-minus or A.

This is a problem for three reasons.

First, with grades as high and compressed as they are, there is much less room for professors and TFs to distinguish between work of differing quality. If the scale for a paper grade effectively ranges only from A to B, it becomes extremely difficult to differentiate between an excellent paper and a mediocre one.

Second, a compressed grade scale makes it harder for outsiders such as graduate schools or business recruiters to understand what Harvard’s grades mean. While an inflated A might look good on a transcript, it diminishes the accomplishments of students who actually master the material and produce innovative, original work. This damages the credibility of Harvard’s grades.

But most importantly, grade inflation damages an instructor’s ability to teach and a student’s ability to learn, which is the purpose of giving grades in the first place. In the past, grades have been used a pedagogical tool—they reinforced comments on a paper or a test. Students are much more likely to take seriously a professor’s or TF’s comments if the grade sends an equivalent message. If an instructor says that a student’s work was mediocre, unoriginal or contained significant omissions but gives the student a B—which is supposed to indicate good work—the student receives conflicting signals and is less likely to take the critical comments seriously. But a C-minus on a poorly completed assignment, if accompanied by constructive criticism, is both fair and would motivate the student to do better work in the future.

This is the real value of grades-—to measure one’s work against previously existing, clearly defined standards of excellence and to create incentives for students to improve. Though grades inevitably measure students relative to each other, that is not why they should be given. The grade you receive in a class should tell you about your work, not the work of others in your class—over which you have no control. If, however, grades are set to an absolute scale, where requirements for achievement are clearly outlined and carefully enforced, they can perform a valuable pedagogical function: telling students whether they met their instructor’s expectations.

Grades mean much less if they only compare students to their peers. If a TF tells a student that her work was excellent but that she was given a C because, in accordance with a predetermined grade distribution, students are precluded from all receiving high grades, the C gives a misleading assesment of the innate quality of that student’s work. On the other hand, if all the students in a class produce mediocre work but the top fifth of the class must receive As in accordance with a strict curve, those As are clearly unearned and are only an artificial indicator of—as the Beatles put it—“shades of mediocrity.” We firmly believe that professors and TFs have a better idea of the quality of students’ work than any statistical curve.

Therefore, we believe that reducing grade inflation can only be accomplished through a coordinated Faculty-wide effort to reassess and clarify Harvard’s standards. These standards should be based both on accumulating knowledge in a subject and reasoning critically about that knowledge. Along with higher standards, oversight is key to ensuring that professors and TFs are consistently adhering to those standards.

Over the next four days, we will detail the history of grade inflation at Harvard, explain further the purpose of grades, discuss proposals that won’t work, and finally offer our solution.