The Doctor is In

Consider the following exchange on the subject of faked orgasms, taken from the movie When Harry Met Sally:

Sally: Most women at one time or another have faked it.

Harry: Well, they haven’t faked it with me.

Sally: How do you know?

Harry: Because I know.

Sally: Oh, right, that’s right, I forgot. You’re a man.

Harry: What is that supposed to mean?

Sally: Nothing. It’s just that all men are sure it’s never happened to them and that most women at one time or another have done it, so you do the math.

Change the word “women” to “graders” and the word “men” to “students,” and you encapsulate the Harvard attitude toward grade inflation.

According to a recent Crimson survey, less than 25 percent of the student body feels grade inflation to be a serious enough problem to warrant fixing, and only 27 percent of students believe their grades to be inflated in the first place. More than half, however, are concerned that the widespread attention to Harvard’s high grades might diminish the value of their degrees.

Thus, 73 percent of students believe that the average grade should hover around an A- in the humanities and almost as high in the social sciences. Those marks are deserved. No grader could possibly fake the “Big A,” right?

Baloney. Almost all of us faculty members fake it every semester. The reasons are manifold. We get to know and like our students and we don’t want to penalize them if everyone else is getting high grades. We don’t want to deal with the protests and struggles that can accompany marks in the low B and C range. Perhaps most importantly, we know that lower grades often—although not always—translate into lower student evaluations and lower enrollments. So we let loose with an orgy of academic “oohs” and “ahhs.”

I benefited from this very same system as a student, but I got an early, rude awakening as to what was going on. In my freshman year at Princeton I studied with Mary Douglas, a famous anthropologist who had just come to America after many years in the British system. At the end of my first paper she wrote, “Excellent essay,” and under that was an initial grade of B. However, the “B” had been erased and replaced with an “A.” In Professor Douglas’ academic training a B probably represented a very good mark, but that didn’t fly in an American university. In order to maintain an acceptable distribution—and probably at the urging of her departmental administrators—she took eraser in hand and faked the “Big A.”

The next year I chose a seminar with an extremely nice visiting professor who had the soul of a poet and the backbone of a garden slug. I was surprised to get back one particularly shoddy essay with the final mark of “A.” At first I rationalized the grade, deciding that my work must have stood out because the seminar included several legendary stoners. One of them, known to his peers as the Bazooka (because he was often heavily loaded), differed from Bill Clinton in that he had never actually exhaled. But at semester’s end even the Bazooka boasted about his first “A” after seven years of college. My sense of achievement went right up in smoke.

I know it, you know it: Elite universities inflate their grades. From what I can tell, Harvard is no worse than other top schools. Inflation exists wherever students pay tens of thousands of dollars per year and are treated, in return, as consumers of education. As one critic put it, how hard does a consumer ever have to work to buy a product?

In an ideal world, top schools would return to a system in which C is acceptable, B is very good and A is absolutely first-rate. Since that’s not going to happen, I offer three attainable goals. First, Harvard students could drop the hypocritical position that all grades should be high but that no one should leak it to the “outside world.” Second, students could get firmly behind the proposal to list the average grade for every course on their transcripts. Third, students could recognize that they can either do outstanding academic work or engage in more extracurricular activities than a yacht-load of Congressmen, but probably not both. Harvard students are incredibly bright, but there is only so much time, energy and attention to go around.

Besides, if it’s worldly success that concerns you, grades are vastly less important than hard work, connections and the art of self-promotion. The world is full of straight-A students managing money for guys like the Bazooka.

In academic as in romantic affairs, honesty and self-scrutiny are of paramount value. Let’s strive for an atmosphere in which faculty and students understand each others’ needs, everyone achieves academic fulfillment and no one has to fake the “Big A.”