Same Old Song

Last year, when grade inflation was an operatic solo that Harvey “C-minus” Mansfield sang to an empty theater, I promised myself that I wouldn’t write about the topic. Why validate the argument through response? Why try to use logic with a man who found it sound and reasonable to claim that manliness is the world’s most admirable virtue and that the introduction of minority students leads to a downward GPA spiral?

But then Lower-is-Better-Larry hopped over from the Treasury and suddenly “C-minus” had an audience. Ready to demonstrate that he wasn’t only concerned with inflation of the monetary sort, Lower took the took the bull by the horns (although some would later claims that Lower became the bull himself).

With Lower’s backing, the debate about the fringes of the bell curve was no longer at the fringes of the University. This year everyone’s been talking curves and credentials as “C-minus” has happily faded to the background with a smug post-proselytizing grin. Indeed, on April 18, the University waved the bureaucratic equivalent of a giant red flag—an Educational Policy Committee (ECP) report detailing the problems of grade inflation and suggesting ways to ensure that, in the future, every Harvard college student will graduate with a slightly more mediocre GPA.

But just because the University president has stolen “C-minus’s” stump speech is that reason to give the vacuous hysteria over grade inflation any more credence? Lower may have one-upped “C-minus” in the competition to offend minority students and faculty, but he certainly hasn’t one-upped him in the competition to provide a reasonable explanation of why the nation’s most elite University should expend time and energy trying to worsen its students’ grades. Indeed, with grade inflation, the speaker has changed but the substance (or lack thereof) hasn’t. (Earth to the president: We may not be as smart as our transcripts say we are, but we’re certainly not stupid.)

Last year, in an attempt to provide students with more accurate feedback as to where they stood in his class, “C-minus” gave each student two grades: one to reflect the inevitably substandard quality of his work and another higher grade to comfortably pad his transcript. This year, in an attempt to give employers and grad schools more accurate feedback as to where students stood in Harvard classes, the ECP recommended giving two evaluations on each student’s transcript: a grade to reflect the (supposed) quality of his work, and the percentage of As given in the class to alert outsiders as to whether his transcript was comfortably padded.

Both approaches encourage befuddlement and second-guessing (perhaps something stodgy academics and former government bureaucrats deem laudable) but neither provides feedback of any real sort. The student with two grades on his paper guesses he needs improvement but doesn’t now how to improve (because there is no need, of course, to encourage TFs to provide substantive qualitative remarks or to encourage professors to interact more with students). Likewise, the employer with two numbers on a student’s transcript guesses that student didn’t have to work hard for that common seminar A but doesn’t know how to prove it (because there is no need, of course, to attach substantive qualitative remarks to transcripts or to overextend the faculty by asking them to provide comments on each student).

And what unfortunate gov. jock can forget that last year, in an attempt to ensure that most students earned Bs, “C-minus” bound his government sophomore tutorial to an adjusted grading scale. What déja vu then when this year, in an attempt to ensure that most students earn Bs, the ECP recommends binding students to a newly adjusted grading scale.

But, conveniently, “C-minus” had no time to discuss the philosophy of pedagogy when there were numbers to be adjusted, and neither does Lower today. (We’ll give Lower a little slack, because, in addition to grades, he’s also adjusting the number of faculty.) Could it be that Harvard students-hand picked for their anal-retentive, over-achieving zeal-regularly produce the “work whose excellent quality indicates a full mastery of the subject,” the College definition of an A? Would it be surprising if an era of SAT-coaches, AP classes, and elementary schoolers seeing college counselors current Harvard students actually worked harder than their predecessors who gained admission from Daddy’s name and paycheck? Should Harvard students graduate with mediocre GPAs when they could easily earn near perfect marks at any school in the nation? And does the need to produce students with lower grades actually have more to do with faculty and administrative fear that other schools are approaching our academic rigor than it does with measuring real student achievement?

Don’t go looking for answers in the new report. That’s just a numbers game.

Lower will do what “C-minus” didn’t; he’ll correct grade inflation once and for all. But he’ll do it while singing the same old song.

Lauren E. Baer ’02 is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.