Faculty To Vote On Limiting Honors Degrees Reduction

Two Faculty committees have approved proposals to limit the proportion of students who can receive honors to 60 percent of the graduating class and to switch to a 4.0 grading scale, according to Dean of Undergraduate Education Susan G. Pedersen ’81-’82.

The proposals—drafted after extensive discussion within the Faculty Council and the Education Policy Committee (EPC)—will go to vote before the entire Faculty May 21.

If the honors change is made, which is proposed to become effective with the Class of 2005, almost five times as many students will graduate without honors than did last June when 91 percent of Harvard undergraduates received honors.

The proposal, detailed in a report released to The Crimson Friday and to be sent to the Faculty prior to the May 21 meeting, recommends switching to a system of percentage cutoffs for awarding each level of honors. Currently, a student is recommended for honors by their department and awarded University honors based on exceeding a certain grade point average cut-off.

The proposal suggests that after departmental recommendations for magna and summa degrees are made, the awards would be given to 20 percent of the class—with the customary 5 percent reserved for summa and 15 percent receiving magna.

Cum laude degrees would then be awarded to the next 30 percent of the class recommended for honors by their departments.

The 50 percent would be chosen by ranking all students recommended for honors by overall GPA.

Members of the Faculty Council and the EPC chose not to eliminate a category of honors that has been debated extensively these past months—cum laude in general studies.

In the past, Pedersen has said that she feels this category of honors is unnecessary.

“It seems odd to award honors to students who have not earned honors in their concentrations, given that work in the concentration is the most important component of undergraduates’ work here,” Pedersen wrote in an e-mail earlier in the semester.

But under the proposed system, those students who were not recommended for honors by their department could still receive honors if they had a GPA higher than the minimum required to earn magna honors of those recommended for honors by their departments.

No more than 10 percent of the class could receive this type of honors in general studies.

The report says that based on past data only about 3 percent of the graduating class would receive this final category of honors—thus making the total numbers of students receiving honors about 53 percent in a given year, according to data from recent classes.

While some faculty suggested simply raising the GPA cutoffs in order to reduce the number of students who receive honors, the report said that “new, higher GPA bars might [themselves] be inflationary.”

The report also justified the new percentage-based system by saying, “It would not be affected by grade inflation or grade deflation.”

The report suggests that the change go into effect with the Class of 2005 since “although it should have no effect on concentration choice...it seems wise to begin implementation with those students who will begin their concentration work in the fall.”

The other proposal that will be voted upon by the Faculty is the switch from a 15 to four-point grading scale. If approved, the change would go into effect for the 2003-2004 academic year.

Wolfson Professor of Jewish Studies Jay M. Harris said last week that the Faculty Council endorsed switching the scale in order to eliminate the gap between a B-plus and an A-minus. He said this gap might cause some professors to award higher grades.

And Harris says the proposed change would make administrative sense.

“There is a perfectly good scale already out there that everyone uses,” Harris said. “It is simple and elegant.”

The Faculty will not vote upon whether to add the percentages of A’s awarded in a class next to the student-earned grade on the transcript—a suggestion to combat grade inflation made by an EPC subcommittee earlier this month.

According to the report, “The full EPC was less persuaded than the subcommittee of the specific advantages of including this particular information on the transcript.”

But according to Pedersen, the Faculty has said it is worth considering different types of transcripts in the future.

Pedersen says even if the proposals are not approved, she feels progress is being made in combating grade inflation.

“Once the EPC subcommittee started talking about grades we thought we could do more to address the idiosyncrasies and transparency of the system—that seemed the more important part of the debate,” she said.

—Staff writer Jessica E. Vascellaro can be reached at vascell@fas.harvard.edu.