Fighting To Deflate Grades

Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. ’53 has long been bemoaning grade inflation at Harvard. This year, people actually started to listen.

Grades at Harvard have consistently risen throughout the past century; today, 50 percent of grades are either As or A-minuses. By all accounts, the quality of students at Harvard has increased; admissions are more selective than ever, with the first-year class chosen from among tens of thousands of applicants from dozens of countries. But student improvement alone cannot account for such a massive increase in grades. Admitted students’ SAT scores have increased only marginally over the last 15 years, for example, while Harvard’s average GPA increased a full point over the same period.

Several factors have contributed to rising grades. As former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Henry A. Rosovsky has postulated, professors in the 1960s were reluctant to give low grades, especially to male students, because poor marks could cause them to be at greater risk of being drafted to fight in Vietnam. Additionally, the increased reliance on graduate students as teaching fellows has caused grades to rise; teaching fellows have less experience evaluating student work than professors, and they have little incentive to resist raising grades when challenged by students. In fact, teaching fellows could be even more tempted to give higher grades because of the correlation between high grades and positive student evaluations, which can influence their professional ambitions, their advancement prospects and even their salary.

The best way to combat this upward spiral is to set clear and consistent standards which define exactly what level of work deserves an A, and then to oversee graders to ensure that these standards are rigorously upheld. Admittedly, this is the most difficult way to address the problem: it would be far easier to arbitrarily mandate what percentage of As can be awarded in each class, forcing grades to conform neatly to a curve. But blindly enforcing a curve would defeat the entire purpose of grades—they would merely measure students relative to each other, telling students absolutely nothing about the objective quality of their work.

Though grades inevitably indicate differences in the quality of students’ work, the purpose of grades is pedagogical. Grades are valuable tools for instructors to provide pupils with assessments of their work and with constructive comments for future improvements. Grades should be a part of that assessment that quantifies how well a student met the instructor’s expectations, not how well a student’s classmates performed, over which the student has absolutely no control.

The best hope for clarifying standards is for each professor to produce rubrics explaining the standards students will have to meet in order to earn a particular grade in the course. Examples of successful assignments should be made available to students so that students can understand the level of performance demanded by a class, and student work should then be held to these high standards. In order to ensure that teaching fellows are well-equipped to judge student work consistently and fairly, they should be required to pass a course in how to lead a Harvard undergraduate section, such as those offered at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, before beginning as instructors. Professors must carefully monitor teaching fellows to ensure that grading standards are being upheld. This will require professors to pay more attention to their courses, carefully designing rubrics with the same attention they give to reading lists and syllabi. At the same time, both departments and the College must continually evaluate each course’s rubrics, syllabi and grading practices to ensure that standards are consistent for courses of similar levels across departments and across the College.

As the calls for reform have multiplied over the past year, the Faculty’s Educational Policy Committee has brainstormed several ways to combat grade inflation. One suggestion, which was adopted by the Faculty and will be enacted next year, is to switch from Harvard’s needlessly confusing 15-point grading scale to the standard four-point scale. This is a good move, but it will not directly reduce grade inflation; grades have increased because standards have disintegrated, and shifting to a new grading scale will not make grades more accurate.

The committee also suggested eliminating the grades of C-minus, D-plus and D-minus because they are rarely given. But eliminating those grades would further compress professors’ choices when assigning grades, reducing their ability to draw meaningful distinctions between students. Lastly, the committee proposed to list on transcripts the percentage of A-range grades awarded in a particular class next to each student’s grade. This would put those in classes with many other high-performing students at an undeserved disadvantage. Many extremely advanced classes award a high percentage of As precisely because their students produce consistently outstanding work. The Faculty wisely did not endorse these last two proposals.

The Faculty must ensure that Harvard undergraduates are held to high and consistent standards, and that professors are giving student assessment the attention and care it warrants. If strong steps are taken to combat grade inflation, professors will fulfill one of their most important responsibilities: to give undergraduates honest evaluations and constructive criticism that allows them to learn and grow, so that graduating students can say without equivocation that they have truly earned their place in the fellowship of educated men and women.