Worries about Grade Inflation

When I read the “breaking news” that there is grade inflation at Harvard, I was a bit surprised. First of all, I realized that I’m clearly taking the wrong classes. More seriously, while I agree that Harvard’s grading system is problematic, I think so for very different reasons than most. Beyond emphasizing one standardized metric of success, the current discussion of grade inflation has failed to recognize two important points: On a macro scale, relative grading—in its current format—makes institutional comparisons irrelevant, and on a micro scale, it makes the interdepartmental comparisons problematic.

My first grievance is the intense focus on institutional comparisons. The Crimson’s article says that the grade inflation announcement vindicates suspicions “that the College employs a softer grading standard than many of its peer institutions.” Quite frankly, it seems irrelevant to compare inflation at Harvard with inflation at other peer institutions, unless all institutions in the comparison are employing one identical and uniform grading.

Critics might say that nation-level comparisons are important for employers and graduate schools that need to compare candidates from different schools. It is true that our society demands relative assessments in some sense, but Harvard and many other institutions’ grading systems amount to a mere assessment of relative performance within their respective institutions. Rather, comparisons between universities require a relative assessment of the universities themselves to account for variations in institutional quality.

To make this more concrete, consider a scenario in which all universities institute the following rule: Only the top five percent in any given course can receive an A, and then the next five percent can get an A-, and so on. The grade would reveal very little, if anything, about any given student’s performance. Rather, to understand how a given student compares to another student at a different school, the internally relative grade must be viewed against a trans-institutional standard.

To solve the problem of nation-level comparisons, given variations in institutional quality, the United States could adopt an absolute grading system. Objections against distributions would then be inappropriate—if students meet the absolute criteria for an A, then they ought to receive it, even if that means that A is the most common grade at Harvard.

Therefore, assuming that the option of an absolute grading standard is rejected, the absence of a trans-institutional grading standard that adjusts for variations in institutional quality renders institutional comparisons irrelevant; an internal grade distribution is the only relevant metric for evaluating candidates from the same institution.

And the internal distribution of grades at Harvard is in fact my second grievance. It could indeed be problematic that the most common grade is also the highest grade (at least in a relative grading system, such as ours). Yet, in approaching this problem, a Harvard-wide quota alone would not ameliorate it. There are, at least, two other significant problems with the current system that must be addressed in conjunction with the problem of distribution: first, inconsistencies in grading standards among departments, and, second, the equal weighting of courses of varying difficulty.

Concerning the departmental disparities, there is no denying the perception that certain concentrations are easier than others. The debate on grade inflation should address this perception, whether it is accurate or not. This problem is aggravated by the fact that different disciplines emphasize different talents and achievements, possibly making it impossible to find a uniform grading system. Yet, in the absence of such an internally uniform grading standard, there is no point implementing a standardized grade distribution or talking about external comparisons.

Concerning the latter, I personally find it striking that introductory courses are given equal weighting in students’ grade points averages relative to advanced courses. While there may be good reason for this (as opposed to indifference or inertia on part of the administration in differentiating courses), it incentivizes intellectual laziness. While graduate schools claim to review transcripts to account for disparities in the difficulty of candidate’s coursework, such measures are far from universally recognized. Prima facie, a fair grading system ought to somehow account for these internal coursework divergences.

In conclusion, (in)famous grader Mansfield is in fact correct in asserting that Harvard’s grade inflation “represents a failure on the part of this faculty and its leadership to maintain our academic standards.” If the assumption is that we want a relative grading system, then Harvard’s true failure is the absence of an internally uniform and well-distributed system. The news that Harvard has a broken grading system is not at all breaking.

Oliver C. Wenner ’14 is a philosophy concentrator in Winthrop House.