Why GPA?

Harvard’s 2012 cheating scandal was a reminder that the motto “Veritas” does not ensure fair play. The draft Honor Code, proposed as part of a wider effort on the part of Dean Jay M. Harris and his Committee on Academic Integrity to support “intellectual discovery, artistic creation, independent scholarship, and meaningful collaboration,” seeks to rehabilitate truthfulness on campus. The list of “moral imperatives” will, the committee hopes, reinforce these educational virtues by “suffusing the culture of the place.” Beyond the specific issue of academic honesty, the code assumes that good values precede good deeds. But is this really true?

There are powerful incentives at Harvard that work against the code’s intentions. For undergraduates, the biggest carrots—or biggest sticks—are grades. 32 courses, 32 marks, distilled to a decimal point average. The mindset of GPA is second nature to young Americans, and a determinant of future success. If you want to get to Harvard, you need a near-flawless set of grades from high school—some candidates better a 4.0 with the help of AP scores. And even after Harvard, GPA is a key component in applications to professional careers and graduate programs. At each stage, years of academic endeavor boil down to a single number. It doesn’t matter what your GPA was last year, only what it is now.

With an eye on their ambitions and the grades needed to realize them, many undergraduates have to consider what they stand to lose by taking each course at Harvard, over and above what they might gain. Just listen to how students talk about GPA. Spend an afternoon in Harvard Yard and you are likely to overhear snatches of conversation such as, “That Ec class last semester really damaged my GPA,” or, “My 3.9 took a beating from the pre-med requirements.” It is possible—likely even—that a graduating senior’s GPA will be lower than a freshman’s after the latter’s first fall at Harvard, as a senior has endured the battleground of many more semesters. High GPAs require protection. When they get knocked, it hurts.

This metaphor of physical injury is familiar, but its familiarity should not obscure the fact that it is a strange way to think about assessment. Education can come to seem like a computer game where you lose lives rather than accumulate prizes. Feeling this way undermines the value of knowledge learned, work completed and challenges overcome.

GPA implicitly supports values that run counter to those in the proposed Honor Code. It discourages intellectual risk-taking and original thought. Students are rewarded for taking courses in which they are likely to do well and ones renowned for being easy. In some classes, syllabuses are comparable to contractual checklists spelling out how to get an A. At worst, sections abandon genuine inquiry and become performances for students to say what they believe teaching fellows want to hear.

The GPA system is further compromised by two different (and both reasonable) attitudes to grading among professors. Some argue that Harvard undergraduates perform well above the national average and deserve high marks to reflect this. Therefore, according to them, an A- is a truthful mean. Other faculty argue that this approach leads to grade inflation, which diminishes the value of a Harvard degree. Instead, they insist on using the full range of grades, which disadvantages students who might have scored better for the same level of performance in a different class. It is easy to see why professors who think “nationally” rather than “locally” are in the majority. They want to avoid queues at office hours, extra paperwork, and the responsibility of barring a student’s hopes of getting into medical school because of a single grade.

Those who think GPA works well might say that an average is an efficient way to summarize a list of grades. On graduation, a string of letters and their numerical mean amount to the same thing. This may be true, but the crucial problem with GPA is not the final result, but the dictating power it exerts in shaping an individual’s decisions and dissuading admirable attitudes to learning as he or she works toward a degree.

Although it is hard to imagine how GPA could be done away with, there are certainly ways to curb its sway. Harvard could increase un-assessed, ungraded discussion time, in the model of Oxford and Cambridge supervisions. This would help facilitate greater experimentation and heartfelt contribution while discouraging irrelevant participation to check-off course requirements. The College could also learn from the graduate school by prioritizing projects and longer papers, which develop through an advising relationship with a TF. To make time for this initiative, classes could assign fewer quizzes and thought-papers. And perhaps the College could encourage undergraduates to take more than two courses pass/fail. If the standards for passing were more rigorous, people might not see the ungraded route as a way to take the course less seriously.

The Honor Code’s inauguration is an ideal opportunity for Harvard to use its reputation to open a national discussion about whether the GPA system makes practical and moral sense. Does a 4.0 bear convincing correlation with whether an individual has devoted him or herself to the discovery, creation and collaboration the code celebrates? Harvard’s approach to GPA must better enable students to square their ambitions with these educational values.

Kate J. Womersley received her master of arts degree at the Graduate School of Arts and Science as a Frank Knox Fellow.