Grade Inflation is Bad. Grade Deflation Would Be Worse.

Many economists agree that the only thing worse than inflation is deflation. After reading Harvard’s report seemingly urging grade deflation, we fear the same is true for grades.

Last Monday, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh emailed students and faculty a report about grading trends at Harvard. The vast majority of the report outlines the severe grade inflation we have seen over the past decade, as the median grade switched from an A- to an A, and the proportion of grades that were an A increased by around 50 percent.

Harvard is right — there is a problem with grade inflation. It is very hard to distinguish between students when so many of them receive A’s, especially when students who do minimal and exemplary work alike receive an A.

However, the flippant solutions provided in the report make us deeply nervous that the cure will be more dangerous than the disease. Grading standards will vary even more widely across classes, students will self-select into lower level courses, and students will become immensely less collaborative — to the detriment of themselves and their classmates.

The two of us come from vastly different corners of Harvard. One of us is a pure math and Computer Science concentrator; the other, History and Government. This report is bad news for both of us.

Take for example Mathematics 55A: “Studies in Algebra and Group Theory” — a course infamous for being perhaps the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country — or other high level STEM courses. Many students receive an A precisely because by completing the vast majority of the work correctly, they are submitting material of exceptional quality — the standard for an A, as laid out in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences grading guidelines. When professors of these courses feel that they must create a more stringent curve, allotting only so many A’s, B’s, and so on, fewer students will take them. Instead, they will enroll in easier courses that do not truly challenge them so that they can protect their GPA. This arrangement does not promote education.

Moreover, in humanities seminars there can be fewer than 10 people in a class, many of whom self-select because they are passionate about the topic, which often correlates with expertise. If professors give out fewer A’s or A-’s, students will come to understand that they cannot just make their work excellent — they need to ensure their essay is better than the other eight, nine, or ten people in the class. Where there might have previously been robust exchange of ideas or peer edits among classmates, now there will be closely guarded secrecy. Where students used to focus solely on their own paper, now they’ll have to constantly worry about what others are writing.

The root problem here is simple: There is no universal professor that teaches every class and can ensure even distribution of grades across the College. Thus, deflation will occur on the individual class level, resulting in implicit or explicit curves even as professors are ill-equipped to contextualize their course difficulty in the wider Harvard ecosystem, and thus are not in a position to provide fair grades to their students.

Making matters worse are differences in professorial deference. Some — particularly non-tenure track or pre-tenure faculty — might be more likely to take the administration's guidance to heart for fear of potential retribution. Others with greater job security might more rigidly defend their current grading practices. Because of these differences, the crackdown will unfairly punish students based on their professors’ rank and attitude towards the administration.

We do not oppose a culture at Harvard where the standards of work required for an A is higher. This type of monumental change, however, cannot simply happen at the snap of a finger, but instead requires careful long-term reform that looks at the nuances of each individual class. Rapid, haphazard deflation would be inconsistent and unfair, as students strategically take classes that they view as less competitive.

The report’s suggestions do not assuage these concerns. Take one of the top recommendations: adding median course grades to transcripts. This reform is shortsighted for two reasons.

One, it doesn’t account for self-selection. Math 55, like many other high level classes, might have a median grade of an A because the students enrolled are among the brightest math minds in the country. Yet, no one would say that it is an “easy” course.

Two, it necessarily pits students against their peers. By effectively penalizing students for the success of their peers, the administration is instituting a zero-sum game: Any A that one student gets diminishes the value of an A — or any other grade — for the rest. And these aren’t random people, we’re talking about — they’re our friends and classmates that we’re learning alongside.

We don’t want to go to a school that prioritizes ranking students at the expense of a collaborative educational experience. We don’t want to go to a school where one student relishes their friend in their humanities seminar getting poor grades so that they can do better. We don’t want to go to a school where students feel punished because their professor is more amenable to the administration than another.

Changing the generosity of our grading system will not end the game of grade grubbing — it will just make the game far more toxic.

Zach D. Berg ’28 is a History and Government concentrator in Adams House. Daniel Zhao ’28 is a Math and Computer Science concentrator in Adams House.