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Harvard College’s Office of Undergraduate Education released a 25-page report in late October on grade inflation, arguing that the College’s current approach is “failing to perform the key functions of grading.”
The report found that more than 60 percent of grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates are A’s, up from 40 percent just a decade ago. It concluded that Harvard’s current grading system is “damaging the academic culture of the College.”
Students voiced swift opposition to the report, saying that it overlooked the complexity of academic life at Harvard and that stricter grading could exacerbate an already stressful environment without necessarily improving learning.
To understand how the College is rethinking its approach to grading, we spoke with Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh, who has been leading the push to recenter academics. We talked with her about the motivations behind the report, student concerns about fairness, and the future of grading reform at Harvard.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
FM: Let’s start with the elephant in the room: You went to Yale. Did you become Dean of Undergraduate Education because you hate Harvard students?
AC: I was the worst Yale student. I never went to the Yale-Harvard game in all my years there. And in fact, the first time I went was last year, where I rooted for Harvard. I was a very misanthropic college student. I spent my time smoking cigarettes in the smoking lounge of the library, which we had back then. One of the real pleasures of my job now is to really get to enjoy and appreciate the extracurricular life at Harvard, which I think is really what distinguishes Harvard — even more than Yale.
FM: Would you be pro opening up a smoking section in Lamont?
AC: [Laughs] No.
FM: You released a report called “Re-Centering Academics at Harvard College: Update on Grading and Workload.” In it, you argue Harvard’s current approach to grading is undermining our academic mission. What drove you to write this report?
AC: My responsibility is to preserve the value of a Harvard degree. For the rest of your life, you’re going to have Harvard on your resume, and I want to make sure that every time someone sees Harvard on your resume, they think you’re a smart person who got a really rigorous education and learned how to do important things. My concern is that very recent trends in our grading are threatening that reputation, and I want to make sure that we act before that reputation is damaged.
FM: Several students have argued that the report overlooked the complexity of academic life at the College. What would you say to students who think you’re just trying to make Harvard harder?
AC: I don’t want to make Harvard harder. I think Harvard is plenty hard enough, but I do think that hardness is unevenly distributed. It’s clear that there are courses and concentrations where students do a great deal of work and they’re held to very high standards. The goal is not to make those courses any harder. The goal is to lift up other courses closer to that level.
FM: The report argues that the grading system is no longer communicating meaningful information about a student’s mastery of material or differences in student performance. However, many graduates of Harvard College are still attaining competitive outcomes in graduate school, admissions, and employment. What exactly are the problems with the grading system if student outcomes remain strong?
AC: What we’re hearing from admissions and from recruiters and employers is that there’s been a spike in grading across the board in elite colleges. It’s similar to what I think a lot of high schools are seeing. What we’re hearing from recruiters and admissions officers is that it’s harder to understand the transcripts that are coming out of a school like Harvard. What this means is that, ideally, all of the elite schools would move together to solve this problem. And I’m talking to colleagues at other schools; I know that they’re also grappling with it on their campuses. But whether or not other schools move, I think there’s an opportunity for Harvard to show leadership in this area.
FM: There’s a tendency at Harvard and other colleges for students to prioritize their extracurricular and pre-professional commitments over their coursework. What role should a Harvard classroom play in undergraduates’ lives?
AC: I don’t think that’s a new tendency. Harvard students have always seen the value of their extracurriculars, and I agree. I see the kind of things that our students are able to do through their clubs, their activities, their sports, and it’s incredible what they do and what they learn.
At its best, a Harvard education has students with one foot in the classroom, one foot out in the world, doing things. I think that relationship between the classroom and the world works best when what’s happening in the classroom is very sturdy, and so I don’t see us as trying to marginalize extracurriculars in any way, or to impose changes that would dramatically change campus culture, but just to restore the centrality of academics to this broader college ecosystem.
FM: Some students are worried that stricter grading standards would add to an already demanding campus environment. How do you view those concerns?
AC: We worry a lot about stress, and what I’ve come to see is that we can’t relieve our students’ stress because we’re not causing our students’ stress. Our students are stressed not because of anything we’re doing, but because they are very ambitious people who want to do very great things in the world — and with that inextricably comes stress. We can’t remove the stress from them, nor would it prepare them for the world for us to do so. If it’s stressful to be a pre-med, it’s just as stressful to be a resident and then to be a doctor and to be responsible for life and death decisions. What we can do with students is help them learn how to live with their stress, help them channel that stress so that it fuels their performance rather than undermining it.
I’ve also heard from students who are worried about competitiveness. Many students experience Harvard as a relatively non-competitive environment, which is great, and they contrast that to their high schools, which felt much more cutthroat to them. They worry that any change to our grading standards might make Harvard feel cutthroat. I think that Harvard is actually quite a competitive place, and if our students aren’t perceiving that, it’s a sign that they are actually learning to live maturely with their competitiveness — that they’re able to be friends with people even as they are are aiming for the same goals and competing with one another to some extent. It’s good that they’re already learning those skills here because that’s something that they will have to do in every workplace afterwards.
FM: For the students who are concerned, how do you plan to get them on board with potential changes enforcing stricter grading standards across the College?
AC: As I mentioned in my email to students, it’s unprecedented to share this kind of report with students, and I had two hopes with that. One is to solicit their best thinking about how we can move forward. But the other is, I want them to understand why change is happening. I want them to understand why the faculty are worried about our grading. I don’t expect them necessarily to agree that this is a problem or to agree with any particular solution — although I hope to be able to persuade them — but at the very least, I would like them to know that we are approaching this seriously and with great care.
FM: Do you worry that some students or graduating classes of the College would be harmed in the short term if Harvard started enforcing stricter grading standards?
AC: I don’t want to do anything that would damage our students’ chances to get jobs, to win fellowships, to get admitted to great professional schools. If we do make any changes to our grading system, we will be responsible for communicating those changes far and wide.
Students sometimes say, ‘Would you be willing to write to employers to say you changed the grading?’ Absolutely, I will write to every employer in the world. We will communicate with every professional school. We will make sure this is widely known. We will figure out how to put it on transcripts. That’s part of why we’re being so public and why we’re talking to the press about this. We want the world to understand that there is a widespread problem that Harvard is the first school to grapple with. So we want that reputation to be attached to our students when they go out into the world.
FM: In your report, you mentioned that universities have tried and failed to correct for grade inflation. You include references to attempts at schools like Yale and Dartmouth to implement the policies that you say might be useful, which ultimately failed. Why do you think these ideas could work at Harvard?
AC: Two reasons. One is because I think our current grading system is caused by many factors, and so our response has to address all the factors at once. What other schools have done is they’ve made one policy shift, but we would be thinking comprehensively about the entire system and how to change the incentives around faculty grading, so I think we are more likely to succeed.
I also think we’re in a uniquely privileged position because of our prominent professional schools and the possibility of getting all of us to work together on this will send an important signal throughout the system.
FM: The report states that students are working as hard as they ever have, if not more. Why do you think they might deserve lower grades?
AC: Students believe that grades should correlate with effort. I think that effort is really important, and I think the fact that our students are working hard is very important, because the ability to work hard and focus on something is a valuable skill in its own right. But grading is not meant to measure effort. It can’t measure effort — faculty don’t actually have any way of knowing how much effort a student has put in. It’s meant to measure performance and to confer distinction.
FM: The Educational Policy Committee has charged a faculty committee with exploring adjustments to Harvard’s grading system, including the possibility of awarding a limited number of A pluses, or including the median grade of courses on transcripts. What’s the timeline of the committee’s work?
AC: We don’t always do a great job of explaining to students how this place is run. So just to make clear: deans have only executive power. Anything that happens, any policy, is set by the legislature, which is the faculty.
It starts, as you said, with the EPC. It will then go to the faculty council, which is a set of faculty who are elected to that committee, and they consult with elected members of the HUA. It will go to the faculty council twice, and then it will go to the full faculty meeting. And so the soonest anything would be voted on would be by the end of the academic year.
I also want to add that any changes we make are never retroactive. I’ve learned that some students are worried that we might retrospectively start putting course medians on transcripts, things like that. We don’t do that.
FM: After the report was released, you immediately went viral on Sidechat, Harvard’s anonymous social media platform. How are you planning to embrace your new celebrity status?
AC: I don’t know everything about Sidechat. I did see the meme of me as Gandalf, and I am looking to have that framed. I thought it was very funny, and whoever made it, I salute them.
FM: Outside of writing reports on grading, how do you spend your time?
AC: I spend my time doing ordinary professor things. I go to plays, I go to concerts. Cambridge has a very serious dinner party culture, so my partner and I spend time having dinner with other professors.
FM: Why did you become dean of undergraduate education?
AC: Rakesh Khurana invited me to apply for the position, and I thought it would be a nice change. As soon as I stepped into the job, I realized I found my vocation. I know that people like to roll their eyes about the quote unquote admin. Some people become professors because they love their subject and want to think about it every day for the rest of their lives. Other people become professors because they love the University, love the kind of culture it creates, love the role, and really believe in the role that it performs in society. I’m in the latter group, and it is therefore an incredible honor and privilege to help to lead a university.
—Staff writer Samuel A. Church can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @samuelachurch.
—Magazine writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.
