Harvard University’s motto has a long history: It began in 1650 as In Christi Gloriam (“for the glory of God”), briefly morphed into Christo et Ecclesiae (“for Christ in the Church”), and finally secularized into the familiar Veritas (“truth”). As far as I know, the school is not trying to crowdsource a fourth version, but the internet recently offered a suggestion anyway: “The only thing harder than getting in is failing out.”
Yes, the academic reputation of what is arguably the world’s most prestigious university is the subject of mockery in online forums like Reddit and College Confidential. Yet these sites have a point about Harvard’s grading system. In 2013, former Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay Harris confirmed rumors — and caused an uproar — when he announced that the median grade at Harvard College was an A-, and the most common was a straight A.
Academics call this grade inflation, or awarding students higher grades than they deserve, especially in comparison to historic performance. Grade inflation is certainly not unique to Harvard, but considering its harmful effects — cheapening excellence, masking disparities in performance, skewing the expectations of employers — it is especially worrying that it occurs to such an extent at a school that serves as an example for the rest of academia.
Several of Harvard’s peer institutions have independently piloted policies that set quotas for A-range grades, but all have folded amidst student backlash, suggesting that normalizing grade distributions will require a coordinated movement of elite schools. In the meantime, the College must brainstorm ways to distinguish relative student performance, increase transparency around its grading distributions, and provide students with the honest evaluation of their performance that they deserve.
Is Harvard Up To Grade?
Grades have been on the rise across the country at least since 1960, when the average GPA in the United States was a 2.4. The first major uptick began at the onset of the Vietnam War and is largely ascribed to faculty efforts to keep male students eligible for student draft deferments. Throughout the 1990s, grades rose again with the emergence of the “student as consumer” model of higher education that demands a transcript that can justify a $250,000 tuition bill. Today, the mean GPA is around a 3.15, and it is even higher at private colleges and universities.
Harris’ 2013 announcement offered a rare glimpse into the grading machinery at Harvard, as the College does not publicly release data on grades. Yet according to The Harvard Crimson’s annual survey of graduating seniors, the class of 2017’s average GPA was 3.65, half a grade higher than the nationwide average and among the highest in the Ivy League. With a 2019 acceptance rate of 4.5 percent, Harvard carefully selects from a pool of the brightest and most accomplished high school students. Are high GPAs to be expected at a school filled with the world’s top performers, or does Harvard just grade easier?
This is not an easy question to answer. Harvard’s average GPA has been rising since grades were first recorded, but some attribute this climb to factors other than grade inflation. David Laibson, a Harvard professor of economics, said that rising GPAs are in part a product of a student body which includes talent that was untapped only a generation ago. “I started teaching in ’94, but my Harvard experience goes back to ’84,” Laibson said. “I feel that the students of 2019 are remarkable in their achievements and in their capabilities, and my instinct is that to curve them on the 1984 curve would be unfair.”
In contrast, Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield denies that today’s students are any more capable than those he encountered when he began teaching at the College in 1962. A vocal opponent of grade inflation, he believes the ’60s-era spike in GPAs was at least partly driven by affirmative action. “Nobody wanted to give a black student a C. That meant they wouldn’t give the white students Cs either, so C became a nongrade pretty much,” he said. “For a student today to receive a C would be like a sword in your vitals. It would be like death.”
Whatever the reasons for its ever-climbing GPAs, the College has developed a reputation for grade inflation, and the current administration has done little to address the issue. According to Karen Pearce, director of Harvard College Institutional Research, at Harvard all data on grading is kept confidential — a stark contrast to schools like the University of California, Berkeley, which publishes detailed information about GPAs by major and course.
The College tweaked its grading system in 2002, switching from a 15-point to a 4-point grading scale and capping at 60 percent the number of students graduating with honors — a feat that was achieved by nearly 90 percent of the class of 2001. In the past two decades, however, GPAs have continued to climb, jumping 0.2 points from 2005 to 2017 alone, per Crimson surveys. Additionally, little is known about how grading may vary across majors or departments.
In an email to the HPR, Harvard Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh wrote that “it’s really hard to create a good grading system because we rely on grades to achieve three distinct ends (maybe more!).” These ends include to motivate students to engage with courses, provide students with feedback about their performance, and rank students relative to one another. “Each of these ends would be best served by a different grading system, which makes it hard to create one that serves all three,” she wrote. However, it is not clear how the College’s current grading system meets any of these goals: a glut of top grades does not highlight areas of strength and weakness or differentiate students in a course. And an easy A is unlikely to motivate students to engage with anything except the snooze button.
Whatever grading system Harvard employs, it does more than just boost GPAs. Matt Saunders, a professor and the director of undergraduate studies in Art, Film, and Visual Studies, said that even theses are not immune to the “A for effort” mindset that has permeated the campus. His department struggles to keep reasonable grade distributions for theses in part because it recruits outside readers to grade them. “We’re going to do some work in the formula to actually reduce some of the value of the thesis in final honors, because it’s really inflated right now,” he said.
It does not take a straight-A student to see why grade inflation persists at Harvard, or anywhere: In short, “it’s very agreeable to everyone,” said Mansfield. “Students like it, and professors like it because nobody complains about a grade anymore.” But giving every student a stellar transcript does not mean they are all excelling. Instead, awarding grades from only the top of the distribution masks disparities in performance that could be improved by altering curricula, increasing department funding, or hiring support staff. It also skews employer expectations of student performance, punishing students from schools that adhere to traditional grading patterns.
Peer Policies
Though Harvard has never explicitly addressed these issues, several of its peer institutions have tested a variety of strategies to keep “A” from meaning average. In 2004, Princeton began limiting the percent of A-range grades doled out until it overturned this policy in 2014, citing concerns about “psychological factors and campus atmosphere.”
At Wellesley, faculty became concerned that inflated grades at the women’s college could perpetuate widespread sexism that casts doubt on the legitimacy of its degrees, said Ann Velenchik, Wellesley’s dean of academic affairs, in an interview with the HPR. This fear, combined with a significant discrepancy between grades in humanities and science courses, led the college to develop guidelines that set mean grades in introductory and intermediate level courses at no higher than a B+.
The policy was immediately effective, reducing A and A- grades by 18 percent in courses that had mean grades above the B+ target. However, the policy was ultimately overturned in the spring of 2019, for reasons similar to Princeton’s. “We were experiencing many of the negative consequences of having that policy … and very few of the benefits. The gap between grades in the humanities and grades in the sciences had gone back to where it had been,” Velenchik said. “So we decided last spring, after a lot of campus conversation, that we would rather have no grading policy at all than continue to have one that was different on paper than it was in practice.”
One of the most widespread criticisms of policies with so-called “grade ceilings” is the alleged disadvantage they give students applying to graduate schools and jobs relative to their peers from colleges with more lenient grading approaches. Velenchik stresses that many graduate programs, such as medical schools, care mostly about grades in students’ majors or courses whose grade distributions were largely unaffected by the policy. However, she did acknowledge that there are employers who will not allow candidates below a certain GPA threshold to apply, and studies have confirmed that recruiters and admission committees are more likely to select applicants with higher GPAs without accounting for differences in grading distributions among schools.
Rising Above Grade Inflation
Princeton and Wellesley’s policies successfully lowered their mean GPAs, but both schools ultimately caved to internal and external pressures to revert to more favorable grading distributions. An effective and enduring counter to grade inflation will likely require a coordinated movement of influential colleges to adopt similar policies. Schools like Harvard and Stanford — who each receive over 40,000 applicants and boast matriculation rates above 80 percent — are likely better positioned to pioneer such a reform than smaller colleges like Wellesley. According to Velenchik, the negative response to grade deflation from prospective students, combined with Wellesley’s need to maintain its edge in the competitive market for college-bound high school seniors, contributed to the decision to reverse its grading policy. Grade reform across the entire Ivy League, for example, would rewrite grading expectations nationwide and keep any individual college from becoming the target of students’ fears or employers’ biases. As the oldest and wealthiest university in the United States, Harvard is uniquely situated to lead such a movement.
Another solution to rising grades at Harvard could involve an overhaul of the entire liberal arts system. The discrepancy between grades in humanities and sciences courses that plagues many colleges has eluded UC Berkeley, for example. Bob Jacobsen, dean of undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley’s College of Letters & Science, told the HPR that Berkeley’s generally large class sizes and “relentlessly interdisciplinary” requirements — in contrast to Harvard’s mandated general education courses — keep grade variation in any given course high. “If you’re a physics major, you’re taking a philosophy class, and it’s a real philosophy class and we’re grading you like everybody else,” he said. “The distribution of people is, some people are doing much better in that class than others. It leads to a desire to have that reflected in the grades, not between an A and an A-, but between a C and an A.”
Not too many students received Cs in Harvard’s gen-ed courses. Their easy reputation, as described by the College in a 2015 report, was one of many reasons it restructured its entire general education program last fall. Consider the perennially popular course “Hebrew Bible,” which included this professor’s note on its course evaluation in 2018: “I hope that you will take the course not only because it is ‘easy’ but also because the material is interesting and important.”
Many of the gen-eds offered this year, including “Hebrew Bible,” are rebooted versions of their former selves, so it is too early to tell if their new and improved curricula will be enough to normalize grade distributions. But the urgency among administrators to revive the courses that are the foundation of Harvard’s liberal arts education is there: Saunders recounted that at a recent faculty orientation, administrators exhorted those teaching gen-eds to reevaluate their approaches to grading. “We’ve been asked to take the lead in trying to be very mindful of ways to beat back grade inflation [and] to make the gen-eds rigorous,” he said.
Other ways to offset grade inflation need not even change grading itself. Laibson had one suggestion to simultaneously provide information about variation and achievement: keep the grading distribution as it currently stands, but add a percentile score to each grade to illustrate relative student performance. However, he acknowledged that he would be reluctant to embrace such a system himself if it would “undermine some of the cooperative learning that I often try to encourage in my own classes.”
If school- or system-wide grade reform remains a few years off, the least Harvard can do in the meantime is increase transparency around what kinds of grades it is allotting, and to whom — a demand that echoes a campus-wide call to action for increased visibility around other administrative affairs, including investments and hiring practices. A public database of grading distributions by major and course — similar to UC Berkeley’s — would likely also pressure departments and professors to correct their grading patterns, lest individual courses become the target of ridicule.
When considering grade inflation, it is important to return to Harvard’s motto: truth. Grade inflation may placate students and faculty, but it is not an honest reflection of student performance, and the secrecy surrounding Harvard’s grading process only perpetuates the issue. Harvard needs to be a leader in the rectification of grading to bring value — and bring veritas — back to academics.
Image Credit: Unsplash / Jean Colet // Unsplash / Florian Klauer