Reasons to Fight for Grade Inflation

The gist of Jendi Reiter's argument ("A Gentleman's 'B+'", March 15, p. 2) seems to be that Harvard students (including herself, we are to presume) are so wonderful that we, your instructors, should give you all high grades in order to make you happy and to help you get the good jobs you deserve. Her remarks, lacking even at iota of the self-critical altitude which Harvard should (but often doesn't) instill in its students, closely resemble the arguments put forth by Sean Becker of the U.C. during March 11's IOP panel discussion on grade inflation.

For Ms. Reiter's and Mr. Becker's sake--and for the sake of anyone who might be tempted to agree with them--allow me to enumerate a few of the many problems brought on by grade inflation. Note that I do not advocate a curve, but rather merely adherence to higher standards, in which C would, once again, more or less represent par.

1. As I said in my now-infamous article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (January 6, p. B1), by rewarding mediocrity we discourage excellence. An A should be a goal worth striving for, not something to be taken for granted. In discounting the possibility that grading policy can be used to elicit better work, Ms. Reiter demonstrates beyond all doubt that she has never taught Harvard students. Here, as elsewhere, easy grading breeds apathy.

2. Inflation inherently devalues currency, whether it be grades or money. The admissions, director of a top-six law school told that cum or magna degrees no longer help applicants from Harvard get into his school. While he is certainly more knowledgeable about the honors situation here than the average employer, word is getting around. Eventually honors and good grades won't help you at all--but the lack thereof will stick out like a sore thumb. If the Harvard faculty implemented (and publicized) a strict grading policy, no one would forget how hard it is to get in here in the first place. A Harvard diploma would maintain its value, a good transcript would be an additional selling point.

3. By protecting students from failure we are not helping them--we are merely guaranteeing that they will be unable to cope with it when they encounter it later on. Failure, we seem to have forgotten, is a part of life. Getting a D or an E should not be a disgrace; it should be an experience a student learns to bounce back from.

4. Easy grading in art, literature, and history courses tends to draw lazy students to the humanitites while pushing those eager for a challenge towards the sciences and the social sciences. All areas of inquiry will suffer over the long terms, as students choose their fields according to their personalities, rather than their talents and interests. Because of the laws of supply and demand, rigorous humanities courses will continue to give way to easy ones.

5. Lax grading allows instructors--of all ranks--to slide by without doing much of anything: it's easy to give a paper an A and write no comments. But a stricter policy would force all teachers to examine and criticize work more carefully. Along the same lines, grade inflation makes it impossible to evaluate teachers accurately. Students tend to be unduly harsh with tough graders--who, ironically, tend to be the most dedicated and hardworking teachers.

6. Giving high grades for mediocre work fosters contempt for the instructor, the field, the institution, and academica in general.

7. If employers and graduate schools can't tell good students from bad on the basis of their transcripts, they'll have to pay increasing attention to extracurriculars. I find it downright frightening that a mediocre student who writes for The Crimson or serves on the undergraduate council might be accepted into law school rather than an excellent student who doesn't.

When I was a first year in college, I planned to study political science. I took a required full-year core course in literature, and the professor got into the annoying habit of giving me C's and D's on my papers. Finally, on the eighth and final essay of the year. I got an A-. I felt--rightly--that I had acquired a new skill, that I had learned to excel in an area in which I had been close to failure. Exulting in this experience, I chose to study literature. Of course, my instructor could have given me A's all along, thus depriving me of this feeling of genuine accomplishment, a sentiment many Harvard undergraduates will never know.

Many Harvard undergraduates (or, more precisely, their parents) are forking over up to $100,000 in exchange for a prestigious degree, a bunch of good grades, and not much else. Lots of students get by with shoddy work and lots of instructors get by with shoddy teaching. Meanwhile, the administration smiles and takes the money. If this cycle is to end, we all must make a concerted effort to replace the status quo with rigorous and concerned teaching, learning, and evaluation. Instead of resisting the fight against grade inflation, students should be leading the way. William Cole