Let Sleeping Grades Lie

As you probably (hopefully) know another exam period has just come and gone. And, as occurs only twice a year, all Harvard students are worried about the same thing--grades.

Aside from wanting them to be higher than they already are (if you don't fit into this category you are either a deranged upper Group I student or flunking out) the major concern that has recently emerged is grade inflation.

Everyone seems to think that the grades have exploded at major universities and that something should be done about it; everyone except students presently enrolled at those universities. The grade inflation "crisis" has been fed by the media's recent obsession, coupled with the rantings of individuals like Keenan Professor of Government Harvard C(-). Mansfield '53. As a result, most people who see grades from top schools, including recruiters and employers, assume that they are artificially high.

Harvard has been anxious to change its reputation to ensure that no one thinks the number one University in the country is too easy. The recent trend, for those of you who have not yet been frustrated by it, has been against grade inflation. What this means, no one is really sure--but one thing is certain: it is hurting Harvard students.

First, all those people crying for grade reform at Harvard should look at the situation and realize its not that bad. No matter what Mansfield says, high grades are not that easy to get at this school--As still require significant work. On the other end of the scale, getting Cs is now harder in most classes than it used to be and Bs can generally be counted on. But, it's not those Bs you hear complaints about, it's the number of As.

When I was a first-year I heard about all these courses that were supposedly "guts," such as "Heroes for Zeroes" and "Jesus and the Easy Life." Well, I soon discovered I could not find a class that had a low work-load and an easy grading scale. The moral of this story is that you can avoid work in a class at Harvard, but its virtually impossible to have a work-gut be an easy grade too. (If you find one let me know.) It seems Harvard has been trying to remove the really easy courses, and others, like Heroes, have begun to grade more harshly.

But while you can find courses with low work-loads, I have never found a true "grade-gut" here. People talk about them, but there always seems to be a catch. If you don't believe me, try enrolling in the next one you hear about--trust me, you will be disappointed.

Beware looking at the grade lists to see if the average grade for a course is high. Almost universally you will find out a lot of work is required by the class. Some critics believe that high grades in any class are bad, but if a lot of the students do the work extremely well they deserve the good grades that cannot be provided by a bell-curve. And if the average grade here is higher than at Pickyourstate University, who cares? At Harvard we are competing against the best students in the country--any of whom could go to that school and get near perfect GPAs.

When you leave the Peoples' Republic of Cambridge and venture into the real world, those looking at your transcript might not realize the level of competition you faced at this school. The average grades at the top schools should be higher than at other schools, since the students are that much more qualified on average.

Sure, many classes do not give out Cs, but the students here should not be punished for taking a course with smart people. Grades are competitive enough at this school. If you reinstitute the C as a regular grade (as opposed to the equivalent of an F) students will be scared off from ever experimenting with courses outside their best field. It is not as if the university does not already make a big distinction between As and Bs by having a jump on the 15 point grade-point average scale.

Harvard always claims that grades are secondary to learning. While that may be true in one sense, what Mansfield et al. fail to understand is that students will not take the chance to learn something new if they know they could do the work and still get hammered by a bad grade. People can say "grades don't matter" all they want to, but we all know that's not true if you want to do something after graduation.

Critics of the present Harvard grade system always end up lamenting that the grades here are higher than they used to be. Well, what is wrong with that if the students here today are more qualified than their predecessors?

If one listens to our own admissions office every new class admitted to this place is the most qualified in the entire history of the institution. While we allow the office their bit of hyperbole, the fact remains the classes admitted today cannot help being more qualified that those of 40 years ago.

In those days Harvard was mainly a regional school, drawing the majority of its students from New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, with no sizable minority population. Today, Harvard draws students from all over the country, the world and all ethnic backgrounds. With a pool of applicants larger that ever before and with so many more areas from which to draw, it would only be logical for Harvard to enroll a better class than 40 years ago. And if the class is that much better, shouldn't the grades reflect it?

The most worrisome aspects of the present trends are the steps faculty and administrators have taken to try to deflate grades. When Harvard professors actively try to do something about grade inflation it ends up, not surprisingly, hurting students.

While some departments are renowned for being easy graders, like English or Economics, others, like philosophy, are considered anything but easy. So, when departments receive pressure to lower grades, it might not help the situation. When pressure is applied across the board, those in departments which are graded more harshly will be hurt even more.

Also, when professors receive pressure to change the grading in the class, they often make changes with the sole purpose of lowering the average grade. As a result, students who do extremely well and deserve a certain grade by reasonable standards might not receive it because the professor wants to make the class harder.

Many proposals to combat grade inflation have been tossed around, but the only one that is currently being considered is the addition of classes' mean grades to transcripts. The proposal, however, has been much criticized and stalled before the Committee on Undergraduate Education.

Such a proposal, as critics have already argued, would make classes more competitive because it would be in every student's interest to have others do worse. It would also distort reality because grades would be evaluated compared to how the rest of the class did. While in large classes this might prove useful, in smaller ones where the entire class may have worked exceptionally hard it could easily devalue hard work. One cannot evaluate the rigors of a course by just looking at numbers.

If any form of unified grade deflation is ever instituted at Harvard, it will definitely hurt students. Any move that lowers the grades across the College will make graduates look less attractive to outside observers, giving other top schools' graduates an advantage for jobs or graduate schools.

Whatever the problems of grade inflation may be, the solutions offered at this point are much worse. Grades should be a secondary part of any student's experience at Harvard, and the present system allows that situation to occur.