'C-Minus' Strikes Again

After his controversial campaign last year against grade inflation, Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 has taken another step in his longtime effort to change the College’s grading patterns. Mansfield, who co-chairs the Government 97a tutorial—a required course for all sophomore government concentrators—is advising teaching fellows in the course that no more than one fifth of all students should receive a grade of A or A-. We strongly disapprove of Mansfield’s imposition of a grade quota on his captive audience of students, and we urge the government department to step in to oversee grading in the course.

Mansfield is right to fear the consequences of unrestricted grade inflation. Inflated grades allow for no true comparison among students, and because the majority of inflated grades are A’s and high B’s, the importance of each third of a grade becomes distorted.

Yet the grading system at a large university like Harvard will not change in a day, and while Mansfield’s goal may be worthy, his means are shortsighted. Grades are used for more than self-esteem—future employers, graduate school admissions officers and Phi Beta Kappa committees will not suspect that the unusually low grade on a student’s transcript was due to the professor’s ideological commitments rather than the student’s substandard work. Students seeking to meet fixed GPA cutoffs will have no opportunity to explain the discrepancy. Arbitrarily lowering the grades of all sophomore government concentrators from what they would have received for the same work from other departments (or even from other professors) will not stop grade inflation and will only punish innocent students.

Mansfield’s policy is also wholly inappropriate for a tutorial environment, in which close interaction among a small group of students creates an intimate learning experience. By imposing a quota on the number of A and A- grades, this collaborative environment will be shattered: instead of building from the knowledge of fellow classmates, students will instead compete for precious class time and participation points, and teaching fellows will be forced to invent distinctions between equally good papers that can’t both receive A’s. Mansfield could have chosen merely to toughen grading standards in the course; instead, his choice of a numeric quota upsets the principles of fairness on which his campaign against grade inflation is based.

Strangely, Mansfield seemed to recognize the reasons against punishing students for the sins of their professors last year in his elective course, Government 1061, “Modern Political Thought From Machiavelli to Nietzche,” a course chosen by students rather than required of them. In that class, students were given two grades—one representing what Mansfield felt they deserved, and another re-centered on average grading data obtained from the Office of the Registrar. At that time, Mansfield said that his conscience had tired of punishing the students that chose to take his course. However, now that Mansfield has been put in charge of a tutorial from which students cannot leave without switching concentrations, he has lost his scruples against what he describes as doing “for the whole department what is my individual choice for my own course.”

Without similar commitments from other departments, Mansfield’s quixotic charge against grade inflation will have little effect on College-wide grading policies. Yet it will have detrimental effects on the students who are unfortunately subject to his caprice. The government department should question whether to allow its irresponsible professor to prejudice the academic record of a full class of concentrators in order to soothe his wounded conscience—and should intervene if necessary to ensure that students’ transcripts don’t become an outlet for Mansfield’s political crusade.