DISSENTING OPINION:No Value-Added

Talk to anyone in the world of business schools today, and you’ll find the hottest topic revolves around A’s and B’s. During the dot-com boom, some schools, including the Harvard Business School (HBS), prohibited students from releasing their grades to employers. This arrangement helps both parties by lowering grade pressure on students, contributing to a collegial, cooperative environment that HBS has adopted as central to its academic mission. Recently, the administration of HBS has expressed interest in making it “optional” for students to release their grades. This interest must not blossom into policy. Making grade release optional will not solve any of HBS's current problems with academic rigor. Moreover, the administration should be censured for trying to ram through this change without the input of HBS students.

Critics of HBS and other schools with the same practice have questioned the schools’ academic rigor, saying that business school classes mean nothing without grade accountability. From their perspective, the cooperative environment that the no-release policy fosters is outweighed by its detrimental effects on academic motivation and excellence. That said it’s hard to see how releasing grades to employers would fix HBS’s problems. Since 65 to 75 percent of the school gets a grade of “II,” and only the bottom ten percent a legitimately bad grade of “III,” the only students who would really be more motivated would be those bottom ten-percenters. The forced curve at HBS effectively dooms the vast majority of the student body to relative mediocrity. The curve is the real source of student apathy, not the whims of potential employers.

That is not to say the grading system should be changed. Critics of both the grading system and the no-release policy simply have warped views of what a business education should be about. HBS uses an all-case study curriculum that stresses cooperation and group achievement. The school is also an invaluable place for students to gain useful connections for their future careers. To focus on individual achievement instead of the many intangibles that HBS offers outside of academics undermines HBS’s stated academic mission.

Clearly, there are good arguments on both sides about the no-release policy. And were HBS only proposing to adopt an optional release policy, the debate would be less heated. Student bodies at the business schools of Stanford and the University of Chicago have done end-runs around official policy by banding together to enforce no-release policies over the official optional release policies of their schools. Since students own their grades, as the Staff note, they should be able to do with them what they want. HBS administrators, however, are saying that if this optional release policy is adopted, it will supersede any actions by students. This means that HBS, which needed student support to push through the no-release policy back in