A-Range Grades Rise for 2nd Year

Three years after national media and Harvard faculty scrutinized reports of grade inflation at the College, the number of A-range grades for the 2003-2004 academic year rose for the second year in a row.

According to data released in January by Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71, A-range grades climbed half a percentage point to 48.3 percent last year from 47.8 percent the previous year. A-range grades represented 46.8 percent in 2001-2002, and 48.7 percent in 2000-2001, the year that prompted the investigation of grade inflation.

The mean grade in undergraduate courses also saw a slight increase, up to 3.42 from a 3.41 the previous year.

Following a 2001 Boston Globe article reporting that 91 percent of graduating students received honors, Harvard came under fire for its inflationary grading tactics.

After extensive discussion, the faculty capped the overall number of honors at 60 percent, voted to switch grade point averages from a 15- to a four-point scale, and formally committed to enforcing more vigilant grading practices.

The honors cap goes into effect for this year’s graduating class.

Grades of “A” dipped for the next year, with the number of “A” grades dropping from 23.6 percent in 2000-2001 to 22.2 percent in 2001-2002. Grades of “A” rose again last year to 23.1 percent.

Faculty of Arts and Sciences spokesman Robert P. Mitchell said that the Dean’s Office did not have a more extensive breakdown among College divisions and across class size available for the 2003-2004 academic year.

Grade inflation has been the target of administrators at several elite universities.

Last spring, Princeton faculty voted to implement a non-binding 35 percent cap on the number of A-level grades distributed in each undergraduate department. The proposal, to be phased in over the course of three years, took effect this fall.

The number of A-range grades given at Princeton, like at Harvard, hovered around 47 percent for the 2002-2003 academic year. And according to a study conducted by Princeton Dean of the College Nancy W. Malkiel, 11 top schools including the Ivy League universities, Stanford University, and MIT, have awarded 44 to 55 percent of grades in the A-range in recent years.

Baird Junior Professor of Science Gary Feldman, who has expressed concern about the issue in the past, said the data did not surprise him.

“I don’t think our grading patterns have changed appreciably,” Feldman said. “I don’t think we’ve done anything that could cause them to change substantially, other than a little bit of jawboning,”

Feldman added that with the curricular review in full gear, he thought that the issue of grade inflation has become less of a priority.

“Once we finish the curricular review, it might be worth thinking about the problem again,” he said.

But Cabot Professor of American Literature and Languages and former Dean of Undergraduate Education Lawrence Buell cautioned that the issue of grade inflation, while important, should never top the list of any serious educator’s priorities.

Buell suggested that to address the issue of grade inflation, transcripts could reflect how a student performed relative to other undergraduates in the same course.

“I would not favor a requirement of this sort but rather the inclusion of another line on the transcript indicating into which quintile or quartile the student’s grade fell relative to all the grades given in the course,” he wrote in an e-mail. “That would instantly put the meaning of (say) a Harvard A- in context.”

Feldman proposed another alternative to ameliorate a grading problem he identified as compression—a narrowing of the range between high and low grades, especially as more are squeezed toward the top of the grade spectrum.

“If one is serious about wanting to reduce the amount of grade compression, then one way of doing it would be to simply go to a completely new grading system,” Feldman said. “In other words instead of A through E, it might be 1 through 10.”

Redefining the grading scale, Feldman said, would force faculty to rethink their grading practices.

—Staff writer Margaret W. Ho can be reached at mwho@fas.harvard.edu.