GPA and Intellectual Risk

Harvard students are nervous wrecks. In order to get here, we’ve had to keep careful tabs on our accomplishments, always making sure that our soccer trophies were a little bit bigger, our papers a little bit longer, and of course, our GPAs a little bit higher than our competition’s. No wonder we’re kind of edgy.

Unfortunately, that instinct didn’t magically disappear the moment we opened our acceptance letters. As relentlessly future-oriented overachievers, we can’t help but look onward to the next challenge. Law schools, medical schools, Ph.D. programs: Options like these require that we spend our four years at Harvard just about as stressed as we were in high school.

So while Harvard students should be spending their time taking intellectual risks and picking at will from among the course offerings of the world’s premier university faculty, many choose instead to gravitate toward those classes where they can feel assured of a high grade.

At the very least, the prospect of a low grade often dissuades Harvard students from taking classes they otherwise might. The overall affect of this GPA-mania on the quality of our undergraduate education is regrettable.

There is, however, something the College can do about it. It’s called the pass/fail option, and yes, it already exists. But the way in which pass/fail is implemented stands in the way of its most promising potential benefits.

If the College wants students to use the pass/fail option to take intellectual risks, then it should follow in the footsteps of Columbia and Dartmouth by making one minor change in the system: Once we’ve decided to make a class pass/fail, the College should give us one more chance to change our minds.

Jeffrey Wolcowitz, senior lecturer in economics and former associate dean of Harvard College, highlighted the ways in which student behavior has nullified the intended effect of pass/fail. “Students are so concerned about their transcript that in many cases they’re reluctant to take courses pass/fail…and therefore don’t avail themselves of the option that we provide for them to take risks.”

As it stands, students can only make a course pass/fail before Add/Drop Day, only five weeks into the semester. In most cases, this makes students choose between a normal grading scheme and the pass/fail option before they’ve had a chance to be evaluated even once by the professor, TF, or preceptor. The decision, once made, is final.

Students are forced into an agonizing dilemma: risk getting a bad grade, or get locked into the certainty of a not-so-impressive-looking P on the transcript. In most cases, as Wolcowitz said, students avoid making that choice at all.

What can Harvard do then to revive the original purpose behind the pass/fail option? The answer is simple: make pass/fail reversible. At Dartmouth and Columbia, pass/fail students get the opportunity at the end of the course to turn their Ps into grades, if they so desire.

This minor change transforms the pass/fail option from a preemptive admission of defeat—one which most overachievers are unwilling to settle for—into a sort of grade insurance. If, as usual, they pulled it out in the end, they could always cash in their Ps for shinier, more respectable-looking As.

In all other respects, the pass/fail system would remain entirely the same. The College could still impose a limit of one pass/fail class a semester, and professors could still exercise their right to disallow pass/fail students in their classes. For those students who use the pass/fail option to avoid doing work—and we all know they exist—the ability to reverse their decision would only add to the incentive to strive for success. (Allowing the reverse, that is for students to change grades into Ps, would weaken the incentive for success).

This new system would encourage students to take the intellectual risks they’ve been nervously avoiding for so long. Rather than reinforce our nervous tendencies, the reversible pass/fail option might even help us in an area in which we all deserve a big, collective F: relaxation.


Andrew C. Miller ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Matthews Hall.