Gross: Grades Have Not Risen

Addressing parents on campus for Junior Parents Weekend, Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 said Friday that grades “have not inflated tremendously” over the past eight years and that the issue was not a major concern.

“I haven’t pressed too hard on this issue since I’ve been dean,” Gross told parents in a nearly full Sanders Theatre. “One reason was that I felt it was more important that the Faculty concentrate more on what we were teaching, what the curriculum was for the students, what we were trying to have them learn, than how we were evaluating them.”

The median grade point average for students is about 3.4, a number that has not changed much over the past eight years, Gross said in response to a parent’s question about grade inflation.

Despite the attention given to grading in the past, Gross said that he did not want “to use grades in any way to pit [students] against each other.”

“My feeling is that grades are most useful to give students some idea of how they are doing in their courses,” he said. “Our students are going to do fine when they get out of here, regardless of what is certified on their transcripts.”

Some Faculty members may choose to address grade inflation after the completion of the curricular review, Gross added, but he downplayed the possibility that grading policies might change.

“I would welcome a discussion in the Faculty at the end of the curricular review, but I’m not convinced that we will end up changing our position,” he said.

Three-Hundredth Anniversary University Professor Laurel T. Ulrich, who is one of three professors in charge of setting agendas for Faculty meetings, said in an e-mailed statement that she had not heard any discussion of grading policies for several years.

Echoing Gross’s comments, she wrote that “I think most people are more interested in how to encourage deeper and better learning. Grades are one motivator, but not always the best one.”

In addition to answering questions from parents on the Curricular Review, the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative, undergraduate attention, and expansion into Allston, Gross highlighted the changes the College has undergone in the time since current juniors matriculated as freshmen. These changes include the development of secondary fields, the delay in concentration choice, and the creation of a peer-advising program and student spaces such as the Lamont Library Café, the Harvard College Women’s Center, the Student Organization Center at Hilles, and the soon-to-open Cambridge Queen’s Head Pub.

“This has been a period, while your children have been here, of great motion for an ancient institution,” Gross said.

—Samuel P. Jacobs contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Brittney L. Moraski can be reached at bmoraski@fas.harvard.edu.