Abolishing Pass-Fail Won’t Fix Gen Eds

Harvard’s General Education program has plenty of problems. Its grading basis isn’t one of them.

Since 2018, Harvard College students have had the option to take one of their four General Education courses on a pass-fail basis. Starting with the Class of 2029, that may no longer be possible. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has expressed broad support for a proposal to eliminate the pass-fail option, and will hold a final vote at an upcoming meeting.

The FAS is right that Gen Eds need a revamp. But the effort to eliminate pass-fail hardly scratches the surface of the program’s shortcomings — indeed, it may even make things worse. Instead, the FAS should make Gen Eds worth our while by broadening their scope and improving their pedagogy.

The co-chair of the Gen Ed program suggested that axing the pass-fail option would reinstate Gen Eds as the “crown jewel of a student’s education.”

Many Gen Eds may certainly be gems — but they’re a ways away from being crown jewels. For most students, it’s our concentrations that lie at the forefront of our academic lives, regardless of the grading basis of other requirements.

And even if Gen Eds have faded too far into the background of the College curriculum, we’d wager that’s more a product of their content than their grading. These classes’ emphasis on narrow topics, rather than foundational disciplines, don’t encourage students to treat them as academically indispensable.

The pass-fail proposal would only intensify that dynamic, discouraging students from taking challenging Gen Eds that genuinely interest them. Without a pass-fail option, students will likely flock to classes that guarantee better grades, regardless of how fulfilling they find them.

And if the University is concerned that too many students see their four Gen Eds as “a bothersome set of requirements,” it’s hard to see how changing the grading basis of one will do much to change that.

Eliminating the pass-fail option does nothing to solve the real problems facing the Gen Ed program. Instead, Harvard must improve the courses themselves so that students want to invest in them.

While courses on topics like NeuroAI and Grimm’s Fairy Tales may be fascinating, they appeal to a relatively limited audience. Rather than exclusively spotlighting a hyper-specific content area, Gen Ed offerings could also provide students with broad introductions to disciplines — think English, math, history, or science.

The pass-fail proposal appears to be part of a larger effort to make Harvard more rigorous, in the wake of an FAS report raising concerns around the decreasing prioritization of academics. And while efforts to recenter academics at the College are welcome, we’d do well not to overstate the issue. Q Guide data analyzed in a recent op-ed suggests that Harvard students still spend far more time on coursework than the national average.

So if the FAS wants students to be more academically engaged in Gen Eds and beyond, there are better places to start — like stronger attendance requirements, no-laptop policies, improved teaching, and designating a broader range of courses to fulfill the Gen Ed requirement.

We’re glad Harvard has caught onto the deficiencies of General Education. But they still have more work to do to find a lasting cure.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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