Harvard’s A+ for Absurdity

The new report from Harvard University documenting the extent of grade inflation at the Ivy League school is alarming enough on its own. Yet what arrested our attention was the remedy proposed to address the plague of promiscuous As. Harvard suggests “permitting faculty to award a limited number of A+s in each course,” on the theory that this “would increase the information our grades provide by distinguishing the very best students.”John Harvard would have fallen out of his socks. The university that bears his name thinks it can cure grade inflation not by deflating grades but by letting professors continue to give out “As with abandon for mediocre work” with the option to assign an “A+ for work that’s slightly above mediocre,” The Editors’ Ira Stoll reckons. “What are they going to do in five years, convene another committee to add a grade of A++?”We wouldn’t rule it out. Just consider the numbers laid bare in the 25-page report: More than 60 percent of grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates are now A’s — up from 40 percent a decade ago and less than 25 percent two decades ago. The average GPA has charted a similar trajectory. As one Harvard Crimson writer observed: “Looking at a graph of student GPAs since 1889 is sort of like looking at a graph of Harvard’s endowment: It only goes up.” What drives this debasement? To start, the report points to the College’s course evaluation system. Professors employed by Harvard, worried that negative reviews may impact their standing in the university and hinder their future job prospects, are incentivized to go easy on their students. At the same time, students have exerted their own “increasingly litigious” pressure on instructors to grade generously.Then there is the contribution of the College itself, which has for the past decade encouraged faculty to “remember that some students arrive less prepared for college than others.” University administrators have also called for compassion regarding students’ struggles with “imposter syndrome” or difficult family situations. “Unsure how best to support their students,” the report concludes, “many have simply become more lenient.”The consequence of their coddling is evidenced in a separate Harvard report which found that students will often skip class or arrive unprepared, yet “rampant grade inflation allows them to coast through anyway.” That means, the Times summarized, “many students graduate without having benefited from talking very much with their teachers and peers, and they stay stuck in ideological bubbles, unwilling or unable to engage with challenging ideas.”The Trump administration has picked up on the issue, offering funding incentives to universities that sign a compact committing to, among other provisions, “grade integrity and the use of defensible standards for whether students are achieving their goals.” Since Harvard has been unable to rein in its own incentives toward grade inflation, it could do well to buy into the Trump Administration’s efforts. It might work better than the A+.

Harvard’s A+ for Absurdity

Harvard’s A+ for Absurdity

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