Feb. 14, 2006
Up, Up and Away
Grade inflation is alive and well at Harvard University, but despite some high profile unhappiness from a long-time critic, many students and professors aren’t sure there’s cause for concern.
The mean grade (figured on a four-point scale) at Harvard increased every year from 1985 — when the average grade equated to a 3.164 — to 2000, before dipping from 3.405 in the 2000-1 academic year to 3.389 the following year. The dip came after a Boston Globe series detailed grade inflation at the Ivy League’s most recognizable name. In order to bring accolades for Harvard students down from the stratosphere, the percentage of students in a class who could graduate with honors was reduced from around 90 percent to 50 percent.
But according to a letter that Benedict H. Gross, a math professor and dean of Harvard College, sent to faculty members last month, the grade dip was nothing more than a tiny pothole on a road that has continued its course.
The 3.389 average grade in 2000-1 was followed by 3.412, 3.415, and, in the 2004-5 academic year, 3.424, with about half of all grades A’s or A-‘s. Gross’s letter says that “grade compression continues to be a concern,” but it isn’t near the top of the docket for some professors. “I’m not a big advocate of the view that this is a critical problem,” said Harry R. Lewis, a professor of computer science, dean of the college from 1995-2003, and author of Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education, which will be published in May and discusses grade inflation. “I’m unaware of any studies that establish that education is improved when grading is tougher.”
Lewis pointed out that grading, though it makes for good headlines, isn’t the first thing faculty members want to talk about. “Grading is the thing professors like least about their jobs, worse than writing grant applications,” Lewis said. He added that the only mention he could recall in Harvard’s recently completed three-year curricular review of grade inflation was an early mention that grading can inhibit academic exploration.
One of the major themes of the final report by the Harvard College Curricular Review’s Committee on General Education is a push to increase the flexibility students have in choosing courses. “Tough grading would not be part of that agenda,” Lewis said, adding that he thinks there are much more pressing issues, like making sure students get adequate academic advising.
One vocal critic of grade inflation, Harvey C. Mansfield, a Harvard government professor, decided after receiving Gross’s letter to return this semester to a practice he used in 2001 for one of his courses. Mansfield doesn’t want to give lower grades than the rest of the college, possibly deterring students from his course, but he does want students to have honest evaluations, so he gave out two grades. In Mansfield’s “true grades,” which are shared only with the student and teaching assistants, he awards 5 percent of the class an A, 15 percent an A-, and 30 percent a B+. For what he calls the “ironic grades,” the ones that go on transcripts, 50 percent of students get an A or A-, consistent with the grade inflation elsewhere at Harvard.
Mansfield stopped using the two grade system shortly after he began, on the assumption that the administration and faculty members were going to tackle grade inflation, but Gross’s letter proved to him that faculty members have not stepped up, so back came the “ironic grade.”
Mansfield thinks that the “common good suffers” because of grade inflation. “It’s not good for students to be flattered and professors to be flatterers,” he said, adding that giving out A’s also shows that faculty members have a low regard for their material, which is bad for faculty morale. Still, Mansfield doesn’t expect instant change. “It’s hard to find a constituency for doing something about grade inflation,” he said. “Students like it, parents like it, faculty members like it because it keeps students off their back, administrators like it when parents are happy.”
The Harvard Business School decided in December to begin disclosing student’s grades to employers. Previously, students were forbidden from disclosing their marks to potential employers, and employers forbidden from asking. The move has drawn scathing reviews from students.
Other institutions, where grade inflation has generated significant discussion, have tried various solutions. Princeton University put a quota on the percentage of grades that could be A’s, and Columbia University began several years ago to put the percentage of students who got an A or A- in a given course on the transcript next to a student’s grade.
Brian Powell, a professor of sociology at Indiana University and one of the authors of a section on grade inflation in The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: The Contribution of Research Universities, isn’t sure that grade inflation is a big problem, or that students aren’t actually getting better.
Powell said he’s not convinced that good grades show that professors are kowtowing to students who will evaluate them. “To my knowledge, it has not been shown” that institutions that emphasize teaching have more grade inflation, Powell said. As far as the quality of students, Powell said adding women to the mix has raised the bar. “Women do better in classes, so when you add them in” at institutions that were typically male, like Harvard, “grades go up, and then the selectivity of the males goes up. You keep hearing how it’s so much more difficult to get in. If that’s true, you’d expect grades to go up.”
Irene Choi, a Harvard psychology student and member of the Undergraduate Council, said in an e-mail that she’d “like to think” of grade inflation as “a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a student is awarded more A’s, this will bolster his confidence significantly which in turn could actually improve his performance in other courses.” Choi wondered whether her experience would have been more “enjoyable” and “easier” in the humanities, where grade inflation is presumed to be rampant. At the same time, she said she sometimes thinks, “at least I’m not pre-med,” in reference to the commonly held belief that grade inflation has helped physical science students less than others.
Lewis said he’d like to see departments come together and get people on the same page with regard to grading, and Gross has said he will initiate talks about grade inflation, but did not want it to overlap with the curricular review. Still, Lewis thinks grading in general, as it is practiced, is about as precise as Dick Cheney with a shotgun. At least in the natural sciences, he said, “we keep exact point totals, we then chunk that into letter grades, so we throw away information,” Lewis explained. “Then we send that to the registrar who tries to recreate precision by making a [grade point average] of 3.2754. This is completely absurd as a way to do any kind of measurement.”
Besides, he noted, a long history of grade inflation hasn’t quite brought Harvard to its knees. Lewis said grades were introduced to Harvard in 1886, and it took the faculty until 1896 to decide “that standards had gone to Hell,” Lewis said.