A recent article in the Harvard Crimson has generated substantially more buzz on the national scale than is common for
college newspaper fare. That’s because
of its subject, a 25-page report authored by Dean of Undergraduate Education
Amanda Claybaugh regarding rampant grade inflation at the university. “Our grading,” she writes, “no longer
performs its primary functions and is undermining our academic mission.”
Certainly the rapid and apparently inexorable rise in
average GPA scores threatens to make grades obsolete, if we haven’t reached
that stage already. There has been a lot
written about the situation over, well, about as long as Curmie has been paying
attention, which is to say when he started his own collegiate career over a
half-century ago. There are manifold
causes of the phenomenon: from a political attempt to help men retain their
student deferments in the Vietnam era to an over-reliance on student course
evaluations for decisions about merit pay, retention, and tenure to concerns
about student well-being during COVID.
Increased emphasis in secondary schools on standardized
testing and the accompanying teach-to-the-test mentality also contributes, as
students arrive at college having memorized a few names, dates, and formulas,
but without having developed the thinking skills required for advanced study in
any academic discipline, especially those in which personal interpretation is
foregrounded. Curmie has often said he
doesn’t care whether you think Sam or Hally is the protagonist in “Master
Harold”… and the boys; he cares about the thought process that gets you
there. (And it had better be more than
simply parroting what some teacher told you.)
There’s a good article on the gradeinflation.com website that
looks into both the statistics and the causes.
Curmie encourages you to at least glance through it, Gentle Reader. But keep in mind that the information
included there is over a decade old, and things have gotten far worse,
especially but not exclusively during COVID.
How bad is it? Well,
there are literally dozens of articles out there, examining a lot of universities,
but let’s stick with Harvard, where the problem seems to be worse than anywhere
else. (Curmie devoutly hopes this is
true, because if any university’s grading integrity is more compromised than this,
Curmie will run screaming into the night, never to be seen again.) Over half of the grades at Harvard are now an
“A,” and from what Curmie can decipher, that means an “A” as opposed to “A-range,”
which would include A-minuses. And get
this: the cutoff for summa cum laude status is now 3.989, meaning that a single B-plus or a pair of A-minuses dooms a
Harvard student from getting summa.
Ah, but there a few fewer 4.0s in the most recent class than in the
previous year’s; this is being touted as a sign of progress. Sigh.
Ultimately, of course, whereas there are a lot of excuses
reasons for grade inflation, they all ultimately boil down to the same thing: the
faculty. According to Claybaugh, “Nearly
all faculty expressed serious concern… They perceive there to be a misalignment
between the grades awarded and the quality of student work.” Well, they could always… you know… give
grades that corrected that “misalignment.”
True, there are pressures to keep passing out “A” grades like candy on
Hallowe’en, especially in an era in which students are perceived as consumers
rather than clients. But grades are a
professor’s responsibility, and a university that truly cares about the integrity
of the process would encourage faculty to be a little more conscientious, not
merely in words but in actions.
All of this (except a couple of specifics) has been a standard
topic of conversation for a long time. Curmie
has written about it several times, most recently in a discussion of course evaluations, and he’s had dozens of conversations with colleagues from around the
campus and around the country. There’s
one proposal from the Harvard administration he wants to talk about in a moment,
but first, let’s look at Harvard students’ reaction to the suggestion that
perhaps not all of them are the best in the class.
When Curmie started college many years ago, part of the orientation
process was telling us (repeatedly!) that over 90% of us were in the top 10% of
our high school classes, and that it was mathematically impossible for us all
to do so in college, but being in the middle of a class at an Ivy League school
was nothing to be ashamed of. Our
parents all got a letter with the same information. One suspects that Harvard does roughly the
same thing with their freshmen.
Ah, but the weeping and wailing from Cambridge drowned out
the sounds of the jets at Logan Airport.
A follow-up piece in the Harvard Crimson described the horrors associated with requiring even better than average work not to get an A. One student described the
report as “soul-crushing”: “The whole entire day, I was crying. I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just
sobbing in bed because I felt like I try so hard in my classes, and my grades
aren’t even the best.” Another worried
about her ongoing ability to “enjoy [her] classes.” A lacrosse player whined that “it’s not
really accounting for what we have to do on a day to day basis, and how many
hours we’re putting into our team, our bodies, and then also school.”
Way to play to the stereotype, guys! Nothing says “snowflake” louder than this
drivel. You might end up with a 3.8
instead of a 4.0? And that crushes your soul? Get a damned life. The chances are, of course, that these
students never really had to work very hard in high school to get the grades that would get them admitted to an Ivy League school. (Curmie didn’t.) And the competition is tougher now.
You don’t, or at least shouldn’t, go to Harvard for the extracurriculars;
you go to get a Harvard-level education.
And prioritizing academics, at least somewhat, is, well, mandatory. When Curmie started at Dartmouth, the cutoff
for induction into the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society was 3.4. Curmie figured he could write and edit for the
college newspaper, help out at the Forensic Union (i.e., the debate
team), work on shows essentially non-stop, play intramural sports, etc., as
long as he kept that GPA. (They changed
the standard for ΦΒΚ in his junior (?) year, so Curmie didn’t end up getting
in, but he shifted his attention to being magna cum laude, and achieved
that goal.) You can do things other than
study and still get decent grades.
The whole “I killed myself all throughout high school to try
and get into this school” argument (yeah, that’s a quote, too), suggesting that
the work should be easier now, is beyond stupid. It’s the equivalent of an all-conference high
school basketball player complaining about not being all-conference in college
although he averages 2 points a game, can’t guard anyone his own size, and has
more turnovers than assists.
One argument seems, superficially, to have some validity: if Harvard gets
tougher on grades and equivalent universities don’t, it places Harvard students
at a competitive disadvantage.
Ultimately, however, this line of reasoning really isn’t very persuasive
at all. A Harvard degree means something—perhaps
less than it once did, but still something—but good grades there are now
meaningless from an institution where an A- GPA is below average.
Curmie is reminded of a piece he wrote 15 years ago about the efforts by Loyola Law School to help its
students be competitive, namely by simply raising GPAs by a third of a letter
grade across the board, including instituting a new de facto A++
grade. Yes, really. But the thing is, the little ploy got a lot
of attention, thereby diminishing the prestige of a Loyola degree and doing
little to actually help students. Here’s
what Curmie wrote:
When I was applying to PhD programs, I was looking at one school that said something like “generally, we require a 3.5 GPA in your undergraduate work.” My undergrad GPA was 3.46 or something like that; it was considerably better in my major, but I didn’t meet the stated criteria. Still, there was that word “generally” in their statement. So I called them up. Their response, paraphrased, was “You have a 3.46 from Dartmouth? Of course we’re interested in you!” That’s what Loyola students used to have going for them: the reputation that a Loyola grad, relative to alums from a different school, was better than his/her GPA. Now the entire place is—or at least ought to be—a laughing stock. Oh, what a brave new world.
Harvard didn’t learn that lesson, apparently. And, especially in light of the New York
Times article a few weeks ago, the world knows just how little a good grade from Harvard now
means.
There’s one more item to discuss before we get to the putain
de stupide. One of the arguments in
favor of, shall we say, excessive grade generosity is that “For the past decade
or so, the College has been exhorting faculty to remember that some students
arrive less prepared for college than others.”
If a particular student needs remedial work in a single subject area,
that’s understandable. For example, Curmie
had plenty of advisees who could handle all of the university’s general
education requirements… except math.
The same phenomenon works in the opposite direction, as
well, of course. Years ago, Curmie taught a
variation on the theme of English Composition at Cornell University
when he was a grad student there. One of
his students was, from all accounts, a brilliant physicist. But, curiously enough, he didn’t write as well
in his third language (he was Korean; his second language was Chinese) as did
the native English speakers in the College of Arts and Sciences at an Ivy
League university.
Accommodating that student to the extent of dragging him
kicking and screaming to a passing grade is one thing; giving him an A for
barely passable work would have been something else. More recently, Curmie has had a handful of
students whose native language is Spanish.
All of them were learning English even as they were also learning Play
Analysis. All of them passed; all of
them deserved to pass, without needing any accommodations, because they
did the work, and their ideas were good even if they sometimes struggled with
writing in their second language. One,
in particular, went on to become a star pupil in subsequent courses and got a
Master’s degree from a quite reputable university.
But if a student is “less prepared” across the board, that
person shouldn’t be at Harvard. One
suspects, and you can be certain that the right-wing press will be asserting this,
that we’re talking about what could be called DEI admissions. There are certainly advantages to a diverse
student body, but it does no one—not the student, not the other students, not
the university, not the nation—any good to admit someone who just can’t cut it. To this extent, the Trump administration has
a point.
Ah, but it’s time for the grand finale. You may recall, Gentle Reader, that Curmie described the part of the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education that demands
that universities return tuition money to students who drop out in their first
semester as “a contender for the stupidest fucking idea in the history of
stupid fucking ideas.” Curmie spoke too
soon, as there is now a new leader in the clubhouse, a proposal so blazingly
inane it could only come from a university administrator, and probably one at
Harvard.
Get this: one of the proposals, apparently initiated by Claybaugh
and sent to a faculty committee for discussion, is to allow a limited number of
A+ grades (Harvard’s best grade at present is an A), thereby “distinguishing
the very best students.” You can’t make
this shit up, Gentle Reader. The way to
fight grade inflation is to further inflate grades. Curmie might have thought that a better
course of action to curb grade inflation might be to give students whose work
is very good but not exemplary an A- or (God forbid!) perhaps even a
B. Curmie clearly was never cut out for
administration, at least at Harvard.
Harvard has brought this on itself. There are other universities that are, no
doubt, almost as bad, but this stuff surpasses credulity. The pampered little snowflakes who make up at
least a good share of the student body should be scorned, but they’re still
post-adolescents and might be salvageable.
The administration and faculty, however, are beyond hope of redemption.
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