Harvard students “essentially a lazy bunch,” and not “that smart.”

November 12, 2001 5:37 AM

Harvard students “essentially a lazy bunch,” and not “that smart.” Whatever. At least they have the best friggin footbal team.
posted by Voyageman (41 comments total)

Of course, this perception goes back to Teddy Kennedy's undergraduate days.
posted by MAYORBOB at 6:13 AM on November 12, 2001

I've always thought that university was an easy ride. Getting there's the difficult part. I learned FA at uni. All my studying was done at A'level (exams at age 16-18). AND getting into prestige colleges like Oxford and Cambridge (and I guess Harvard) are often about playing the system and applying for unpopular colleges and courses rather than actual intelligence (that's my bitterness and resentment talking).
posted by Summer at 6:13 AM on November 12, 2001 [1 favorite]

Damned Harvard students are so lazy they can't even spell "football". ;-)
posted by adampsyche at 6:16 AM on November 12, 2001

I've heard of Gaelic Football, Australian Rules Football, American Football, Canadian Football, Association Football and Rugby Football, but I've never heard of "friggin' Football". It sounds a lot more fun. What are the rules?
posted by salmacis at 6:20 AM on November 12, 2001

i heard a story from a fellow math grad student about a TA for Calculus at Harvard finally losing it in front of his freshman section: "Whoever told you you were smart?!"

Of course, he lost his teaching job. But truthfully, I've met many of the high-SAT crowd and been extremely unimpressed by their lack of intellectual curiousity as well as their complete inability to reason beyond answering homework questions.
posted by meep at 6:27 AM on November 12, 2001 [1 favorite]

One of my profs (at a state university) had a daughter who was a TA at Harvard. She wasn't permitted to give a grade below a B. If a student was performing below that, it was the teacher's responsibility to give them easier work or alternate assignments, anything at all to make them look as if they were somehow contributing something towards their good grade.
posted by fotzepolitic at 9:04 AM on November 12, 2001 [1 favorite]

Yeah! Lazy bunch of fuckers at Harvard. They don't even have a good hockey team!

(go Cornell! this weekend we'll beat Harvard and Brown, on our way to an ECAC championship)
posted by chacal at 9:11 AM on November 12, 2001

What's a 'TA'?
posted by adrianhon at 9:13 AM on November 12, 2001

adrianhon,

Teaching Assistant...teaches a smaller section of students while a Professor teaches the large lecture. Usually TAs are graduate students in the particular field.
posted by chacal at 9:20 AM on November 12, 2001

Teaching Assistant. Graduate doing tutorial work. And since undergrad stuff is much more class-based than Ox/Cam (in the sense that students are taught in classes) most of the teaching load gets placed on grad students. Who are then burnt out by the time they get their doctorates, with fuck-all chance of tenure.

(And Ox/Cam are still more meritocratic than the Ivy League, because tuition costs don't enter the equation as much.)
posted by holgate at 9:20 AM on November 12, 2001

Graduate School TA's were also the closest many of us undergrads ever got to our own fantasys of Mrs Robinson.
posted by Voyageman at 9:37 AM on November 12, 2001

from everything I know about Harvard, it's not a good place to go as an undergrad if you want to learn. It's a great place to go to make contacts, and to get into their alumni support system. But if you want a real education, you're better off at a school where the classes are taught by professors instead of grad students and where you have better opportunity to do real hands-on research with the profs....

It also seems that they keep their grad students around for an unnaturally long time, without encouraging them to finish their degrees, as they are such a valuable source of cheap labor. My evidence for this is purely anecdotal, but does add up.

(That said, of course everything depends mainly on the student, and I'm sure many Harvard students take great advantage of the opportunities there.)
posted by mattpfeff at 9:40 AM on November 12, 2001

The Graduate is my favorite film ever. Most of the dialogue is taken straight from the novel written in the mid-fifties by the same title. Not

Decent book in general, but the dialogue [and "stage direction cues" which were taken en masse for the movie from the tilt of head to a smile] is really incredible.

At any rate, I want to BE Mrs. Robinson when I grow up. It is always good to have goals, and mine is to continue dating 22 year old men through my 20s, 30s and 40s.

But back to the topic at hand: in graduate school, a C is a polite failure. The threat of a C shouldn't be about making the student's work easier, but perhaps giving them extra attention, and scaring their asses into gear.

But part of the "grade inflation" is the concept that people know that "C" isn't average. C stands for common, and no one at that level is supposed to be common. We are all exceptional, therefore noone can be average. I think this is so for most every grad school.

Most grad school's divide grades into A+, A, A-, B+, B-, then below that is OH, lord you've erred. B+ is probably average or right under. A- is quite good but not extraordinary, still basically average. A is Oh wow you amaze me you're so not average and A+ is godly.

At any rate, the problem with grade inflation and grades in general is that they are meaningless and subjective. There is no universal definition to what they mean. Grade point averages are a useless way to judge students.

Grade inflation doesn't necessarilly mean that the students are lazy, because grades don't really mean any thing.
posted by indigo at 9:49 AM on November 12, 2001

I'm intrigued by the French school system. I understand its a numbered scale of 1-20. So far so good. One catch - grades 14 through 20 (the highest grades) are the equivalent of A, A+, A+++, A++++ and are hardly ever handed out. I suppose its the reverse of grade inflation (grade deflation), always making you feel so utterly inadequate.

PS I wish Indigo had been MY TA...
posted by Voyageman at 10:25 AM on November 12, 2001

This thread would probably be incomplete (for fans of Tom Lehrer, at least) without this.
posted by normy at 10:48 AM on November 12, 2001

Harvard rejects tons of people with near-perfect SATs and other measures of pure braininess, while admitting many people with significantly lower SATs and other measures of raw intellectual firepower?

Why? Because Harvard's primary goal is to graduate future masters of the universe: CEOs, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, US Senators and cabinet members, and so forth. High intellect is only one of the qualities that (sometimes) makes for such people. Assuming a modest intelligence as a given, other qualities are far more important, including social skills and assets, commitment to public service, drive and ambition, beauty, coolness, creativity, etc.

There is (relatively) small niche of universe-masters made out of the most brilliant, but these qualities catch fire in unpredictable ways among undergraduates, and only flower while a graduate student. Makes a lot more sense to pick the most brilliant undergraduates from around the country for your doctoral programs, than to admit all the biggest 17-year-old brains you can find, only to discover 5 years later that 80% are C+ average kids who used four years in the dorms to become broadband Everquest addicts, rather than to study their hearts out, or to indulge in sex, booze and the other compelling attactions of college to the achievers who aren't superbrains.

Bottom line: Harvard can have a higher level of confidence in the long-term potential of the guy who was the star of the lacrosse team AND a Senior Class President AND 98th %ile SAT AND spent his junior year of high school summer building houses for the poor ... than they can in the kid who got a 99.8th %ile LSAT and who graduated 1st in his class, rather than 10th like his lacrosse playing classmate. But Lacrosse boy probably won't be too impressive to his freshman calculus TA, partially because he isn't super brilliant, and also because he knows it hardly matters unless he wants to go on to teach physics, rather than be an investment banker.
posted by MattD at 10:55 AM on November 12, 2001

Oh, this is very funny. I was a Tufts undergrad, a Harvard PhD student, and a TF (that's what they're called at Harvard, stands for 'Teaching Fellow') for several Harvard classes.

Tufts students tend to have enormous chips on their shoulder about Harvard, because large numbers of them applied there and were turned down, thus attending Tufts as a second-choice school. ('How many Tufts students does it take to screw in a light bulb? Two, one the screw in the bulb and the other to proclaim loudly they were doing it every bit as well as Ivy League students could!')

It's a silly argument, of couse. Both schools have students who are genuinely intellectually curious. I think the main difference (in my experience) is that the unmotivated at Tufts tend to be the dumb jock types who just want to have a good time, get their degree and get out. The unmotivated at Harvard, on the other hand, are the Machiavellian types who want to try to play the system to gain a maximum of advantages with a minimum of work. But those are gross generalizations.

With respect to grade inflation, I'd guess that the assistant mentioned by fotzepolitic is not the norm. When I was a TF, I had to go through some seminars on why grade inflation was a Very Bad Thing. Certainly it was hard to get an 'A' in the courses I TF'ed. But I'd agree with indigo's assessment of the real grading scale, where a 'C' really is a failure, meant as a warning to a student that they have to shape up without actually giving them a failing grade.
posted by Chanther at 11:08 AM on November 12, 2001 [1 favorite]

Chanther, I went to Tufts undergrad as well, and can't add anything to your assessment. Right on. While the stories about Harvard grade inflation have been floating around for YEARS, I have to say I don't feel I was subject to grade inflation at Tufts. When I put time into a class, studied hard, and stayed engaged, I did well and got what I felt I deserved. Those senior-year classes when I wasn't so engaged, I still got what I deserved. :)
posted by sbgrove at 11:29 AM on November 12, 2001

One Harvard student wrote in his letter, “Don’t hate us ‘cause we’re better!”

I'm trying, but it's so hard, Your Majesty.
posted by Hildago at 11:49 AM on November 12, 2001

As the third Tufts alumnus to comment on this thread in a row, I'll agree that Chanther's take is correct. I'm surprised that a Tufts dean actually made that comment on record to the Globe-- but he did and it did drag Harvard students into the fray for a change...

But the quality of students and education at the top US universities is generally comparable, though the details might vary....
posted by andrewraff at 11:55 AM on November 12, 2001

They should show your ranking for each class you took on your transcript. An "A" in one class is not equivelant to an "A" in another class, or even section.

That would be one messed up transcript though.
posted by Witold at 12:11 PM on November 12, 2001

If that "Don't hate us 'cause we're better!" letter from the Harvard fresher is anything to go by, I suspect that the good people of Tufts have a point. But then again, I'm not particularly impressed with the general standard of undergraduate teaching throughout the US.
posted by holgate at 12:21 PM on November 12, 2001

One issue that the grade inflation debate generally ignores, is that at places like Harvard there's much less of a disparity between the "top of the class" and the "bottom of the class." The fact that the majority of the students have B+ averages may not be indicative of grade inflation at all - it may simply mean that most of the students work at that level. Schools like Harvard have gotten much, much more selective over the last two decades and the dean from Tufts was probably there years ago when getting into Harvard was a little less about achievement and more about having gone to the "right" prep school.

The same debate was taking place at my alma mater (Duke) two or three years ago, and i thought it was strange that several of the professors and administrators complaining about grade inflation were only using absolute numbers to build their case. (i.e., "The average GPA in 1975 was 2.89 and now it's 3.3, therefore, grades must be inflated now.") This may not be true of Harvard, but Duke was a very different place in 1975 and not nearly as selective as it is now. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine that a majority of students at Duke are capable of achieving at a B/B+ level given the fact that most of them had to be tremendous overachievers to get into the school in the first place. Unless you really believe that grading should be relative above all else, there's not much of an argument for having to see a particular range in grades or grading on a curve.

On a side note, I was a TA for a year in the public policy school and with the exception of a handful of what I would consider statistical outliers, there generally wasn't "three or four letter grade's" difference between the top of the class and the bottom.
posted by lizs at 1:30 PM on November 12, 2001

I'm not particularly impressed with the general standard of undergraduate teaching throughout the US.

In my experience, it falls in line with the general standard of undergraduate study. Those classes where the students are motivated are taught much better, as well.

This, of course, is probably somewhat universal. Perhaps it is another indication that undergraduates in the States are generally poorer students. The majority of them would scarcely care, I think; it is only exceptionally that the material learned as an undergrad is put to practical application after graduation, and furthermore few students focus on their studies (as opposed to drinking and partying) while in school.

But I imagine that those American undergrads who apply themselves are comparable to the best students anywhere. At least, those friends of mine who have gone to graduate school (at top schools) have compared rather well with graduate students from outside the States....
posted by mattpfeff at 1:39 PM on November 12, 2001

The 60's were tough at Harvard. Grade inflation began with the disco . Faculty Notes - Feb 1976: "Professor H. Mansfield asked the President what was being done about the problem of grade inflation....when one considered that last June eighty-five percent of the class had graduated with honors and that seventy-three people had received Summas, it was possible to question how much of an honor it was to graduate from Harvard with honors." Meanwhile, 8 months later : Tutorial Grades Decline; Mansfield Still Unsatisfied - October 1976 , "...Mansfield, who called last year for a "general deflation" in grades and for a return to the tougher grading standards of the late 1960's, said that he has been exhorting members of the department who haven't noticed the upward creep in grades to pay attention to what they've been doing."
posted by Voyageman at 2:04 PM on November 12, 2001

Grade inflation at elite schools is generally indefensible, although Lizs makes an excellent point that (modest) grade inflation is proper at schools which have become orders of magnitude more elite is a well-taken one. However, I think that should really apply only to schools, such as Duke, that have become more elite relative to their competition. Harvard has gotten numerically harder to get into as (a) the number of college-bound high school seniors has increased and (b) the number of applications-per-student has increased ... but it still occupies more or less the same relative position it always has.

However, I am happy to defend the insistence of less-elite schools in maintaining more rigid grade structures. Unlike Harvard, where everyone benefits from the degree itself (cf. what used to be the Gentlemen's "C" and is now the Gentleman's "B"), less elite schools misserve their best students if they make them hard to distinguish from the mass.

Thinking in the context with which I'm familiar -- a top 5 law school -- I know that our class was full of Harvard, Princeton and Stanford grads who were good but not particularly great students there -- but was also full (at least 1/3) of grads of Tufts, the University of Indiana, University of Alabama, Michigan State and many other schools which are respectable but not as selective of their entering class, who never could have been admitted unless those schools (generally) practiced rigid grading. Getting a 3.8 from Ohio State meant that you were reliably as smart as someone who got a 3.4 at Harvard -- with the LSAT, of course, serving as a norming factor.
posted by MattD at 2:23 PM on November 12, 2001 [1 favorite]

They should show your ranking for each class you took on your transcript. An "A" in one class is not equivelant to an "A" in another class, or even section.

That would be one messed up transcript though.

Dartmouth transcripts are close to that, though without an explcit ranking. Since sometime in the mid-90s, the College has included the number of students enrolled and median grade for each course listed on the transcript.
posted by jewishbuddha at 2:33 PM on November 12, 2001

I suspect that there are not many other Harvard alums piping up here because we are taught that we must never be defensive about our Harvard degree. :)

Please see this link for the Harvard response to all of this.

All I can say is that among my friends and acquaintances from H, I can count a handful of *major* novelists, a well-known film director, a journalist for CNN, scientists who are perpetually in the news and, of course, a truckload of CEOs. My degree and these connections have helped me to open doors as effortlessly as a master locksmith.

The *quality* of the education is a pointless discussion. I met people there (e.g. Noam Elkies) whose genius would have flourished even in a dark closet.
posted by vacapinta at 3:26 PM on November 12, 2001

Damn. Post wipeout. Just to agree with you, mattpfeff: from personal experience, US students tend to flower as postgrads, whereas Brits (who slogged out their guts to get their graduate places/funding) tend to take things a bit easier. But that's my gripe with the US system: "academia" only really starts at grad school, where (no coincidence) the fees are much, much higher.

As for Oxford: well, there's less sign of "grade inflation", simply because it's a different grading system, that relies upon final exams and extended essay projects, rather than continuous in-class assessment. (Enough people still get their "Desmonds".) Although some tutors, especially in the sciences, complain that "the questions are getting easier".
posted by holgate at 3:28 PM on November 12, 2001 [1 favorite]

Has anybody in the field of academia *ever* claimed the exams were getting easier?

It's an annual ritual in Britain: as soon as the A-level results are announced, there's always someone to moan about how much harder it was in his day.
posted by salmacis at 3:35 PM on November 12, 2001

I hesitate to join in this thread again, but I have to confess that I see a tone of arrogance in the pro-Harvard things I've read here, including vacapinta's post and provided link.

I mean, "Our obnoxious but understandable arrogance becomes, paradoxically, evidence that we aren’t brilliant and talented. (The victim of Harvard Syndrome, a lifetime second-rater, has no conception of justifiable, well-earned pride.)" is something that I don't like the sound of. As one who has been accused of arrogance on many occasions, I don't think that, understandable or not, it should be accepted.

I'm a second year student at Cambridge University. We have our fair share of jokes about so-called 'inferior' universities (e.g. 'Here's your coat, and I've called a taxi for you to Durham') but there are extremely few people who really believe them. Statistically, Cambridge is by far the best university in the UK, at least in terms of academics. Occasionally I see people who lash out against Cambridge and often they were rejected. After a while they get over it (c.f. Laura Spence, who now says that Oxford was right to reject her), realise that Cambridge isn't the best university in the world (for such a thing does not exist) and can't really be termed 'second-raters'.

Aside from a minority of irritating Cambridge Union regulars who invariably come from the likes of Eton, we generally get along with other unis around the UK and respect them.

I would like to think that the same is true of Harvard, and that the Harvard response is not representative of the general student body.
posted by adrianhon at 3:59 PM on November 12, 2001 [1 favorite]

MattD hit the nail on the head about Harvard's preference for the well-rounded future Master of the Universe.

The make-up of Harvard's student body was something that took me a while to grasp while I was a student there. I was the first graduate of my public high school to go to Harvard, and I was in that minority whose "credentials" were pretty much just academic. I tended to gravitate towards people with similar backgrounds. Midway through college, I remember it came as a surprise to me that several students in Stephen Jay Gould's big general education biology course complained to our TA that it was hard to follow his lectures because they were full of words like "causality."

There's no doubt that Harvard, and the many schools like it, gather together people who are bound to "succeed" for reasons not traceable to any magical effect of the Harvard degree. But it's really no secret that the key to such success does not lie in a passion for ideas and intellectual expression.

At the time I graduated, the real idea of Harvard College struck me, as I obliviously ignored the Management Consulting (= dot-com of the mid-nineties) opportunities before me, and later, in the trenches of academia (a TA myself!) realized that my alma mater really was organized coherently around a clear idea, indeed, a definite social function (esp. production of lawyers, investment bankers, and people with those mysterious properties that add up to the right habitus for being a business, politics, or media titan...).

I hope that doesn't sound either resentful or arrogant... In fact, surprisingly enough, I appreciate Harvard a lot more now that I left it. As an alienated over-intellectual adolescent, I had unfulfillable expectations of Harvard. Now, I realize that for all that the place was filled with rich people who paid for their intellectual credentials, there are some pretty extraordinary educational opportunities there. Ultimately, I judge a school by the quality of learning that happens there, not by some supposed intrinsic measurement of the students' worth. The sad part of it all is that I know there are a lot of people who on paper don't meet Harvard's desires for entering students, who would power a more intense intellectual environment for students there. But hey, that's what the world is like.
posted by Zurishaddai at 4:07 PM on November 12, 2001 [1 favorite]

What it is all about:

School rankings.

You see, freshman retention/graduation rate is one of the keys used in ranking and evaluating schools - because who wants a school that 50% of the strudents fail out or leave? That would infer that the kids are stupid, and the school was admitting people to inflate enrollment.

Harvard, once getting in as an undergrad, is basically impossible to flunk out of. I have a lot of friends who went. You could basically not go to class, show up at the end without doing any homework and ask the professor to do something a week before grades are due, and you get a B.

One of my friends who was going to Harvard tranfered out to Carngie Mellon in his Junior year, where I was going and got his first 'B' of his college career. He never studied at Harvard, but was locked in his room most of the week at CMU, and still got the B.

Then again, that was back when CMU had the highest suicide rate in the country, a 80% retention rate, and 1/4 of my friends freshman year failed out, and not due to lack of studying.
posted by rich at 6:07 PM on November 12, 2001

Actually, Teaching Assistants at Harvard are called Teaching Fellows and we're drawn from the graduate schools which have a different demographic background than the pedigree bred, legacy admitted , cram club joining, hong kong scorpion bowl swilling undergrads. As they say at big H, there are no hats large enough to fully cover the swelled heads that you meet there.

If you can't be the best...be different.
posted by AsiaInsider at 7:00 PM on November 12, 2001

Harvard is one of the only schools in the country which actually doesn't have to worry about school ratings ... note, after all, the COMPLETE lack of concern evidenced on Harvard Yard when Princeton or MIT takes the #1 slot on the USN&WR listing.

Yale and Stanford have, for now, no real worries about their rankings ... but if they ever slipped below Columbia or Duke or Dartmouth ... there would be a bit of panic. If Harvard started to poll below Cornell, nobody would break a sweat.

I'd say the only other schools with total ratings immunity are CalTech and the service academies, and maybe Notre Dame (because it is Notre Dame, and has such a lock on the imagination of its target market). The top state universities have a bit of the same immunity, since their target markets (the smartest middle kids in the state whose families can't won't pay for private school but aren't poor enough to get full rides) really have no choice ... Michigan, Virginia, Berkeley, Wisconsin, and the like don't agonize too much about fluctuating USN&WR's ... and certainly manage their admissions process the way the privates do to maximize rankings.
posted by MattD at 9:06 PM on November 12, 2001

I am not aware of any stats ranking colleges by number of undergraduates currently (and historically) in leadership positions in arts/business/government/advanced degrees etc. Assuming Harvard (and other Ivy league) undergrads are up there (as I suspect they may be) is that because they are indeed better, or is it simply because they have a branded college degree and are well connected ?
posted by Voyageman at 9:51 PM on November 12, 2001

I'm intrigued by the French school system. I understand its a numbered scale of 1-20

Voyageman: The Portuguese system is the same(0-20 actually)so 7 is 35%, 10 is 50%, 14 is 70%, etc. It's very irritating as anything over 14 is considered extravagant. I taught political philosophy for six years at a Lisbon University and was constantly berated for going over the limit when marking students. Even more annoyingly, my hellishly difficult First from Manchester University(B.A. Econ., 1978), when it went through the Portuguese system came out as 17, i.e. 85%. So, Harvard-wise, apart from Oxford, Cambridge and Heidelberg, I wouldn't look too much to Europe for inspiration...
posted by MiguelCardoso at 11:15 PM on November 12, 2001

In regards to vacapinto's post, I want to say that this article is completely unrepresentative of the Harvard student body. The author, Ross Douthat, has been linked to before on Metafilter. In vacapinto's Crimson article, Ross manages to sound even more arrogant and patronizing than he did in the previous one. Try this article for an even more representative sample of Ross' tone.

Ross is not representative of the Harvard undergrad student body.

My friends and acquaintances here at Harvard are a hard-working bunch. They aim high, frequently receive less-than-stellar grades for considerable efforts, and for the most part, they appreciate the opportunity to learn from some of the best professors in the world. (These professors, by the way, do actually teach our classes. They won't go out of their way to seek you. But if you make the tiniest effort to contact a professor, it will be fruitful beyond your expectations. In three-and-a-half years here, I've never had a class in which I felt the professor was inaccessible, or even difficult to reach.)

Yes, a C is a disappointment to me and my classmates, and I don't know if that was always the case. But I do know that when I receive a C, I work hard to pull that grade up. I talk with professors and tf's about that which I don't understand, and make a sincere effort to understand it better. I don't know if I'd generally be receiving lower grades at another school, but I know I work at least as hard as my friends elsewhere in the country.

I find that the main distinction between my friends here and my friends at other colleges is that folks at Harvard cherish their extracurricular life more than usual. They dance (5th place in the nation for our dance team last year), sing (3rd place in the nation for my a cappella group last year), play sports (see the football stats for this year :), juggle (our juggling club includes a Guinness record-setter) and above all, participate in community service (Harvard has the nation's only student-run homeless shelter; I know few people who aren't involved in some type of community service). I'm not trying to make the argument that Harvard students are the best in everything, because that's not true, but I do want to point out that my classmates aim high at everything they do, and they frequently reach or exceed their goals. There are fraternities, or 'finals clubs' as well, but those represent only a fraction of the student population.

And lastly, about Harvard students being connected, this is the ultimate myth. We're not all here with Rolodexes in our backpacks. Sure, if you want to be an i-banker or a consultant, going to Harvard can ensure you graduate with a fabulous starting salary. But I have known far more students who have other aspirations who have graduated to start, as most do, at the bottom rung of the career ladder. If they get anywhere, it won't be because of their connections, but because of their drive.

My friends are not "pedigree bred, legacy admitted, cram club joining, hong kong scorpion bowl swilling undergrads." They are hard-working, intelligent, profoundly interesting, motivated people from all sorts of social backgrounds. Even Ross Douthat is an interesting and intelligent guy, though I do hate his writing. But neither he nor anyone else can truly claim to be a representative of what I feel is a diverse, vibrant student body.
posted by grrarrgh00 at 7:55 AM on November 13, 2001

Here is the Boston Globe article ["Harvard's Quiet Secret"] referred to in the first Crimson article posted here.

Wow -- 91% of undergrad degrees conferred with honors?
posted by sbgrove at 9:37 AM on November 13, 2001

This is beautiful : "In response to intense scrutiny from the Harvard Faculty and the national media, the University will release a report today calling grade inflation a “serious problem” at Harvard ....but promising NO immediate change." But this is sublime : "A Victory for the Ages".
posted by Voyageman at 10:29 AM on November 20, 2001

The Sunday NY Times weighs in. They don't really say all that much, though.
posted by mattpfeff at 12:58 PM on December 9, 2001