Harvard Faculty Votes to Put the Excellence Back in the A
May 22, 2002 9:46 AM   Subscribe

Harvard Faculty Votes to Put the Excellence Back in the A (NY Times) Grade inflation is over at Harvard after almost 90 percent of '01 grads received some form of honors. What's worse, up until now students who completed a thesis were guaranteed honors by their department.
posted by dayvin (12 comments total)
 
the long arm of larry summers :) but it will not bring cornel west back!
posted by kliuless at 10:49 AM on May 22, 2002


Grade inflation is over because they turned an A- average into a B+ average? Because only SIXTY PERCENT of the class will graduate with honors? In two years, we'll be reading a story about how it changed nothing.
posted by MikeB at 12:04 PM on May 22, 2002


Automatically giving honors to students who complete a thesis is not a practice unique to harvard. The assumption is that thesis advisors are discerning and hold the students to a certain standard of rigor for the theses they turn in. If you do a crappy job, then you don't "complete" your thesis and thus you don't get honors. Seems fair to me.
posted by mariko at 12:36 PM on May 22, 2002


Harvard lost credibility when their most intelligent grad, Dubya, opened his mouth and we all heard what came out.
posted by nofundy at 12:37 PM on May 22, 2002


Harvard lost credibility when their most intelligent grad, Dubya, opened his mouth and we all heard what came out.
posted by nofundy at 12:38 PM on May 22, 2002


Make no mistake, GWB is a Yalie as is his father. Business School doesn't count.
posted by vacapinta at 12:50 PM on May 22, 2002


Argh. It's sort of frustrating to see this article today; degree recommendations for a lot of graduating Harvard undergrads were announced this afternoon. Grade inflation is one of those things that seems to be a problem when you consider it in terms of statistics, and is much less so when you actually look at it on a student level. What thing that people don't tend to consider is that Harvard's student body is packed with students who have demonstrated the motivation to pursue the highest honors in an academic setting. If you fill a school with the people who were slavishly devoted to their academics in high school, you're going to end up with a college of people who go after honors.

It's not easy to get honors at Harvard, nor is it guaranteed, contrary to the posting, that students who complete a thesis will receive honors. One of my good friends, a senior in the notoriously stringent History and Literature department, slaved for six months over an amazing, unorthodox thesis that one reader recommended for summa cum laude and another reader did not recommend for honors at all. If the two professors had been of the same mind, my friend would either have received summa, or no acknowledgement of her thesis work whatsoever. Harvard already does a wonderful job of encouraging students to strive towards their best work; that is what the 90% figure represents.

If you're worried about stratifying students within that number, it's already taken care of; a select number of students receive magna cum laude, an even more select number get summa, and even those students are further stratified into Rhodes scholars, prize winners, Phi Beta Kappa and whatnot. A purely statistical, competitive approach to grading can only serve to pit students against each other more than they already are, fostering an environment where they're encouraged not to innovate and best themselves academically, but to see who can play the system the best.

My friend, she of the schizo thesis grades, got a cum despite having a (well-deserved) straight-A transcript, having gotten her summa recommendation on the thesis, and being brilliant. She has worked her ass off for four years, directing a radio show, being a principle contributor to a book that's likely available at your local chain bookstore, and never asking for an extension on a paper. My point is that everyone doesn't just ease on into Harvard and grab their A and honors; people work hard, earn their A's, and work towards an honors degree. Putting a quota on that effort is arbitrary and frustrating.
posted by grrarrgh00 at 8:21 PM on May 22, 2002


Not to give the flipside of grrarrgh's argument, but I went to a school where the average grade point average is a "C+". Really.

That means, for example, that most students make some "C"s. I know that this is hard to believe, a college today giving out "C"s to students. And it was hard when I got some. But it sure makes the "A"s I received much sweeter. And it shows the gap between the the smart and lazy and the truly dedicated students in high relief.

To get honors at the U of C, I had to make a 3.2. And I barely made it. But I know that I did better than most because the average of classes in the college is a "C+". And how many students graduated with cummulative averages above 3.75. About 15 my year. That's what grades should be, a bellcurve.

I agree that putting caps on the number of students who can graduate with certain honors is weird, and probably will serve to increase competitiveness among just the set of students who can't see over the tops of their books long enough to trip others on their way to class. But how is it possible that 50% of every single college class [numbers about grades about half-way down] deserves an A? That can't be right. What happened to the gentleman's "C" which replaced the "F" ? Is it now the Gentleman's "B+" ?

Honors may well be another thing, and it sounds from grrarrgh's comments that honors at Harvard are handled in a very complex way. But grades serve to differentiate. And I think the faculty at Harvard has decided to that the current state of affairs doesn't differentiate much at all.
posted by zpousman at 9:02 PM on May 22, 2002


zpousman: Separating the smart and lazy from the truly dedicated is an honorable endeavor, an end that should be pursued. My point is, Harvard's already done most of that work by the time their students get to sophomore year (e.g. like most Ivies, they interview all applicants; they ask students who might not be ready to handle the workload to take a year off before beginning college; many students transfer or drop out if the work doesn't take). Harvard has taken the honorable tack of designating a standard of work; if you achieve or exceed that standard, you are rewarded for your efforts. The school has only become more selective as years have gone on; what is the purpose of making arbitrary stratifications within a group of students who are all smart and motivated?

Grades should not differentiate. Grades should recognize a standard of achievement. Excellent work should receive an A, regardless of how many people are able to achieve that standard; great work should receive a B; good work should receive a C. These are students chosen from a pool of 3,000 high school valedictorians; I think it's plausible that half of them can achieve A-quality work.
posted by grrarrgh00 at 2:16 AM on May 23, 2002


I certainly admit that Harvard places all of its selectivity in the admissions process.

But you're wrong to say that many people transfer out or drop out. Harvard has a 96% freshman retention rate and eventually graduates 97% of its students. This is one of the highest in the country. It's an open question as to whether this results from a somehow outstanding selection process or from something more nefarious, like gentleman's (and gentlelady's) "B+"s for everyone.

Here's my point: Take an average Harvard student and put him at the U of C. He won't graduate with all "A"s. Not one student in the past 10 years has graduated the U of C with a perfect 4.0. Can you really argue that it's because not one of those 10,000 (approx) graduates was smart enough or worked hard enough? No, it's because the U of C does not give out all that many "A"s.
posted by zpousman at 5:44 AM on May 23, 2002


Grades should not differentiate. Grades should recognize a standard of achievement. Excellent work should receive an A, regardless of how many people are able to achieve that standard; great work should receive a B; good work should receive a C. These are students chosen from a pool of 3,000 high school valedictorians; I think it's plausible that half of them can achieve A-quality work.

But this is not, in fact, how the grading procedure works. When we judge student work, we do not assign grades in line with some Platonic Idea of "the A paper" or "the A exam." Grading standards are relational: they are determined by faculty expectations for performance from a particular student cohort. Moreover, to say that an "A" rewards "excellent work" is not quite accurate. It rewards work that far exceeds the instructor's criteria for adequately completing an assignment. Believe it or not, that's not quite the same thing. Here, for example, is how I define a "C" paper for my students, many of whom arrive at the college badly under-prepared:

“C” range: An acceptable essay. The thesis statement may be underdeveloped or missing, but at least the essay makes an honest effort to have a solid introduction and conclusion. However, specific examples from the text may be missing; if they are there, they may be under-analyzed or sometimes misunderstood. The argumentation may be choppy or unconvincing, but the reader can still locate the essay’s main points. The essay’s ideas are not particularly insightful and may “parrot” classroom discussions. There are quite a few grammatical errors, some of which may interfere with the reader’s understanding of the argument; the proofreading may need more work; and the formatting may have some glitches. An essay with no evidence cannot receive any grade higher than “C.”

These criteria reflect what I can reasonably expect from my students, given their preparation. Most of my students can meet this definition of "adequate" work, with some rising well above the standard and some falling well below. However, when I taught for a year at the University of Michigan--Ann Arbor, I could reasonably expect a higher standard of adequate performance from my students. Result: my classes at the U of M had grading curves very similar to my classes at my current institution, a SUNY college. Again, when I was a discussion section leader while a graduate student at the University of Chicago, our reasonable expectations for adequate performance were higher still. Once more: very similar grading curves.

The point, in other words, is that Harvard has many students who, no matter how brilliant, will only meet the instructor's criteria for "adequate" performance. If everyone is a valedictorian, then the bar for "adequate" goes higher and higher.
posted by thomas j wise at 7:42 AM on May 23, 2002


amen wise. U Chicago. Makes you cry, but that's the point.
posted by zpousman at 6:28 PM on June 4, 2002


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