This academic year, Harvard has endured a dark night of the soul, including (among other troubles) facing down the consequences of grade inflation and searching for curricular absolution. In a much-publicized fall report, the university confessed that its current grading system is, in fact, a “problem”—an admission that reportedlyleft students “soul-crushed” and crying in their beds.
Undeterred, America’s oldest institution released in February a new plan to deflate grades. Will the new plan lead Harvard from the dark of inflated GPAs and into the light of more accurate grading, or will the institution “continue in Oblivion lost?”
Harvard Has a Plan
The primary recommendation of the new plan is a simple cap on the number of A’s. Professors can now assign only 20 percent of their students (plus four additional A grades, regardless of class size) the top mark. While I applaud just about any effort to curb grade inflation, Harvard’s reform gives reason for skepticism. Harvard is not the first university to try such a scheme.
First, Harvard is not the first university to try such a scheme. In 2004, Princeton noted similar problems with grade inflation and prohibited professors from rewarding A’s to more than 35 percent of their undergraduate classes. And it worked—at least a little. In the decade in which the policy existed, the percentage of A’s droppedfrom 47 to 41.8. A comparable policy, capping most course averages, led to similar results at Wellesley College.
Alas, both colleges reversed course. A report from a faculty committee at Princeton bemoaned increases in student anxiety and poor comparisons to peer universities that had not adopted similar grade caps. In response, the faculty voted in 2014 to remove the cap, and grades once again crept inexorably upward. If past is prologue, then this current initiative from Harvard could be destined for similar tragedy.