Good Grades and Hard Work Are Honorable

To the editors:

In response to dissent from the Staff’s editorial about grade inflation by Jonathan H. Esensten ’04 and Anthony S.A. Freinberg ’04 (“A Dishonorable Solution,” May 13). I feel obliged to point out that admission itself to Harvard, not the awarding of honors, is “meant to distinguish between those students who are merely good and those who consistently have done work of the highest quality,” as the authors claim.

Harvard is in itself an honors college; as the admissions office has made efforts to bring to campus a more diverse and academically talented student body over the years, it seems natural that the percentage of the students who earn honors would increase. After all, with the influx of women and minorities who were not previously given a fair chance in the admissions process, what Harvard has done is turn out the bottom half of the white men. In the process, admission has become tougher for everyone, and it therefore seems only right that more and more students qualify for honors.

I disagree with the contention that while grades can be measured on an absolute scale, honors cannot. If honors are correlated to grades—as they should be—they become part of that absolute scale. In other words, once a student has submitted a thesis or equivalent project that reflects sophisticated, individual thinking, and has backed up that project with a record of good grades, it is unfair to suggest that splitting hairs over GPAs is the way to reward a chosen few.

Honors are simply a reflection of the level of work a student has done over four years of college. The suggestion that if only ten percent of the graduating class earned honors, we would know who the real academicians are seems childish, since it would serve only to increase competition and acrimony among students.

Honors are not a comparative tool meant to separate the great from the good in a personal way; they are a reward for four years of hard work at a high level. Those deserving should earn them.

Nora Guyer ’03

May 13, 2002