Get Tough

TWENTY-ONE PERCENT of last year's seniors pulled off an amazing double feat--they had below median grades and they graduated with honors. Such is the end result of Harvard's system for distributing honors, a system that is increasingly growing out of sync with the ostensible purpose of the practice--rewarding superior performance.

One can think of a number of reasons for giving out a lot of honors degrees come each June, from making a lot of people happy to giving Harvard students better positioning in the post-graduation job competition. The former proposition is absurd, the latter dubious; it is unlikely that a potential employer would weigh the designation cum laude on a resume above all the other characteristics a student would bring to the job, specially if the transcript accompanying the resume is full of E-pluses or B-minuses.

That leaves the best reason for giving honors--honoring high academic achievement--but under Harvard's current honors system, it is difficult to see many of the cums Harvard hands out as anything more than worthless trinkets. Seventy-one percent of Harvard's graduating seniors last year received some kind of honors, a figure for higher than the rest of the Ivy League.

Against this backdrop, the Faculty has understandably been examining the issue for the past several years, and now a compromise proposal appears to be gaining momentum. The student-faculty Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) has forwarded a slightly tougher, fairer proposal for distributing honors to the Faculty Council, the Faculty's elected steering committee.

Students nominated for cum laude by their department must now also carry a general gpa of a 10 (B-minus) and at least a B-minus in two-thirds of their non-department courses. For magna seekers, the gpa must be 12 (B-plus) and the minumum grade B, while the requirements are stiffer still for summa candidates.

While the CUE changes are complicated, the thrust of the proposal is to simplify the current labyrinthian requirements, mostly by taking all of a students courses into account, not just the two thirds of non-departmental courses now under consideration. They also toughen the honors rules in a number of other ways.

Candidates for cum laude in the departments would have to get at least a C-minus in 24 of their letter-graded courses--instead of a D-minus in 21 courses--and their overall gpa would have to be 10.5 instead of 10. Also, the straight gpa of candidates for cum laude in general studies would have to be 11.5, instead of 11.

A number of problems exist with the current proposal, most particularly in the way it penalizes students who want to experiment by taking five courses in a semester or by taking a course in an entirely novel field. The College must determine a way to give experimenters room to screw up in a course without ruining their chances for honors--perhaps, as Professor of Astrophysics David I ayzer suggests, by making only three-fourths of all courses count for honors.

More acutely, the current rush to correct the honors glut wholly ignores a more fundamental problem, the skewed system of grading that makes 87 percent of all grades in courses here B-minus or better, and that creates standards that vary widely from department to department. Until the problems relating to grading are corrected at Harvard, any system for awarding honors will be stop-gap at best.

Finally, while the general move to toughen and simplify the requirements is well-founded, it does not go far enough. Making a B-minus the ground-floor requirement for a cum laude degree is almost meaningless because the vast majority of grades in courses of Harvard are B-minus or better anyway. The Faculty would be well-advised to up the minimum average grade for an honors degree to at least a B. If should also be prepared to bend these grade requirements for those students who write exceptional senior theses, often the most significant academic experience in an undergraduate's career.

IT'S A BIT BORING to listen to all the debate over honors legislation given all the more pressing problems afflicting Harvard undergraduate education, from the poor quality of many sections here to the inattention many departments pay their undergraduates. But insofar as the honors rules reflect Harvard's attitude towards academic achievement, they ought to be changed; all they are reflecting now is a tolerance for the average.