Harvard Updates Gen Ed Guidelines to Curb Grade Inflation

The Harvard College Program in General Education updated its guidelines for Gen Ed instructors in an attempt to standardize grading across classes and mitigate grade inflation.

The new guidelines, rolled out last spring, come amid persistent gripes among students about inconsistent Gen Ed grading and concerns among faculty that students perceive their four required Gen Ed courses as easy A’s — or “gems” — rather than genuine intellectual commitments.

The guidelines urge instructors to share grading criteria with students, “set clear expectations” for graduate teaching fellows’ grading policies, and enforce requirements to “ensure students who do not attend class regularly or do not complete course readings and course assignments are not able to earn an A/A- grade.”

They represent one part of an effort to shore up the rigor of Gen Eds. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is also considering phasing out students’ ability to take one of their four required Gen Ed classes pass-fail.

In recent years, Gen Eds’ difficulty may have been headed in the opposite direction.

Music professor Alexander Rehding, who co-chaired the Standing Committee on General Education during the 2023-24 academic year, said he wanted the guidelines to address grade inflation among undergraduates.

“Over the course of our discussions over the year, it became clear that Gen Ed is actually really well-equipped to take on that challenge of addressing issues of grade compression for the simple reason that every student has to take four classes from Gen Ed,” Rehding said.

A 2023 report found that Harvard undergraduates’ grades had risen dramatically over time. In the 2021-22 academic year, 79 percent of grades given to undergraduates were in the A range.

The new Gen Ed guidelines instruct faculty to make sure they assign final grades across a range that allows them to “recognize excellent work and distinguish it from less excellent work.”

Classics professor Kathleen M. Coleman, who co-chaired the committee alongside Rehding, said it’s difficult to ensure that classes are graded consistently across a large, multidisciplinary program.

But, she said, the new guidelines encourage faculty to be upfront about what standards they are looking for in students’ work.

“As much transparency as possible is what we’ve recommended, so that students know what to expect,” Coleman said. “What must I do to try and get such-and-such a grade — which is normally, at Harvard, what do I do to get an A?”

In interviews, students said they felt that Gen Ed classes varied widely in their difficulty — adding that even different teaching fellows in the same course sometimes applied vastly different standards.

“All four Gen Eds that I’ve taken, it’s been a different amount of work that you have to put in, a different amount of effort to get the grade that you want,” said Pavan V. Pandurangi ’25. “I feel like that’s not how Gen Eds should work.”

Taj S. Gulati ’25 said he aced one Gen Ed despite practically sleeping through it — but found the grading in another to be much stricter.

“Their standard for an A was an essay they deem publishable,” Gulati said, “which is a little bit of a high bar for a Gen Ed.”

Ultimately, Coleman and Rehding said, one of their main goals was simply to convince undergraduates to take Gen Eds more seriously.

“The idea is not to make these courses harder,” Coleman said. “It’s to make everybody respect them as proper intellectual efforts.”

But Rehding admitted he wasn’t sure how much the new guidelines will change students’ attitudes.

“I think there is a certain limit to what can be done, because no one is ever going to concentrate in general education,” he said.

—Staff writer Tilly R. Robinson can be reached at tilly.robinson@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @tillyrobin.