Who’s Going To Do Claybaugh’s Dirty Work?

Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh’s report on grade inflation is far from A quality material. It is great at identifying tensions within Harvard’s grading, but its solutions are not enough to solve the structural issues that keep grades high.

If the College pushes for results without institutional change, grades may deflate, but the quality of Harvard academics will decline alongside them. Put simply, instituting grade deflation requires a whole lot of manpower that we don’t have.

Faculty are already burdened by numerous stressors that make honest evaluation difficult, and with a looming shortage of teaching fellows, the situation is likely to worsen. Meaningful grade deflation demands significant time and effort from instructors to provide in-depth feedback and to ensure balanced and honest evaluations across students, sections, and years.

As the College insists that the faculty lower overall GPAs or enforce stricter grade curves, it must also commit to providing students with feedback that justifies those lower grades. Students deserve to know why they received a grade and how to improve. This requires a much higher level of involvement and time commitment.

Claybaugh claims her initiative seeks to recenter academics at the College. Changing the grading system incentivizes students to engage more closely with their classes and strive to improve in the areas where they are struggling. In order for such measures to be effective, students need to know where they are failing and why. If the goal is mastery, how are they falling short, and what does it mean to be a master in any given subject? Without feedback and clear paths to improvement, low grades are punitive rather than constructive.

Faculty are the ones giving out grades, and they’re also the ones sounding the alarm about grade inflation. Beyond the bandwidth issue, Claybaugh’s report acknowledges the constraints that are preventing honest grading: pressure from other faculty or departments, fear of low enrollment threatening their chance at tenure, and concerns about student well-being and equity.

However, these issues are brushed aside. Without institutional change supporting the faculty — an overhaul of the tenure system, mental health services, and the Q-guide — these outside pressures are going to remain. The report throws out a brief acknowledgement that the college will have to rise to the occasion, but none of the proposed solutions — offering an A+, adding median course grades to transcripts, or a variance-based grading system — begin to address the faculty’s concerns.

Nothing about these solutions gets at the heart of the problem — helping the faculty. In fact, all they do is add to the stress.

Then, another overlooked problem arises: When professors aren’t grading (as happens very frequently), teaching fellows do so instead. The report barely mentions TFs, yet they often form the backbone of Harvard’s feedback system. They face similar pressures as faculty, with the added challenge of inexperienced and limited pedagogical training.

And now, we may be headed into a TF shortage. Graduate programs across the University are cutting admissions, in some cases by over 50 percent. Some departments may get by with their current graduate students for a while, but a steep decline in others is inevitable. With fewer TFs, professors will shoulder more grading, more feedback, and more student pushback — just as the College demands more rigor.

While long term changes are certainly necessary and should be taken seriously, the report encourages faculty to begin the shift as soon as next semester. This timeline does not give time for the College to make these necessary changes before pushing the faculty to take serious action.

To begin, the College needs to formally address and take actual steps towards assuaging professors’ concerns. Instead of a vague acknowledgment of the issue, administrators need to be having the hard conversations about where it is failing faculty and students. Then they need to do something first, and ask for changes from the faculty later.

We also need university-wide conversations about what the college can do in the face of a teaching fellow shortage. Whole classes will need to cope with fewer aides, or none at all.

The college has identified an issue, and would like to see it rid of as soon as possible. Operating without proper support, faculty and TFs may begin to artificially deflate grades, which also fails to meaningfully assess a student’s mastery. The stress this could cause is precisely the reason that other colleges have given up these lackluster policy solutions.

Who’s going to do the dirty work? It can’t be the endangered species of TFs, and it won’t be the college. All that leaves are the unsupported faculty and the stressed-out students. Surely this is no better than a few too many A’s.

L.A. Karnes ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in the Comparative Study of Religion and Government in Mather House.