Faculty Votes To Eliminate Option To Take Gen Ed, QRD Courses Pass-Fail

The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted overwhelmingly to eliminate the option to take courses fulfilling the Harvard College General Education and Quantitative Reasoning with Data requirements on a pass-fail basis at a Tuesday faculty meeting.

The changes — which were widely anticipated after both proposals received broad support at a March faculty meeting — will amend the Harvard College student handbook to remove the option for undergraduates to pass-fail one of their four required Gen Ed courses and their one QRD course. Current Harvard students will not be affected by the change.

Psychology professor Fiery A. Cushman ’03, one of the co-chairs of the Gen Ed program, introduced the Gen Ed proposal for discussion last month, arguing the pass-fail option made the program a “bothersome set of requirements” to be finished with as high a grade as possible.

The program “really ought to be a crown jewel of a student’s education,” Cushman said in March.

During Tuesday’s meeting, computer science professor David J. Malan ’99 opposed the motion and proposed an amendment to the change that would allow undergraduates to take some Gen Ed courses on a satisfactory-unsatisfactory grading basis. The threshold to receive a satisfactory grade is a C minus, while it is a D minus to pass a course.

Malan — who runs the popular course CS50: “An Introduction to Computer Science” — said that when CS50’s default grading basis was changed to sat-unsat in 2017, the enrollment of women increased to a 29-year high. He said eliminating pass-fail options would walk back a well-founded motivation to allow students to explore academically.

“Voting ‘yea’ on today’s proposals would only further drive students away from a system that can be made to work,” Malan said.

But Malan’s proposal did not pass and received just a handful of votes. Human Evolutionary Biology chair Daniel E. Lieberman ’86, who pushed back against Malan’s proposal, said students who take his classes pass-fail are less engaged.

Statistics professor Joseph K. Blitzstein, who chairs the QRD Committee, introduced the resolution to eliminate the pass-fail option for courses that satisfy the QRD requirement.

Blitzstein said the change would increase the academic rigor of QRD courses and make them consistent with other requirements at the College, including Expository Writing, which cannot be taken pass-fail. He added that the change would ensure students devote sufficient time to QRD courses since they cover a wide range of subjects in one class.

Malan had prepared an amendment for the QRD requirement that was similar to his amendment for Gen Eds, but retracted it after his colleagues rejected his first proposal. He wrote in a Wednesday post on Medium, however, that CS50 would have to be taken for a letter grade under the new rules.

Blitzstein’s QRD amendment passed unanimously.

The final approval of the two proposals concluded a process that began in September, when the Gen Ed standing committee announced it had unanimously decided to eliminate the pass-fail option. In October, the Gen Ed program also changed its guidelines to curb grade inflation and standardize grading across courses.

The proposals are part of a wider effort to refocus Harvard undergraduates on academics.

At the March faculty meeting, the FAS voted overwhelmingly to amend the College student handbook to instruct students to focus on their classes. The amendment was proposed by a recent FAS committee report on classroom norms, which found that many students prioritize their classes far less than their extracurricular clubs and athletics.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.