Harvard Needs a Philosophy of Grading

Following reports of grade inflation, Harvard has delivered a hike in the interest rate.

Last Monday, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh wrote in an email to faculty that the share of A grades fell by nearly seven percentage points. The email follows Claybaugh’s initial October report, which flagged a steep rise in the amount of A’s: roughly 60 percent of awarded grades made the academic top shelf, up from just a quarter of grades twenty years ago.

When Claybaugh first brought attention to the extent of grade inflation, we argued that Harvard needed to take the issue seriously — but that the mechanisms it proposed to do so require close scrutiny. We’re not so sure that the University has provided it.

Even though Claybaugh’s communiqué has taken pains to declare that grades should mean something, Harvard has not effectively coordinated a shared standard for how that meaning should translate across vastly different classrooms.

The inevitable result is little more than the hazy, impressionistic shift in grading we’ve now witnessed. A single signal from University Hall alone can only refract unevenly as it travels outward: some faculty will grade harsher, others will hesitate to, and still others will guess at what grades should look like in their corner of Harvard — all the while students are left to discover if and where the rules have changed.

Agreeing on a definition is difficult — implementing it across a wide and specialized university is harder still. But to save grading from itself, it’s what needs to be done.

So far, the most visible “change” has been the number of A’s itself. Who’s to say whether our single semester’s worth of data tells us grades now better reflect learning, rigor, and mastery — or whether they reflect overcorrection, confusion, and institutional whiplash?

So while we trust that the faculty assigning lower grades are making good-faith decisions on assessing their students, we worry that the absence of a clearly articulated framework turns even good intentions into an uneven, confusing, and ultimately unsustainable grading landscape.

And if the grading debate fixates on how high to set a single figure — like the share of A’s — we’ve missed the point. Grades should measure mastery. Statistics about grades should help diagnose whether that mastery is taking place. But improving pedagogy — not manipulating averages — should be the goal.

Indeed, the changes ahead for Harvard’s academic climate will likely drop the number of A’s, but real pedagogical improvements will not always show up neatly in easily telegraphed figures.

And while concerns about graduate school and the job market are real, Harvard students have come to treat grades as destiny. The recent drop in A’s, unsettling as it may feel, is an opportunity to take a step back and remember that imperfection is not failure.

Harvard is not one classroom, and it should not grade like one. No single reform — nor a simple shift in the mean — means grade inflation is solved.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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