Dissent: Grade Inflation Won’t Fix Itself

At Harvard, A’s come a dime a dozen. The problem isn’t that students have suddenly become exceptional — it’s that the grading system has stopped doing its job.

The watering down of our grading system poses a serious problem on Harvard’s campus. It erodes pedagogy and cheapens the academic experience. In response, a faculty committee has proposed capping the proportion of top marks a course may issue at 20 percent, plus an extra four to mitigate effects on small courses.

The Editorial Board acknowledges, correctly, that grade inflation is a problem, but opposes the committee’s proposal based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of this problem — therefore, we dissent.

The Board argues that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of grade inflation, and that the solution instead lies in restoring rigor on a lower, more decentralized level. Grade inflation, however, is by-and-large a collective action dilemma.

Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh’s October report on recentering academics describes how some faculty see competition from students as “a race to the bottom,” keeping grades inflated for fear of empty classrooms or poor student evaluations.

Problems of collective action must be addressed collectively. That means that any solution to grade inflation on campus must be fundamentally centralized, coordinated, and sufficiently uniform in nature. We need a solution that’s binding on all courses — one that goes beyond telling departments and professors to up the rigor — or the collective action problem will remain.

Any fix that applies to both Statistics 110: “Introduction to Probability” and GENED 1074: “The Ancient Greek Hero” (also known as heroes for zeros) will be awkward, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth pursuing. We’re concerned the Editorial Board makes perfect the enemy of the good.

The Board writes that the proposal will undermine learning by fostering a culture of competition among students, and that it fails to address the root cause of grade inflation, for which it faults ambiguous conceptions of mastery and distinction.

We share the view that, as the Board has stated in the past, grading ought to evaluate mastery, and that mastery is absolute and not limited to a fixed distribution of A grades. We also agree that the 20 percent cap is arbitrary and won’t fix pedagogy overnight. But contra the Board’s contention that grade inflation is an impossible problem, we believe improvements can and should be made.

Although it targets a relative distribution rather than a universal standard, the proposal is directionally correct. Whatever your conception of academic mastery, you’d be hard pressed to extend it north of 60 percent of the student body. While we’re skeptical that a change that’s only going to affect a minority of courses would radically upend the campus environment, we expect the cap to bring the number of A’s closer to the number of students whose work merits them.

The proposal is not perfect, but perfection is not the standard. Grade inflation is a collective problem, and we’re glad to see the College treating it like one.

Amelia F. Barnum ’28, an Associate Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Winthrop House. Benjamin Isaac ’27, an Associate Editorial Editor, is a Government and Economics concentrator in Quincy House. Catherine E.F. Previn ’27, an Associate Editorial editor, is a Government concentrator in Lowell House.

Dissenting Opinions: Occasionally, The Crimson Editorial Board is divided about the opinion we express in a staff editorial. In these cases, dissenting board members have the opportunity to express their opposition to staff opinion.