Who’s Afraid of Grading?

During my sophomore spring, I took two courses in which — I am almost certain — every student got an A.

One was part of a year-long tutorial for an increasingly popular interdisciplinary social sciences concentration. Every week, students were tasked with reading a classic text of social theory. Invariably, class discussions would start with 30-minute-long icebreakers, as if the instructor wanted to delay the obvious (yet performatively unacknowledged) reality: Almost no one had done the assigned readings.

The other was a challenging seminar whose members had been selected through a competitive application process. Every week, students would write approximately 400-word responses to foundational texts in moral philosophy, devise even longer solutions to ethical case studies, and meet with peers to discuss ideas outside of the classroom. Every student did outstanding work because, from the very beginning, it was clear that we were expected to.

Merely looking at the ratio of students getting an A in either class would raise concerns of so-called grade inflation. However, such a quantitative focus overlooks an evident truth: While the first course felt like a disappointing failure, the second was, without doubt, a pedagogical success.

As attempts to recenter academics at Harvard continue, we shouldn’t track changes in grade ratios as a proxy for improving conditions. To combat grade inflation, we must see it for what it truly is: not a high number of A’s, but a problem of undeserved praise.

Last October, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh published a now-infamous report showing that, last academic year, 60.2 percent of grades awarded to undergraduate students were in the A range. The report sought to emphasize that something about the College’s pedagogical practices had gone awfully wrong: Current practices are “failing to perform the key functions of grading,” Dean Claybaugh wrote.

According to the report, the functions of grading include motivation, information, and distinction: A’s push students to work harder, communicate subject command, and enable those on prize and graduate school admissions committees to identify the best of the best.

Of these three functions, I argue, only the second is pedagogically significant — information. Grades should tell the truth about students and their level of expertise.

On the one hand, conceiving of grades as tools for motivation takes attention away from what should be the purpose of an education: learning. Literary critic Gayatri Spivak once said that “the task of a teacher is to provide a non-coercive rearrangement of desire,” by which she meant that the role of the pedagogue is to make students so curious that they incessantly crave new knowledge.

The grade may remain a signal of subject mastery, but the moment we expect it to motivate, we encourage students to pursue excellence for the wrong object: the letter, not the learning.

On the other hand, using grades as instruments for distinction provides an incomplete picture of student work. Just like we weren’t accepted into Harvard solely because of our grades and test scores, academic distinctions meant to reward students should not be based on numbers alone.

Metrics might be insufficient to differentiate students, and while an easy fix to this problem might be to adjust grading policies so that only a few get A’s, the better solution is to make award-granting practices more holistic. As such, eliminating essays and letters of recommendation from the Phi Beta Kappa election process was, for instance, a move in the wrong direction.

Ideally, grades should serve as an epistemic thermometer; they should measure the degree to which students demonstrate mastery of knowledge in a given subject, based on what their professors expect from them.

Therefore, whenever we hear the words “grade inflation,” we shouldn’t fear that too many students are getting good grades. Lest we think of grades as mere instruments to tell students apart, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with everyone getting an A.

Put simply, inflation is only a problem when bad students receive good grades.

Indeed, whenever a professor awards an unmerited good grade, she is effectively committing an epistemic wrong to her students. “You have done exceptionally,” she seems to tell them, when what she should be emphasizing is the mediocrity of their work.

But grade deflation is no better. In imposing artificial quotas, a professor risks harming her students in the opposite direction. She lies and tells them that their work is inadequate, even when it might be worthy of her praise.

A friend recently told me that his Expository Writing 40: “Public Speaking Practicum” professor started the course this semester by disclaiming that not everyone in the class would be getting an A. “I want to keep my job,” the instructor told them, and his promise to grade harshly is, to me, a misguided prescription.

To start a class in this manner sends an undesirable message to students. Why would a Harvard professor ever express that the performance he is expecting from some of his students should be any less than excellent?

Claybaugh’s efforts are noble and necessary — the College must ensure that only deserving undergraduates get good grades. But if you, professors, let that lower your expectations for your students, you produce the very failure that the report laments: grades that no longer inform, students that no longer feel motivated to learn.

Andrés Muedano ’27, an Associate Editorial editor, is a Philosophy concentrator in Adams House.