An Unsatisfactory Grading Policy

The newest changes to Harvard’s proposed grading policy prove to be simultaneously overcomplicated and underconvincing.

On Monday, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh announced the latest round of updates to a contentious proposal to reduce grade inflation. Most notably, the reform delays the proposal’s enactment, if passed, until the fall of 2027 and introduces a “SAT+” grade atop the satisfactory/unsatisfactory system for courses opting out of the 20 percent-plus-four cap on A grades. The policy will be voted on by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences this Tuesday.

Regardless of where you stand on the proposal, neither the SAT+ nor the delay makes much sense. Although we have argued against the cap on A grades, the newest updates are at odds with the stated goals of the primary proposal.

The purpose of a class being graded on a SAT/UNSAT basis should be to let learning be its own reward. It’s telling that Harvard courses graded in this manner tend to be small, close-knit courses like first-year seminars and thesis tutorials where collaborative learning takes precedence over individual achievement.

In neither case do grades — or grade-like systems — add anything. In first-year seminars, the aim is to reduce the pressure on new students and allow them to explore intellectually. In junior and senior tutorials, advanced concentrators are already expected to possess the intrinsic motivation a grade might add. In both situations, the format itself already offers the rich feedback that grades aim to foster.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Originally, the proposal on grading reform allowed professors to opt out of the cap on A grades only by electing their course on a SAT/UNSAT basis. This would provide professors the option to evade using distinction, peer comparison, and alphanumeric evaluation as the basis of their grading.

Perhaps there are faculty who hope to both distinguish their top students and avoid the standard grading system — but in catering to this group, the revised proposal unloads the problem onto the tutorials and first-year seminars that were proceeding fine beforehand.

Harvard already has a grading tool which serves to distinguish between rival students. It’s called a letter grade. If the cap on A grades is sufficient, letter grades ought to be sufficient at achieving distinction. We don’t need two grading scales that differ in wording alone.

Pushing the policy back a year is also a mistake. The culture surrounding grading at Harvard has become one in which perfection is expected, and the aim should be to dislodge this norm as swiftly as possible.

More concerningly, delaying the implementation of structural grading reform creates a roughly seventeen-month period, in which some professors will choose to become much harsher in their grading and others will wait until they are forced to. There is already reason to believe that some faculty are grading harder in response to the original proposal, with the number of flat A grades awarded last fall decreasing by nearly seven percentage points from the academic year prior.

When coupled with the mixed responses from faculty concerning proposed grading reform, that decrease suggests that the delay will result in the grading practices of professors changing inconsistently in the coming academic year. This discrepancy would be antithetical to the very standardization the grading policy is attempting to enforce, especially considering the fact that the proposal is rooted in a conception of grade inflation as a collective action problem.

A more useful change might be to allow more advanced classes — such as Mathematics 55, the Safra Undergraduate Ethics Fellowship Seminar, or Physics 16: “Mechanics and Special Relativity” — to petition the FAS for an exemption from the cap on A grades altogether. Distinction makes less sense as a goal in small, selective classrooms full of already distinguished students.

We welcome continued updates to the grading proposal, and we applaud administrators for seeking feedback and being willing to update their ideas in response to it. But we’re not sure they got it right this time.

We didn’t think the original grading proposal was great. A delayed, convoluted version might be worse.

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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