The Atlantic published this story yesterday about grade inflation at Harvard of all places. It opens with members of the faculty bursting into laughter when someone read out the average GPA of graduating students.
During their final meeting of the spring 2024 semester, after an academic year marked by controversies, infighting, and the defenestration of the university president, Harvard’s faculty burst out laughing. As was tradition, the then-dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, had been providing updates on the graduating class. When he got to GPA, Khurana couldn’t help but chuckle at how ludicrously high it was: about 3.8 on average. The rest of the room soon joined in, according to a professor present at the meeting.
They were cracking up not simply because grades had gotten so high but because they knew just how little students were doing to earn them.
It's not hard to figure out why professors at Harvard have gone along with this grade inflation trend. Once everyone else starts doing it, the hold outs quickly get a reputation as professors to avoid. Why sign up for a class where the professor might give you a C?
Few professors want to be known as harsh graders, with the accompanying poor evaluations and low course enrollments. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker told me that, 20 years ago, he gave a quarter of the students in his intro psych course an A or A–. Then students stopped signing up. Now almost two-thirds of the class are in the A range.
The pandemic only made matters worse. In 2011, 60 percent of all grades at Harvard were in the A range (up from 33 percent in 1985). By the 2020–21 academic year, that share had risen to 79 percent.
If 79 percent of the students are getting an A, the grades don't mean anything. And indeed an unnamed professor told the dean of undergraduate education, Amanda Claybaugh, the grades were not about the work being turned in. The grades were about equity (though the professor didn't use that word).
Claybaugh recalled a recent talk with an experienced science professor who told her that some students get A’s for excellent work. Others get the mark because they’re from less-privileged backgrounds and demonstrated improvement throughout the semester. And still others get A’s because they were doing strong work before a mental-health crisis derailed their progress. “So pretty much everyone gets A’s,” Claybaugh told me. “That’s where we’ve ended up.”
The most interesting part of the story is that easy-As don't appear to have reduced the level of stress on campus. On the contrary, the hyper-competitive kids who get into Harvard seem to find it more stressful. Having competed for top marks their entire lives, they suddenly find very little is required. As a result many students eager to distingush themselves wind up joining competitive clubs within Harvard.
This has created what Claybaugh called a “shadow system of distinction.” Students now use extracurriculars to differentiate themselves from their peers. They’ve created a network of finance and consulting clubs that are almost indistinguishable from full-time jobs. To apply, students submit résumés, sit for interviews, and prepare a fake case or deliverable. At this point, the odds of getting into some clubs within Harvard are similar to the odds of being accepted to the college in the first place. The Harvard junior told me that she hadn’t considered going into consulting or investment banking before she arrived in Cambridge. But because the clubs are so exclusive, everyone wants to be chosen. She ended up applying. “There are a handful of clubs that you can just join, but the clubs people want to join are typically not the clubs everyone can join,” she told me. “Even volunteering clubs or service-oriented clubs have an application process. They’re highly competitive.” Things have gotten to the point where some students feel guilty for focusing on schoolwork at the expense of extracurriculars, she told me.
Kids who want to compete and excel don't really feel right about being given As for nothing. They want things to be hard. They want to be challenged and will create their own challenges if the school isn't offering any.
Harvard is now trying to change all of this by toning down the grade inflation. But the article notes that other schools have tried this and failed. Princeton tried setting a cap of the number of As in each class at 35%. However: "It abandoned the effort after a 2014 faculty report found, among other things, that the policy made it harder to recruit students, particularly student athletes."
The same pressure that pushes professors to give out more top grades works on entire schools as well. Applicants may eventually discover that easy As don't fulfill them or make them feel any sense of real accomplishment, but they may not know that when they are high school seniors.
The bottom line is that if you get into Harvard it should be because you have some outstanding ability and some discipline. You get there because you learned how to compete in high school and win. Those are the last people who should be given participation trophies in college. Make the challenges harder and the best students will thrive.
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