The Harvard Crimson on Thursday reported that 79 percent of grades given to Harvard students in 2020-21 were in the A range. That is an increase of 20 percent over the last decade.
It leaves the question of not how difficult it is to flunk out of Harvard but how difficult it is not to excel. Faculty have apparently solved any equity issues by making everyone a top student. The problem was raised in the movie “The Incredibles,” when the villainous character “Syndrome” reveals a plan to make everyone a superhero. Syndrome’s motive is hardly altruistic: He hated superheroes and “with everyone super, no one will be.”
In 2010, 60 percent of Harvard students were given grades in the A range and that was viewed at the time as rather scandalous. Now, to not get an A, is apparently a shocker.Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh and Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana reportedly presented the data at the first meeting this year of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Claybaugh admitted that the “report establishes we have a problem — or rather, we have two: the intertwined problems of grade inflation and compression.”
She noted that the effort to secure better teaching evaluations may be driving the upward shift. She also noted that it obviously “complicates selection processes for prizes, fellowships, or induction into Phi Beta Kappa, which rely heavily on students’ grade point averages.”In other words, to paraphrase Syndrome: “With everyone an A student, no one will be.”
Yet, the suggestions on how to deal with the problem were even more bizarre. Romance languages and literatures Professor Annabel Kim suggested the “abolition of grading” and the institution of “narrative-based” evaluations.It is not clear how employers would be informed of the narrative-based performance of students in school.
On this trajectory, Harvard will be at 100 percent As in year 2033. It may seem the perfect grading system for a trophy generation. However, my students have long objected that they never wanted the trophies. It is not their generational problem, it is ours. We resolved the struggle over tough decisions by not making them.
What is interesting is that Harvard is creating an effective three-grade system where the curve runs from A+ to A-.
The new report seems to vindicate William F. Buckley, Jr. when he declared “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”
As I said earlier, employers recruiting at Harvard are like a man fishing in a septic tank; he won’t like what he catches spread on his dinner plate even if it is decorated with a sprig of parsely.
And if we get a sane president next time around he should look for graduates from other law schools when searching for federal judge appointments. We already have too many judges more concerned with ‘equity’ than with law.
The NY Post has an article on difficult, entitled, fragile new employees imbued with Harvard values spewed into other schools.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/25/employers-reveal-why-gen-z-is-hardest-generation-to-work-with
Yea. Them Harvard grads is pretty retarded. True. Plus. never met nobody who was jealous of them boys and girls, neither. Buunch of Moooronns.
Being smart [and not all of those in Harvard are] is not the only thing.
It is also important to have a moral compass.
Hitler was very smart but as for his morality…..
And Hitler would make a good Harvard student these days. He would fit right in with many students and faculty, prized for his eloquence, organizing ability and, especially, for his solution to “the Jewish Question”.
Young– Exactly. Apparently though, the A+ students at Harvard were not quick enough to realize that signing on to a letter praising those who murdered babies might have repercussions… like future employment. Obviously, many universities today consider a moral compass to be an impediment to diversity, equity and inclusion; otherwise, they would include in their lectures things like the immorality of indiscriminate violence directed at innocent people such as that practiced by Antifa and BLM in this country or Hamas in Gaza.
Honest– “the A+ students at Harvard were not quick enough to realize that signing on to a letter praising those who murdered babies might have repercussions… like future employment.”
+++
True, but they have been praised so often by their peers and faculty for virtue signaling like this that it never occurred to them that there was a line they shouldn’t cross. So they missed it when they bounded over expecting more cheers. The Muslim students are a different matter–I think they knew and wanted to rub it in. Either way, it seems all of them have extinguished their souls. I hope they have also extinguished their careers.
No grading diversity at Harvard.
aint many smart folks younder.
Is this any different from out public schools where they dare not fail someone for not showing up in class or handing in assignments? We must make our unionized faculty look effective and we must prove that anyone of color can get an A if they are not discriminated against? What a farce and what a beginning to an end of a culture (white culture, that is, as we can see the results of a multicultural equity culture daily on any news site).
It is the perfect storm to screw up students: 1. Exorbitant tuition, 2. Sense of superiority and entitlement, 3. Disconnect between performance and recognition, 4. System that does not prepare them for working in the real world, 5. Employers who want value for hiring people and reward performance without participation trophies. At some point, a lawyer (maybe from Harvard) will file a law suit for breach of contract in that they school through its intentional actions diminished the value of their education. We’ll see!
‘We resolved the struggle over tough decisions by not making them.’
Damn straight, and a great, great many of our current ills are the result. It’s time to stop the madness, but if gen z are any indication – it’s only getting worse. I honestly do not know how we fully course correct, but these conversations are a good start if we want to have a future. Those who chose to abdicate their challenges did so without the foresight that they would have to live in the world they were creating too, and this mentality has been rampantly pervasive in the 21st century.
James,
Also have witnessed “Leadership by committee.” The committee makes a decision, turns out to be a bad one, it was the nameless committee that made the decision. The bad decision is ignored and quietly goes away.
Or so they hope.
Gen Z has been found to be the hardest generation to work with: https://nypost.com/2023/04/25/employers-reveal-why-gen-z-is-hardest-generation-to-work-with/
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gen-z-most-challenging-generation-190008042.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9ndWNlLnlhaG9vLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAABe_JxORyy6EXRfyh-0pUxlN1eFFHSm664HA3oJoYpquzzMwSVxJxuQajzsP49kVtKTOgfDJ_nOYj1AHZzSL2DcD-1UI8NC2JioTf7RUr3b6R-cpogkJ-hHYddbnpq4zPI-8swtHEsy10DLZzGcHCtcPIavFpeNGqbscMR4jpdpu
A good friend of mine is a teacher. She says that generation is even worse.
@Upstate
My wife and sister in-law are, too, and they concur. So do I with my own involvement due to my relationships. This is not getting better, it is not going to go away, and I don’t know how we fix it, honestly. We can improve curricula, change school types, vet teachers all we want; it won’t mean diddly so long as parents continue to devalue education and abdicate parental roles and responsibilities. People LOVE to broadcast this about minority parents, but I can assure you it’s across the board, privileged to poor, culture to culture, coast to coast, and it’s multi-generational at this point. Naturally, politics don’t help, but they are only part of the problem. If we continue to keep passing failing students, eventually things are just going to collapse all at once. We probably need to bring back remedial education, but at this point, that is 75% of students. 😐
James,
Seems to me the solution is bringing back the nuclear family and the values that go along with it. Then get politics out of schools. Enable parents involvement in their child’s education to include they have a degree of responsibility. Bring back meritocracy, strive, excellence, standards. Help those who need help to achieve. Get smartphones out of schools. Teach critical thinking and not just how to pass a standardized test. Hire the best and brightest teachers whom can do exactly that.
But, somehow, that would be racist.
Otherwise, prepare for the collapse.
Remedial education. That is how colleges and universities get an extra year or two of tuition out of students with remedial classes.
@Upstate
I don’t disagree; by the time they get to university these days it is purely a money-making proposition, but I’m talking remedial primary education. This year my wife has some seventh graders that are still at 3rd grade level or lower, and though that does match the covid timeline, it has been a consistent progression since before then, and they will passed all the way through high school. And she has taught in various districts in Manhattan, California, and New Mexico. My sister in-law is in Colorado. If you’ll bear with me – I also have cousins (yeah, a lot of educators in the family 😂) that teach in Michigan and Texas – all of these folks are telling the same story, and it is absolutely not restricted to migrant children, though yes, those kids are always very, very low. As far as the Ivy Leagues go, those here who are alma mater may have been part of some the last classes at those schools that were truly exceptional, this stuff spans at least a couple of decades at this point, there used to be some semblance of balance between leftism and the rest, though it has really come to a head only with more recent generations.
James,
Thank you for the insight into the education system.
Given your reporting, I would have to say home schooling would be the best answer for those who care about their children’s education.
Looking at the larger picture of public and even higher education, prepare for the collapse. It is those whom were home schooled that will be the real future leaders.
All others will be useless eaters, useful idiots and fine cult followers never amounting to anything other than their own demise.
Hopefully so.
It is not clear how employers would be informed of the narrative-based performance of students in school.
Most Harvard faculty are not concerned with their students’ employment. When I was an undergraduate there many decades ago, the faculty attitude was roughly, “we’re not a vocational school, we’re only interested in knowledge for its own sake.” I’m not passing judgment on that, just pointing it out.
One thing is certain, though, the undergrads who do not plan on getting a PhD in a useful field are concerned about employment. Those who do go on to get a PhD in a useful field know they will have no worries on that front.
Bari Weiss’s Common Sense had an article about how cheating has increased on college campuses.
Watched a documentary on Harvard a few years ago pre-SJW. The gist was get in, pass your Freshman year then after that, they would pass you no matter what to keep their graduation rates up.
Higher education is a business. People are paying for reputation or could we say “influence” of a degree from a university.
Nowadays, I would question the value of higher education.
“I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory . . .”
The first 400 people in the phone book would also be all A’s. Just sayin.
Also- do not forget behind every international political disaster stands a Harvard graduate….
ROTFLMAO!
Harvard was debased long ago.
Institutions that bar people on the basis of their religion or race (then try to over compensate when caught) and then crank out incompetents like the Kennedys, Tribe the Apparent Plagiarist , Obama the Confused and Ketanji Brown Jackson the Lightweight reveal themselves to be houses of worship for sycophants.
If you graduate from Harvard, you consider yourself to be a legend in your own mind and in the minds of your fellow sycophants but to the rest of us, as this article demonstrates, you are presumed incompetents. Harvard is now a proven paradigm for the concept of ‘mental masturbation’.
The premise of inflated status instituted for the purpose of leveling influence antedates the 2004 film Professor Turley references by at least 115 years. W.S. Gilbert’s libretto for The Gondoliers, or The King of Barataria, includes the lyric, “When everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody.”
Six years ago I flunked one-third of a thermodynamics class because they cheated on their final exam. The person punished was me. I had to fill out many repetitious, detailed complaints and explanations, attended hearings for appeals, and even had to deal with a judge, a friend of the governor, who got the general counsel involved. It took for than year to resolve it all. I still carry the reputation of a “very bad person” with the athletic departments.
This problem of grade inflation/compression began with the colleges of education in the 1960s and 1970s. Look what it has wrought. It is now spreading to all of higher ed. Narrative based grades! What a kidder.
I believe it must go back prior even to the 60s. In his book Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) C.S. Lewis makes fun of similar progressive-education trends in England.
That is interesting. I wouldn’t know personally about what was happening earlier than, say, 1970. But it is a problem with adults unable to make hard decisions and young people who become accustomed to low expectations. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Harvard is a very selective school, and one must be an academic overachiever to get in. Thus it should be expected that students at Harvard excel academically. If Harvard students are not getting mostly As then that would be a problem. Same thing with PhD programs, there is an expectation that all students perform at a high level. I think Turley is coming from a perspective where the students at his school are not of the highest caliber.
Yea. The University of Chicago is really just a community college. Uh-huh.
If only that were true
What is true is that Harvard is in oh so many ways devaluing their degree
They can go a while on past laurels but eventually as woke graduates can not perform up to expectations
The value of a Harvard degree will decline
Today I would be reluctant to hire a Harvard graduate
If everyone is getting an A, or close to everyone, the class is too easy. Even schoolchildren understand this, and will complain if everyone in the class is getting an A.
Since people have a wide range of ability and capability and intellect, there should be a wide range of grades in any given testing situation.
@Sammy
Your statement is one of the most naive comments to date. Either you are a Harvard grad or your knowledge and experience of how Harvard or any university works comes from sitcoms or the like.
(Had a chance to look up the Espionage Act yet, Sammy?)
Sammy is not a Harvard grad, I guarantee it. If he were, he would never have made such a patently false statement.
Eighty percent. Eighty.
Here we’ve been told that the value of these “elite” institutions is that their students can handle a more demanding education, and therefore the education they receive is more demanding than that received by those at, say, San José State. If this were true, there ought to be more of a normal curve in grades, just at a higher level of difficulty. I’ll grant you a curve skewed somewhat to the right, since one can only make certain subjects so much more difficult at the undergrad level, but eighty percent ain’t close to normal.
So in other words… the value of a Harvard education was always just that you got in, hmm?
In the future prospective clients better read the sheep skins hanging on the wall carefully. Apparently from this article you’ll be served as well if it reads “Graduate with Honors from Professor Hornblowers School of Law”.
This could also be explained if the university truly admitted deeply motivated students based on their academic merit (the applicant pool is large) and if the testing were criterion based and objective. If that were the case then it would be expedient for the university to up its game.
As mentioned by a previous post, one should look at the percentage of students who pass exit testing such as the bar, medical boards, etc. on first try or the GRE, LSAT, MCAT , etc. for the undergrads.
The proudest grade I ever got in undergrad was a C. That was one of the most challenging courses and the toughest professor I ever encountered. He set down a foundation of knowledge that paid off in subsequent coursework.
If a teacher/professor or an institution of learning does not fully challenge their students they are cheating them from realizing their full potential. There is something in the human spirit that makes it satisfying to be challenged and to realize excellence.
Good heavens! No wonder these students feel entitled and privileged — they’re so accustomed to being told their every thought and opinion is A-quality that they recoil in horror at the idea that this might not be so in the real world. I’m old enough to remember hearing from my college professors that they graded on a curve, with a comparatively small percentage getting As, a bit more receiving a B, most students getting a C, and so forth. It was tough love but meant that getting an A was a real accomplishment and not an entitlement.
I too went through school systems under the bell curve grading system. Only the most studious and or brightest students got As. Because everyone had to study more, students graduated more knowledgeable. Graduating with all As was rare and certainly an honor.
“79 percent of grades given to Harvard students in 2020-21 were in the A range.”
When I pointed out that such inflation guts the value of an “A,” here was the reply:
But other schools do it. And if we don’t do it, too, our graduates will suffer in the job market.
As if employers are too ignorant to realize which schools inflate grades. And are too stupid to discount those grades.
Sam
The opposite is true
Employers value a Harvard degree and grades because of the excellence those assure
Being less selective and giving out a’s like candy devalues the degree
It’s only a matter of time before the A minus students complain about the minus.
@Dennis: RE:” The MCAT, GRE, LSAT, and GMAT separate the wheat from the chaf.” Perhaps, They exist only to serve the hands which feed them.
What about the hard sciences? Sooner or later the rubber meets the road. The MCAT, GRE, LSAT, and GMAT separate the wheat from the chaf. In a way though, this sort of makes sense. If you are admitting students with SAT’s at near 1600, it may be expected that they will all excel. It would be interesting to know how a student’s GPA correlates to his/her SAT score. Another related area of interest: what is the percentage of A’s given out at non elite universities?
I went to Rice. At least when I was there the official policy was that the mean grade was a B-. So 50% of grades given were B- or below. (SAT range 1490-1570 while Harvard is 1480-1580 for the middle 50%)
I believe that Harvard has a policy that no grades below a B are to ever be given. If someone is doing worse they retake the class. Most universities has deadlines to drop a class so that its grade doesn’t count.
The issue is when applying for jobs or graduate schools you cannot distinguish between students equally. What is a A at Harvard worth when 80% get A’s? Sure it is a hard school to get in but their admissions stopped focusing on academics and has focused on diversity for years. I’m not saying that these are not smart kids but when you drop your admission standards in exchange of diversity and then give everyone the same grades what does that say about your graduates?
How hard do your students work when they know that if they just get along they will get an A. That doesn’t happen at most other institutions.
Maybe the professors are teaching courses at a much lower level of rigor.
@Anonymous: Re:”How hard do your students work when they know that if they just get along they will get an A. That doesn’t happen at most other institutions.” It’s been said that ‘there’s Harvard, and then there’s the rest’. That was thinking 30 years ago when my son applied there, and was ultimately graduated with a degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. He had the ‘right stuff’ then, and has gone on to excel in his field of endeavor and a second startup to boot. The substance of your observation may foreshadow the decline of Harvard as an example of excellence. Their efforts in achieving diversity resulting in nothing more than sameness, with no way of distinguishing wheat from chaff.
I recently listened to Joe Rogan interview Sam Altman as I drove to Duke from Richmond for a cardiology meeting. Altman is the CEO of OpenAI (e.g. ChatGPT). The drive is tedious and I presumed the interview would stimulate me intellectually. I listened for 45 mins out of 3 hours only because I kept thinking Altman would show his intellectual bona fides. Nope. I switched to rock music to keep me awake on my drive. Joe Rogan did not help either.
Aside from Altman being a Stanford dropout, it struck me that these “wiz kids” display low scores when it comes Emotional Quotient. Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout, Steve Jobs, a Reed College college dropout, Bill Gates, a Harvard dropout, all have founded profitable companies by making Americans dumber and more like them – asocial. I worry that people no longer possess interpersonal skills to communicate, lead, accompany, comfort, move others. When people lack basic interpersonal skills, it follows that civilizations collapse. Imagine if cell-cell signaling stopped. There would be instant death.
Im less interested in a person’s educational pedigree or GPA, but rather on whether they can engage people face to face, listen, respond, and meet goals (personal, societal, career, organizational, shared goals). My most recent interactions with MDs and PhDs when it comes to understanding molecular mechanisms of pathology or basic physiology in homeostasis are worrisome. In the medical sciences we are stuck in antiquated medical paradigms, and recent grads from medical school, Medical Residency, Fellowship training do not inspire. Algorithms are all they are capable of following while never looking at the patient eye to eye for a meaningful amount of time.