A recent article in The Atlantic contained a notable account of the final meeting of the Spring 2024 semester for Harvard’s college faculty. As part of his annual report, then-Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana could not keep a straight face when reporting that the average grade at the school was now 3.8. As Khurana chuckled at the lunacy of an average of an A, the rest of the faculty joined in the laughter. It appears that, after years of runaway grade inflation, Harvard’s grading system has become a bad joke even among its own faculty.
All schools have experienced grade inflation, which is often mandated by grading curves that prevent faculty from assigning more accurate grades. Harvard has long been the leader in this race to the top. The ripple effect is that other schools have sought to match the generous grading to appease students who are used to such generous grading standards from high school. The result at Harvard is that the grading scale runs from A to A+.
Here is the account in the article:
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.
Harvard is not alone. As we previously discussed, Yale was at 80 percent years ago. We also previously discussed how, at Spellman College, economics professor Kendrick Morales was fired after objecting to the school raising his grades without his consent, even after the grades were massively increased.Morales worked for two years at Spellman, teaching two upper-level courses. In one class, he added a 28-point grade bump for one test at the request of his department chair.
When students overall performed poorly on the final, Morales “pre-emptively” raised their scores by 36 points, so that a student receiving a 57 would receive an A. Yet, even with that increase, 44 percent of that class would still fail. Indeed, they had failed, but Morales says that Undergraduate Studies Dean Desiree Pedescleaux bumped up the students’ grades again without his approval.
Grade inflation is only the latest sign of how school administrators have lost control of universities and colleges. It also reflects a growing expectation among students for higher GPAs. Schools now attract applicants and professors attract students with assurances that virtually everyone will receive an A.
It is easy to say that this is the byproduct of the “trophy generation,” but this is not their fault. Years ago, I had an interesting conversation with one of my classes over this negative image and one student said that they never wanted participation trophies. She noted it was my generation that wanted them to have them, not the kids. Another student said that she would routinely throw away trophies as meaningless and insulting.
The same could well prove true for grades, which will become worthless and discarded if this trend continues. That will undermine the critical role of universities in evaluating student performance. That role not only helps future employers. It is even more important in offering students an accurate appraisal of their work. Often students will pursue degrees for the wrong reasons and not consider other fields that may be better suited to their talents and interests.
Harvard’s grading wipes out any distinctions between students in a system that only the character Syndrome would celebrate:
We are also producing future workers who have been coddled within a system that does little beyond praising and pandering them. Once they enter the workforce in an increasingly competitive market, they can find a shocker as their performance is actually measured and compared to others.
This generation of administrators and faculty have destroyed the credibility and integrity of higher education because it lacks the courage to maintain academic standards. Instead, faculty now just laugh at their own lunacy.
When John F. Kennedy was given an honorary degree at Yale, he quipped “it might be said now that I have the best of both worlds. A Harvard education and a Yale degree.” The question is whether the Harvard education or the Yale degree hold much distinction when you receive an A by just showing up to class.
JFK mis-spoke: he may have received an “indoctrination” at Hah-vahdh, but he could not have received an “education.” That intellectually obese institution jettisoned the role of an educational institution decades before JFK’s arrival there. Ve ri tas.
Just more reasons why these expensive degrees are WORTHLESS, and not worth the paper they are written on.
You can always tell a Harvard man, you just can’t tell him much.
Very true. 🙂
Mortimer Adler used to have a Great Thinkers course at the University of Chicago and years ago he also had a series on PBS that was very enlightening AND entertaining. Of course if you tried to have the same course today you would be pilloried for pushing Western thinkers (aka white men) and you would be replaced by such “classics” as the 1619 Project, Ta nehisi Coates and Ibram X Kendi, 3 “great thinkers” that will surely live on longer than those lightweights like Aristotle, Plato, Socrates and Shakespeare.
This is today’s education in a nutshell.
Rarely do I see Adler’s name mentioned anywhere. He was one of my favorites. I’ll have to see if I can find the PBS series, if it still surfaces from time to time.
Now that you say that I think I will look for it again too. It was educational and really entertaining.
A rule of nature: no incentive, no accomplishment.
Solutions? A big part of the solution is to understand how incentives were changed to bring about a situation in which professors would not only go along with but actively promote such grade inflation. Using top down rules and regulations will fail to change things. The core incentive is the schools access to free money – student loan funds. A normal lender / borrowing relationship has self correction consequences and incentives to lend/borrow more wisely built in. The student loan system allows the lender to recover money (government guarantees) and separates the borrower into one group the graduates with all the consequences and a second the schools who receive the money and zero consequences when there is a default. The school loves free money and its incentives shift from a goal to maintain high standards (e.g. an accurate grading system) to treating students as customers and profit centers (give out high grades to keep the students). Admission standards are lowered. Students are coddled and every effort extended to keep them borrowing and attending until graduation. The school gets the money regardless of the major, or the quality of instruction, or what happens to the student once they leave. The solution is to put a consequence on the school for loan defaults e.g. 5% or 20%, the default penalty would be adjusted to ensure results. A penalty on the school will force its management in order to avoid bankruptcy to get very involved in admitting quality students, that professors are grading accurately, that failing students are removed as soon as possible, that majors that do not produce graduates who can repay the loans are not allowed, etc. New managements would take over looking to eradicate the woke mind virus. STEM majors and quality teaching would come to the fore (a shift back to teaching how to think vs indoctrination), and woke professors, grievance majors, activist students (and the woke bureaucracy that supports them) would become too expensive to tolerate. Grade schools through high schools would adopt meritorious grading and teaching would improve in order to meet the stiffer admissions standards at the college level. This free money through student loans is a big part that creates education cost increases and putting a price on defaults would promote education deflation.
Scientist Stephen Hawking gave a speech at MIT
The real information flow in human speech is little. In the case of political speeches, it is practically zero.
Look up Professor Harvey C. Mansfield who addressed this problem back in the 1970’s. His response was to give his students two grades: one “official” grade that reflected the university’s high norms and a separate, “uninflated” grade representing his true evaluation of their work.
End Federal Aid to College and Cities, States and Non-profits
this means stopping the federal backing of student loans as well
Let Capitalism FINISH off Democrats
I suggest you take a very long pause and try and think that through.
Just maybe you should Ano
End Federal Aid to College and Cities, States and Non-profits this means stopping the federal backing of student loans as well
🎯
While we are on the subject, end federal backing of health services, any type of loan, medical science research, private enterprises, and so on.There is more wealth in this country than Americans realize. If you can not build relationships with wealthy people so as to convince them to invest in your ideas, e.g. angel investor, a rich relative, a wealthy church member, affluent community member / neighbor, etc, then nor should the Feds (aka We the people)
Follow the science™
I’m sure there are entitled “kids” who slide through the Ivy’s on their family names. But when we moved our son into his freshman dorm, a 6 person suite, at Yale in 2013, 5 of the 6 boys had scored a 36 on their ACT’s, and the 6th one, a recruited football player, scored a 34. None of them came from nationally known or generationally wealthy families. This was a group of highly motivated and intelligent boys, none of whom took the easy route. When you work that hard to get there, it’s difficult to just turn off the grit and determination that got you there. Several years later, just before our son graduated from HBS, parents were able to sit in on a class, and I was once again amazed by caliber of these students. I’m quite sure many of them will be our future leaders.
Presumably there are gold nuggets among the dross but they do not outweigh the dross when A’s are handed out like candy. Undoubtedly many of the bogus A students beeline for government bureaucrat positions where they are on an upward pipeline as long as they have the correct leftwing politics. This is the making of the Washington Swamp heading the Deep State.
Well, when the goal of the teacher’s unions is to produce the required parameters set by bureaucrats in order to qualify for grants, I guess you use whatever means are possible to achieve the appearance of proficiency.
Forget that their primary goal was to teach, these union functionaries, (especially in prog strongholds) kept padding the books with excellent grades that had no substance behind them.
Now we are left with at least 2 generations of indoctrinated sheep who are totally ignorant of their own ignorance. Just what do we do with quasi-illiterate brats who think they should get their jobs the same way they got their degrees – just by breathing.
Disinfect our institutions of learning? and replace the ideologues with true educators. Where we might find them, who knows at this point. We may have ruined our culture for several generations in order for the democrat party to maintain power.
teacher union in NJ, NY, CT, etc is to ensure failure….you get paid more and more jobs are needed the WORSE they make it!
Public Unions SHOULD BE BANNED!
Stop and think man.
NO you stop and think. It’s not getting better, just worse.
we’re in big trouble with a generation of morons https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8BnSqDB/
True, and just how to we apprise these ignoramuses that they are, despite the paper, ignorant of most of reality and are quite unprepared to be hired for any job above fry cook or dog catcher. Their egos will not allow them to comprehend this without great pain and so I doubt if they will ever be anything more than spoiled brats have tantrums because that great job was not given upon graduation.
This makes them prime targets for socialist/communist agents who will use them to gain power, just as is happening in NYC.
Bogus A students head for government bureaucracy where incompetence and left wing ideology is rewarded thanks to unionization that should never have been allowed to happen.
Yes, declare government unions unconstitutional and the dem bureaucracy is toast. The same goes for any teacher’s unions at all academic levels that receive or utilize government funds for any purpose. Make that toxic to unions and watch the prog/fools hired to teach useless garbage find work as a starbucks barista.
Oh, come on now. This blog is well represented with morons. You’re welcome.
Try a mirror
The most represented morons are the anony morons. They say dumb things all the time and contribute absolutely nothing to the blog or society as a whole.
Before I retired, I advised a young employee who was always reminding me of his graduate degree, that the degree got him hired, but his job performance and overall attitude got him fired. After a few incidents similar, I advised HR to forget about degrees, and the university they came from, and concentrate on personal work experience, and attitude. I was less impressed by where a person attended school, and more impressed with how hard that person worked to succeed.
We found that some of our best employees came from our military. They were task oriented, and goal achieving individuals who worried more about finishing the job, than watching the clock.
Inflated credentialism vs hard work in the military…no contest.
As Woody Allen said, “80% of success is showing up.” Apparently at Harvard, that’s at least 90%.
I doubt if you needed to even show up, just check the right boxes and let the prof decide your grade…
😄
That’s called the Obama way – both lazy, both lacking the academic qualifications for top tier schools but wafted in on the affirmative action magic carpet.
Well the world is not only the IVY League. Out in the hinterlands you still have to work to get a real A, B, or C, or even an F. Maybe the Ivy League will be complicit in it’s own demise. Surely some of the parents who pay those outrageous tuition fees will demand something tangible in their children’s education. Or maybe they don’t care either.
I had heard through my years in medicine how superior the Ivy League Medical Schools were but frankly I seldom saw an example of it. My experience was that you could find gems from nearly every medical school if you simply sat down and reviewed what a candidate was taught and then you talked to a candidate. I did that as a Resident and Fellow when I interviewed intern and resident candidates from all over the country and then did the same thing as a Clinic Board member who was charged with recruiting and evaluation of recruits.
Actually it seemed it was always the person who stood out and not necessarily their school.
It was, in many ways, very refreshing to see outstanding physicians blossom even when they came from little known institutions.
But that was my experience in Medicine. Others may have had different outcomes in other disciplines.
you aren’t part of the club…where $500k Salary is assured from being part of the club
A while back you claimed to be an RN, now you claim to have been an MD? Can we fact check you please?
LIAR…
GEB never claimed to have been a RN. That was Gigi/Natasha. GEB is well known as a retired MD.
UpstateFarmer-You are correct. Appreciate your words. I never claimed to be a RN. My wife is an RN, My sister is an RN, and my deceased Sister-in-Law was an RN but I am unable to find an RN degree in my box of certificates, which I took down from my wall when I retired.
I listened to RN’s all the time and were taught by them prior to going to medical school since I worked in 2 different hospitals doing everything the nurses told me to do. They were hard taskmasters and you had better do it to their satisfaction. I guarantee you don’t want an RN angry with you. That fact was not taught in a classroom.
Agree. Experienced nurses have a lot to teach wet behind the ears doctors. They’re like army drill sergeants.
I’ve seen nurses could not take a BP unless it was done by a machine…
Dustoff: Even dental practitioners are taking BP readings before an app’t. I hate it. Can they refuse to treat if they don’t like the numbers? My clinic has gone full AI. Even hired a part-time “wellness” guru.
Tried and true old-timey BP check: Press down gently on inside wrist; count the pulses per minute (should be 72ish).
Anonymous 11:38AM, Dustoff- It’s really a liability issue because you don’t want to have something go wrong in even a dentist’s chair and not have checked the BP. Drug reactions can result in severe drops in the BP or sudden arrhythmias. Or people will faint at unexpected times. Or certain procedures you do not want to do if the BP is already very high. The assesment of BP’s and treatment are undergoing some changes in medicine and there is increasing scrutiny of BP readings and timing of checks. Seeing a dentist is stressful and some people react poorly. My advice – Grin and Bear it.
GEB… I get that. But if the system does down. Get out cuff. (-:
GEB: Thank you for the educational post.
Anonymous@11:38AM
The scary thing about medical colleges these days is the lowering of admissions standards due to DEI. I heard that Harvard has been discriminating against Whites and Asians for years. True? False? All I ask is that my surgeon knows how to stop a hemorrhage on the operating table should I be in that unfortunate situation. My cat would miss me….
DEI is being phased out, according to some sources (and with any luck at all).
California leads with DIE in medicine. Apparently a high percentage of their graduating classes can’t pass the final block to graduating incompetent MDs – state licensing exams. How long until those are dumbed down to hide the fact that DIE fosters incompetence? I don’t use the Left’s preferred formulation DEI when it’s actually DIE – white people’s school entry, careers and eventually physical death as in Zimbabwe and S. Africa when whites become a powerless minority.
My daughter received an F on her first calc test, but she went to an SEC school. She would have loved Harvard! After getting a really good doctoral student for a tutor, she got an A on the second test and finished with a B in the class. She was very proud of that B!
Kristin Oren-Well your daughter could be a physician. I got a 0 on a calculus final exam when I was a college freshman . My med school seemed to have no problem with that.
Med Schools always preached that you have math up to calculus. A little secret-you don’t. If you go into academics and need help with certain types of math or statistics in a rare instance then just hire someone to check the numbers.
Einstein in WW1 had a brilliant German mathematician check his calculations in some of his basic theories. That mathematician calculated artillery trajectories for the German Army. He unfortunately died of some ill defined infectious disease before the war ended. Don’t remember his name.
That’s a great story. She took the lowest math track all the way through school mainly bc she was put in the lower track in the 6th grade even though she did fine in math. Anyway, I told her not to worry, she could still major in math in college and even get her doctorate in math if she wanted – it just would take her a little longer. But she chose business. Glad you didn’t let that zero knock you off-track!
Over 20 years ago I served as an adjunct prof. at NYU and the problem was already there. Coming from Europe I was used to a grading system that had standard answers to the exam with which the instructor could compare the students’ work. I applied that and the results were quite disappointing and I had to upgrade to get at an ‘acceptable’ number of passing students. Students still complained as they felt entitled to at least a B+ of whatever. Indeed, grade inflation is going on for a long time.
The system is self-enforcing, because students use their evaluations to put pressure on faculty: low grades for me, low evaluation for you.
The result is that grades have lost any meaning. Moreover, because the disease has metastasized to a vast majority of universities, a bachelor’s for master’s degree seems to mean very little in terms of the capabilities of the student, and employers will have noticed that as well.
What is needed is a complete culture change and a return to rigid academic standards. Alternatively, new universities may arise that upholds these standards and advertises that fact, so a degree of the new university will become. more valuable than that of the so-called top universities as Harvard, Yale, etc.
Despite the fact the Ivies and near-Ivies like NYU are credential mills and networking services, alumni go back to recruit there because the data suggest the schools are doing most of the sorting prior to admission.
That is, admission rates are often in the single digits. They are admitting the creme de la creme of high school graduates. There is a vast oversupply of applicants relative to the scarce number of seats Harvard and the other “elite” schools make available.
In addition, nearly 100% of graduates have multiple job offers when they graduate.
Those two factors – very low admission rates and very high success at placing graduates means the feedback the administration relies on to make decisions suggests they do not need to make changes.
Surest way to get into an Ivy…be good at a sport…especially lacrosse…for males it ensure a well paying wall street job.
I know these people
Those superior grades coming out of high schools are as inflated as the universities grades. Remove standardized testing and anyone can appear as high quality and the sham goes on and on until these little ignoramuses have to produce in a real work environment and then the shit hits the fan. You can bluff all you want when the system is in you favor, but when reality is the deciding factor, these little flowers wilt – bigly.
I had returned to my Alma Mater in 1978 to work on my masters and the difference between 1968 and 1978 was astounding. Minority affirmative action students were DEMANDING As just because even at that time and professors were reluctantly (at least the good ones that were still there) grading on a curve so that these little darlings could graduate with honors. It was disgusting listening to these self-righteous minorities screaming that it was racist to not give them an A.
I can’t even imagine what it is like now.
Aristotle must be turning in his grave…
The closing of the American Mind (what little of it is left) proceeds apace.
The Chinese must be having a good laugh too, as the American Left is doing its best to destroy itself.
Thank God for home schoolers, charter schools and heterodox academies!
The Chinese have a pool of over a billlion and choose excellence. Americans are choosing on skin color and sex orientation. Behold the inevitable coming of our Asian masters. The flood of Chinese students in American universities are sent to spy and steal what’s left to steal of US research, picking over the carcass. It’s like letting in Germans in the lead up to WWII – likely worse as not all Germans were Nazis but all Chinese sent out from China are Communist.
Perhaps the schools have a method to their madness. Endowments for the Ivy’s have increased anywhere from 50 to 135 percent in the past ten years. Harvard and Yale lead the list.
why? because the Federal Government has PRINTED $30 Trillion Dollars for the richest and Wall Street!
Any non-profits where ANYONE gets $100k+ should PAY 100% of taxes…like colleges, hospitals, etc
So, the, ahem, students are paying for a diploma from a so-called Ivy league school. Why do they even bother to show up? Just fork over the money, give them the piece of paper and be on their way.
There was a report about how six in ten managers have fired a recent college grad within a year. Some of them noted college is not preparing them for the workforce. They cite lack of communication, professionalism, even just showing up were causes for termination.
Wait! Like, you want me to actually show up for work.
Like, really!
Speaks volumes about you An
It’s not like Obama ever showed up for work and he failed his way up to the Oval Office. If he had his white mother’s skin tone rather than his black father’s no one would have heard of him.
The self-serving antics of American academics are insuring a perpetually incompetent media and business community as it has already given us an incompetent political class. The real story is whether or not grade inflation is rampant among the educational institutions of China and India? Imagine the future American “leaders” challenged by those of powerful nations whose leaders were ruthlessly selected by merit.
Had Kamala Harris won, we would have had exactly what you describe. Can you imagine her cackling her way through a meeting with Xi?
The real story is whether or not grade inflation is rampant among the educational institutions of China and India?
China is one of the biggest offenders.
Jining First People’s Hospital tops the charts, with more than 5% of its total output from 2014 to 2024 retracted — more than 100 papers (see ‘Highest retraction rates’). That proportion is an order of magnitude higher than China’s retraction rate, and 50 times the global average. Depending on how one counts, the hospital could be the institution with the world’s highest retraction rate. Many other Chinese hospitals are retraction hotspots. But universities and institutes in China, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan and Ethiopia feature in the data as well. Retractions can be for honest mistakes and administrative errors, but evidence suggests the majority of cases in these data are related to misconduct.
Van Noorden, R., 2025. Exclusive: These universities have the most retracted scientific articles. Nature, 638(8051), pp.596-599. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00455-y
“Retraction Watch” is an excellent website to learn more
https://retractionwatch.com/
*. Well Jack, that is the agenda. The agenda is reliance on foreign nationals while American citizens are drug addicted sex addicts. At some point the agenda includes killing off the useless citizens.
Isn’t that agenda apparent?
Reel back a step and the agenda is to abort what would have been citizens brought up in the USA possibly instilled with some American values and to replace the missing work force with hostiles from failed socialist cultures.