<p>Could current students tell us whether grade inflation really exists at Harvard? To what extent?</p>
<p>I'm not a current student, but there is certainly grade inflation. I talked with a local alum about this a couple years ago, and Harvard is taking and has taken steps to combat this trend. </p>
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To what extent?
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One of the reasons this all came out was because of a New York Times article stating that 91% of Harvard students graduate with honors, if I remember the stat correctly. After a couple of years and lots of work by Harvard, this figure is now quite a bit lower, although I do not know the exact number.</p>
<p>Grade inflation gets mixed up with high rate of graduation with honors. The high rate of graduation with honors had to do with the minimum GPA required for honors (if a student produced an honors-worthy thesis). Raising the GPA requirement reduced the high rate of graduation with honors.<br>
Grade inflation is another issue entirely. From what I can tell, the members of the faculty most opposed to arbitrarily lowering grades (a la Princeton) are profs who have taught at other schools before coming to Harvard. Apparently, they feel that the high grades are deserved.</p>
<p>i doubt there's grade inflation at harvard, i think the students are just brilliant! there's no reason to give them low grades! my friend who goes there is a genius! and he is getting all As, and i think he deserves them :) he was truly smart!!! won all types of awards. man, go harvard students, i wish i had the work ethics of anyone of you sigh</p>
<p>Grade inflation at Harvard? Heck, yes--especially in the humanities. I recommend you read "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" by Ross Gregory Douthat, who writes a withering criticism of grade inflation at Harvard. </p>
<p>Here's an excerpt:</p>
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"Harvard never promotes from within," she told us, "or almost never. Especially in the humanities, junior faculty never get tenure."</p>
<p>For those who stayed, who thrived or at least endured--well, who can blame them if, when it came time to grade their students, they sometimes took the path of least resistance, the path of the gentleman's B+? That is, if they graded at all: Many didn't, particularly those saddled with the large, impersonal lecture classes for which major research universities are famous, with hundreds of clamoring, grade-grubbing students and only a staff of graduate student assistants (or "teaching fellows," in Harvard's pretentious academese) to help. Who can blame the professors, in such trying circumstances, for passing the grading buck down to those younger, less burned-out teaching fellows? And who can blame the TFs in turn--themselves only a few years removed from undergrad anxieties, and coping with their own set of academic pressures--if their grading standards were sometimes a trifle, well, lax?</p>
<p>I give out mainly A's, one TF announced to my section early in the first meeting of the year. A few B's, maybe. But I don't like to, you know?
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The Harvard administration cracks the whip on professors who are against grade inflation. Even Harvey Mansfield was eventually subdued by the administration (albeit grudgingly) and forced to accept grade inflation:</p>
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"Nevertheless, I have recently decided that hewing to the older standard is fruitless ... Therefore, I have decided that this semester I will issue two grades to each of you. The first will be the grade that you actually deserve--a C for mediocre work, a B for good work, and an A for excellence. This one will be issued to you alone, for every paper and exam that you complete. The second grade, computed only at semester's end, will be your, ah, ironic grade--'ironic,' in this case, being a word used to mean lying--and it will be computed on a scale that takes as its mean the average Harvard grade, the B-plus. This higher grade will be sent to the registrar's office and will appear on the transcript. It will be your public grade, you might say, and it will ensure, as I have said, that you will not be penalized for taking a class with me."</p>
<p>Another shark's grin. "And of course, only you will know whether you actually deserve it."
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</p>
<p>Lots of undergrads think that TFs grade more harshly than profs. TFs, although a few years older than undergrads, are very different from the typical undergrads, insofar as most undergrads do not plan on going on for Ph.D.s in the courses they are taking whereas the TFs are Ph.D. students in those fields. They tend to compare themselves at the same stage of their studies with the students they grade and have a hard time tolerating lack of commitment, sloppy work, etc...
I was in college in the late 60s. A world famous prof stated on the first day of class that anyone who came to class regularly would automatically get a B. Anyone who wrote a paper would automatically get an A.
As for the first sentence of the excerpt, Douthat is out-of-date.</p>
<p>Marite, I may not understand this correctly, but if honors status is based on 1) an honors quality thesis and 2) a particular GPA, and GPA is calculated using grades from courses, then inflated grades would lead to higher GPAs which would lead to more students meeting the requirements of honors. </p>
<p>I think that it is absurd to think that the quality of work at Harvard is so uniformally more excellent than that of students from Chicago or Dartmouth (I haven't heard of grade inflation from here, but I apologize if I am mistaken) or some other high-caliber institution at which students are getting Cs and Bs for their work. </p>
<p>I do not know the particulars of Harvard's grading systems, and grade inflation is certainly not something I have read extensively about. Does anyone know how grades in math and science courses are calculated? Humanities courses are obviously much more difficult to judge.</p>
<p>Yes, Harvard does have grade inflation. But, what research institution doesn't where there are not limits set by the central office?</p>
<p>I can think of a couple.</p>
<p>Corranged:</p>
<p>If I remember correctly, a student who wrote a decent honors thesis could receive honors if s/he got a B (or was it a B-?) GPA. Raise the GPA requirement to B+ and the number of students eligible for honors is reduced without tackling the issue of grade inflation.</p>
<p>I recall reading an article by Jay Parini who teaches at Dartmouth. The article appeared about 10 years ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In it, he explained why he'd given in to the grade inflation trend. By holding on to Bs and B+s, he wrote, he was disadvantaging his own students in the graduate school admissions and fellowships sweepstakes as they had to compete with students from other schools that were more generous in handing out As and A-s. I don't recall he named any school and seemed to imply the phenomenon was pretty widespread. </p>
<p>I don't know if there is a single standard for calculating grades in math and science courses. Each prof may decide to give a very difficult set of problems but will take into account the level of difficulty when grading. For example, in a science course my S took, one exam had a median grade of 66. I don't know what the median letter grade is, but I doubt that 2/3 of the class got a C- or worse. In other words, I don't expect that 80 is a B-, 70 is a C, etc... Conversely, if the prof felt the exam was a tad on the easy side, the grading would be more rigorous. It's very hard to discuss grading in the abstract.</p>
<p>That's nice pebbles. How about listing them.</p>
<p>caltech. for one.</p>
<p>but if I were to stick with what I know, I'd stick good ol' MIT in there as well.</p>
<p>Touche. Now, tell me some schools with more emphasis on humanities.</p>
<p>Hmm...</p>
<p>I'm less familiar with those but I'd imagine Chicago to be such.</p>
<p>However... the closer we come to humanities focus the farther we stray from the typical "research university" that you defined.</p>
<p>Yes, raising the GPA requirement would combat the high percentage of kids with honors without actually combating grade inflation. I see what you're saying.</p>
<p>Wouldn't most graduate schools be familiar with how every school grades? It would not, therefore, put kids at any real disadvantage. Even in college admissions with thousands upon thousands on high schools the college is able to take into account grading systems. There are a lot fewer colleges that graduate schools would need to deal with, so the graduate schools ought to be familiar with the general grading systems of each college. I know you weren't advocating this practice or anything, but I just thought I'd share how stupid it seems to me. :)</p>
<p>I asked about grading only because I know how Dartmouth usually grades, so I was wondering if there was a major difference. My sister at Dartmouth says that in the math and science courses the average grade is often in the 60s. The grades will then be centered about a B- curve, meaning that the student with the mean/median (I'm not sure which) score would get a B-. If a lot of Harvard classes centered classes on a B curve or a C curve, this would be a substantial difference.</p>
<p>Well, I will be able to tell you in about a month when my S gets his grades.
As for schools knowing one another's grading practices, I suppose some departments know about other departments. As well, graduate departments focus mostly on the grades earned in the major and rely a lot on recommendations and writing samples. But I understand that law schools and medical schools use straigthforward GPAs, regardless of difficulty of course load or rigor of grading. Fellowships are another matter entirely. It probably depends a lot on the composition of the selection committee and on the criteria used in the selection process. All things being equal, more rigorous grading than at peer institutions does put students at a disadvantage.</p>
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"As for the first sentence of the excerpt, Douthat is out-of-date."
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<p>Douthat graduated from Harvard in 2002. In that sense, you'd be more "out-of-date" than he is. ;)</p>
<p>How do you how out-of date I am?</p>
<p>I don't believe Cornell has grade-inflation.</p>
<p>As far as I can tell, Harvard doesn't have any more grade inflation than the average top-25 university.</p>
<p>I'm sort of annoyed about the whole honors change, because the new system makes it very difficult for students who aren't doing an honors track to graduate with honors. Since honors is being capped at 60% of the class, I feel like people looking at my resume will think I must be in the bottom 40% of the class not to have graduated with honors.</p>