<p>This month's Atlantic Monthly has an article written by a recent Harvard grad (graduated in 2002)- it's called "The Truth About Harvard." Here are a few select excerpts - note, this is not MY opinion, just quotes from the article. The full article is at <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200503/douthat%5B/url%5D">http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200503/douthat</a></p>
<p>"...The students ambitions [at Harvard] are those of well-trained meritocratic elite. In the semi-aristocracy that Harvard once once, students could accept Cs because they knew that their prospects in life had more to do with family fortunes and connections than with GPAs. In today's meritocracy this situation no longer obtains. Even if you could live off your parents' wealth, the ethos of the meritocracy holds that you shouldn't, because your worth as a person is determined not by clan or class but by what you do...What you do, in turn, hinges in no small part on what is on your resume, including your GPA...Thus the professor...as a dispenser of grades...is a gatekeeper to worldly success. And in that capacity [Harvard] professors face upward pressures from students...horizontal pressure from their colleagues, and downward pressure from the administration (If you want tof ail someone you have to be prepared for a very long painful battle with the higher echelons," one professor told the Crimson)...</p>
<p>It doesn't help that Harvard students are creatively lazy, gifted at working smarter rather than harder. Most of my classmates were studious primarily in our avoidance of academic work, and brilliant largely in our maneuverings to achieve a maximal GPA in return for minimal effort. It was easy to see the classroom as just another resume padding opportunity, a place to collect the grade necessary to get to the next station in life. If that grade could be obtained while reading a tenth of the books on the syllabus, so much the better...</p>
<p>In this environment, who can blame professors if, when it comes time to grade their students, they take the path of least resistance - the path of the gentleman's B-plus?</p>
<p>One might expect Haravd's Core Curriculum to step into the breech...It has long been an object of derision among students and a curriculm review committee recently joined the chorus, observing dryly that the Core "may serve to constrain intellectual development...My experience of th ecore was typical. I set out with the intention of picking a comprehensive roster of classes that would lead me in directions at once interesting and essential...What I found were unengaged professors and over burdened teaching assistants who seemed to be marking time until they could return to the parochial safety of their departmental classes...The few Core classes that are well taught are swamped each year, no matter how obscure the subject matter....</p>
<p>A Harvard graduate may have read no Shakespeare or Proust; he may be unable to distinguish Justinian the great from Juilan the Apostate, or to tell you the first ten elements in the periodic table...As in a great library ravaged by a hurricane, the essential elements of a liberal arts education lie scattered every where at Harvard, waiting to be picked up. But little guidance is given on how to proceed with that task...Mostly I logged the necessary hours in the library and exam rooms, earned my solid (if inflated) GPA and my diploma, and used the rest of the time to keep up with my classmates in our ongoing race to the top of America (and the world). It was only afterward, when the perpetual motion of undergraduate life was behind me, that I looked back and felt cheated..."</p>