Harvard faculty will vote May 12 through 19 on a proposal to limit A grades to 20 percent (plus 4) of the students in a class. Somehow, elite professors giving elite students high grades has become the great cultural crisis of our times. As one conservative writer put it, “Harvard has endured a dark night of the soul, including (among other troubles) facing down the consequences of grade inflation …” But even though I don’t care in the least about Harvard’s grades, I am concerned about its soul, and I’m prepared to help Harvard by providing an ideal alternative to this awful plan.
One danger with Harvard’s proposal is that it violates the academic freedom of faculty to grade. Faculty should not be forced to either increase or decrease grades. Although grading is not as absolute as other forms of academic freedom in the classroom (students can appeal unfair grades), it’s still an important authority. Once you limit one aspect of academic freedom, such as grading, it becomes easier to undermine other forms of academic freedom. Faculty should be wary of harming their own academic freedom.
Arbitrarily imposing grade quotas is also a violation of the principle of academic merit. Harvard is proposing that even if a student’s work objectively deserves an A, they will not receive one if too many other excellent students are in that particular class. In fact, you can imagine different sections of the same class taking the same test and students with identical results receiving different grades depending on the random allocation of good students in those classes.
Grade inflation has been a campus controversy for many decades. It began to be noticed nationally with the Vietnam War draft, when college students were exempted, but a failing grade was seen as a possible death sentence overseas. Professors reacted with more generous grades, a trend that expanded with the vast growth in students going to college.
The prospect of grade inflation worried the Selective Service so much that they proposed removing the exemption from the draft for students ranking in the bottom half at each college, a measure that was never implemented after elite colleges opposed it. But plans for it led to the University of Chicago creating class rankings for the first time—and the “Rank Protests” against this change sparked the creation of the infamous Kalven Report.
Other factors have also accelerated grade inflation:
- The rise of the corporate university that views students as consumers to be served with the high grades they want rather than evaluated fairly.
- The reliance on student evaluations where high grades for students translate into high grades for their professors.
- The decline of tenure and use of adjuncts who fear student complaints can cost them their positions.
- A broader cultural shift toward valuing self-esteem that pervades education at all levels and sets expectations for high grades.
At Harvard in particular, there are some rational explanations for why grades have inflated so much: The students are better than they used to be. The old “Gentlemen’s C” reflected a period when a lot of Ivy League students from privileged backgrounds were often lousy, lazy students. One can easily argue that grade inflation at Harvard is partly a reflection of merit rather than a violation of it. Harvard’s admission rate for the Class of 2028 was 3.65 percent, compared to 14.3 percent in 1990. The quality of students has dramatically increased as colleges became much more selective, and so some increase in grades is not surprising.
But, yes, things have gotten a bit out of control at Harvard. When 60 percent of students get an A grade, the incentives for excellent work are reduced. Reforms are needed. But infringing upon one aspect of academic freedom, the power to grade, is the wrong first step.
Before the university starts dictating to professors how they can grade, Harvard should at least attempt better ways to restrain grade inflation.
Peer pressure is a key component here. Professors should know when their grades are higher than other professors and be asked to consider more rigorous evaluations. Professors can be given a guide for grade expectations without having it imposed upon them.
One key reform is transparency. The average grade in a class should be reported on student transcripts and the student evaluations used for professors. Students who get high grades in classes where everyone else does can have that fact considered. And honors should be given based on class rankings rather than grades. Professors who get good evaluations by juicing their grades should be known to their peers and subjected to social pressure and taken into account when examining teacher quality.
An even better option for Harvard would be to create a new A+ grade, which will lower average GPAs (because the A+ would become the new 4.0 standard), reward merit, create incentives for students to work harder, and do so without limiting the freedom of professors to grade or taking away the grades students have earned.
While it’s possible that professors would respond with more inflation by giving a lot of A+ grades, the social pressures against doing so would be strong, and the tendency of professors to continue their same standards for grades would mitigate against this.
The A+ grade is the perfect solution to this silly little problem at Harvard. This approach rewards merit rather than undermining it and enhances academic freedom (giving more grading options to professors) rather than limiting it.
John K. Wilson was a 2019–20 fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies (Routledge, 2008), and his forthcoming book The Attack on Academia. He can be reached at collegefreedom@yahoo.com, and letters to the editor can be sent to letters@insidehighered.com.
