Posted on 10/12/2023 9:47:13 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
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 'A's 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.”
The only way to fail is to have your tuition check bounce.
Hahaha
I was thinking along those lines.
It currently costs only around $334,000 to get a 4 year participation trophy from Harvard.
Lets be honest, if you were paying $100,000 a year for tuition and living expenses there...you’d kinda expect a sliding scale for grade purposes.
“If everyone’s special, then no one is special.”
Just another reason to not hire Harvard grads.
Likely as not, they did not earn their degree.
The dirty little secret of the ivy leagues.
Getting in is the prob. Everyone graduates regardless of performance.
As the median IQ of Harvard students plummets the grades skyrocket. Very curious indeed.
Good times make weak men.
He always used to say "you can always tell a Harvard man,but you can't tell him much".
The point of Harvard is not to give undergrads some great education. It is to brand them as talented enough to have got into Harvard. And really, that’s what most employers of Harvard grads (for the year or two before they go on to grad school) are looking for.
Harvard grads tend to be better looking than MIT grads—and they have better brown-nosing skills.
She needs to spend the rest of her life on an assembly line somewhere. Maybe that hair will get caught in something.
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