Posted on 11/20/2025 9:40:39 AM PST by karpov
At many of the country’s most prestigious universities, an “A” has become a default instead of a distinction. It used to be a mark that indicated academic excellence and proficiency, yet lately it seems like almost everyone is “exceptional.” Now, Harvard’s much-remarked-upon grade-inflation report, released late last month, confirms what many have suspected for years: Grades at elite colleges have lost their meaning.
According to the report, in 2005 “A’s” accounted for 24 percent of all grades given at Harvard College. In 2025, that number jumped to over 60 percent. Even the cutoff mark for summa cum laude status has been forced higher, standing at a 3.989 GPA as of this year, lest everyone achieve the honor. If everyone’s exceptional, is anyone really?
Harvard’s own faculty aren’t happy about it. Many believe there is little “resolving power at the top,” which leaves students without an accurate sense of how they’re performing compared to others. Teachers struggle to distinguish between merely “satisfactory” and “outstanding” work, and prize committees find it harder to differentiate between students with identical GPAs. Grades used to motivate learning and measure mastery. Now they’re just polite checkmarks for finishing the work at all.
Why have standards changed? According to the report, professors feel pressure to maintain high enrollments and avoid low “Q-scores,” Harvard’s course-evaluation metric. Teaching fellows worry that poor “Q-scores” will limit their job prospects. Students who typically earned “A’s” in high school expect the same leniency at college. Administrators, eager to show compassion for stressed or struggling students, have unintentionally helped erode academic rigor. Faculty who want to return to proper grading standards worry that administrators wouldn’t have their backs. The result, as one faculty member put it, is a “race to the bottom.”
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
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This has been the case for decades.
Meritocracy has become synonymous with “racism.”
Only to the reprobate.
“You get a degree! YOU get a degree!! EVERYBODY gets a degree!!!”
Grades?
Harvard has lost its meaning.
And not just in higher education, also, the key to 12 setting where everyone gets a trophy and we move onto the next grade, even if you’re not proficient in basic things like reading in basic math
When my son matriculated into Rose-Hulman a generation ago, in the president’s opening speech, he said two things. One was that no one was accepted to the college who hadn’t already demonstrated that s/he could graduate from the college. The other was that at Rose-Hulman, a C was the equivalent of an A anywhere else.
There are high schools where students are proficient in basic meth, and everyone is weeded out but still there.
Grades lost their meaning when you started giving unequal treatment to applicants of different races.
It’s a long way from the movie “Soul Man”, when James Earl Jones said, “if you have to work twice as hard as those little white s___s, then you damn well better work twice as hard.”
Grades have lost their meaning?
That’s pretty self centric
I believe they mean Harvard’s grades have lost meaning
When George W. Bush ran for President the first time, someone leaked his college transcripts at Yale to The New Yorker for a hit piece, so that everyone could make fun of his mediocre grades (B's and C's). But he had been there in the 1960s before grade inflation.
Gore and Kerry had similar grade point averages to Bush's but somehow the media never talked about that.
Start handing out c, d and f’s and revenue will decline sharply.
The fact of the matter is that most of the students in any college are too stupid to be there.
There are a lot of reasons for grade inflation but letting the lunatics rule the asylum is a big one. Professors are afraid of students. Not only must they give the student an "A" but they also have to be very careful what they say to avoid offending their incredibly delicate / Woke sensibilities.
It stuck with me that I couldn’t round up to 3.0 on my resume. However, I don’t recall a prospective employer ever asking about my GPA. I also updated my resume to reflect the last 15 years of work experience, instead of droning on about my entire career.
Before that, I remember an interview where HR said, “your experience seems to be light in this area.” Over the next minute I laid out the breadth of that experience in great detail.
Their response? “I’m afraid your resume is too strong for this position.” I got up, thanked them for their time, and left the premises.
When I was studying engineering in the 80s, grade inflation was a general problem back then, but at Harvey Mudd College the catchword phrase with respect to “Big Systems” was, “D for DONE!!!”
The last time I gave out grades as a faculty member, (at a elite university), every one of my students received an A!
However, this was a graduate course in biotech, with rigorous labs and tough exams. The students, many of whom were already in industry, were truly outstanding!
Harvard College students are for the most part outstanding. However, they need tough grading to keep them focused on their classes, not just extracurriculars!
Education has lost its meaning.
Well, since all they care about is churning out anti-capitalist communism why worry about stupid grades?
Many years ago (1974-75) I was the first fish at Texas A&M “in years” to earn two Distinguished Student ribbons while earning a Fish Drill Team member cord and ribbon. (A 3.80 first semester, 3.40 second semester. OK, good grades as a Nuc Engineering student, but not “outstanding” by any means.)
So, I'm funding 100.00 scholarships to “the FDT member with the highest grade”. 14 of the active Drill Team members got 4.0 grades. (Includes the 32 freshmen drilling, and the sophomore, junior, and senior trainers, so the comparison is not 100%. But very surprising.)
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