Harvard asks faculty to justify grading methods

Boston Globe ^ | 10/23/2001 | Patrick Healy

[grimalkin]

For the first time, professors at Harvard University have been asked to justify the grades they give students as the university launches its toughest examination yet of grade inflation.

Susan Pedersen, dean of undergraduate education, gave faculty members a January deadline to explain their grading practices in writing. A committee will review the data and recommend whether changes to grading should be considered.

[mdittmar]

For the first time, professors at Harvard University have been asked to justify the grades they give students as the university launches its toughest examination yet of grade inflation.

"Well,she was blond,5'5',105 lbs,wore short skirts and kept crossing and uncrossing her legs. That's an "A" In my book."

[Havisham]

Ha ha haaaa. Poor saps, it's a runaway train. Pathetic.

[nopardons]

BIG BUMP

[Calvin Locke]

I entered a state university in '76. I had the assistant dean for part of an intro engineering course. He was talking about grade inflation then, first time I ever heard the term "gentlemen's C". Last time too, come to think of it.

[Orual]

Three little words.

[grimalkin]

That's scary.

[patriciaruth]

When I went to colleges on the Left Coast, the opposite was the problem.
Harvard professors are in love with the students that parrot their left wing philosophies back at them. Any downgrading will probably be done at the expense of conservatives who can't lie as well.
Al Gore got honors because and only because he wrote a senior thesis paper on "the impact of television on the conduct of the presidency." During that time at Harvard, dove professors were grading easy to prevent their students from losing student deferments and being drafted. Maybe it became a tradition.

[Fresh Wind]

"Well,she was blond,5'5',105 lbs,wore short skirts and kept crossing and uncrossing her legs. That's an "A" In my book."

That's called "grading on the curve". A time honored tradition in academia.

[IceGirl2]

As someone in the recruitment business I laugh at Harvard grads with 'honors'. They are pathetic. I interviewed one who didn't know the capital of Germany. Get out of here Harvard--you've dumbed yourself down to a point that a degree from Harvard is a joke. And some of the courses that they take are outrageous. Most of them cannot write a decent memo.

[XBob]

Simply Amazing - No wonder our leftist Liberals are soooooo dumb. Here are quotes from the article, and the professors are so dumb, that they can't figure out that 91% honors graduates and 50+% A's is grade inflation. Remember the movie 'The Paper Chase', 20-30 years ago, how Harvard has changed:

More than half of Harvard's grades last year were A's and A-minuses, and a record 91 percent of students graduated with honors in June.

Professors and graduate-student teaching fellows are expected to describe the ways in which they assess and mark student work, as well as to explain grading trends that may suggest inflation.

Many professors support the grading review, though they generally add that they think grade inflation is not a major problem. Many also see themselves as fairly tough graders who give high marks only because their students are academically extraordinary. Whether a problem truly exists, and how it might be solved, will become clearer once they see Pedersen's data, they said.

''Dealing with grade inflation requires knowing the extent of it - have your grades risen from C-plus to A-minus, or from B to B-plus? Is it big or small?'' said Roderick MacFarquhar, chairman of the government department.

[jamaksin]

Duh - Must be time to begin the Self-Study at Harvard University in anticipation of their accreditation visit from the NEASC (New England Association of Schools and Colleges). Maybe the Visiting Team got wind of the recent Boston Sunday Globe article?

Faculty Senate must be happy ... get those Standards a'workin'. Thus spoke the Dean(s) ...

[Jim Noble]

The Harvard grading system is the logical extension of national policies that confuse intelligence with merit.

This confusion is widespread, and not confined to Harvard.

What is the graduation rate of all United States medical schools? If you eliminate suicides, voluntary withdrawals, and involuntary incapacitations (prison, mental hospitalizations, and serious illness) it is close to 100%. That is to say, a letter of acceptance at an American medical school is equivalent to the MD degree.

This comes about because of grading and evaluation logic that says, "if this person was smart enough to get in here....".

The evaluation process for Harvard and other elite "educational" choices has become dangerously unbalanced in favor of raw intelligence, as opposed to genuine achievement. It is not an accident that Harvard has eliminated ROTC, which was (among other things) a program to locate and value achievement which is not measured primarily in psychometric terms.

The policy choice to replace the WASP aristocracy with an IQ aristocracy has had unpredictable consequences, the worst of which is to define "merit" in terms of intelligence.

So completely has the Harvard faculty (no dummies, themselves) accepted this syllogism that they cannot deny an "A" average to any of their little darlings, because, by their lights, they "deserve" it.

[tort_feasor]

I went to Temple University Law School and during my second year they changed the curve from a B to a B-. At the same time Villanova had a B+ curve. Schools should be reuqired to list grade curve information on transcripts. So that employers and others can know what the grades mean.

[Jim Noble]

>>Schools should be reuqired to list grade curve information on transcripts. So that employers and others can know what the grades mean.<<

That would be a start, but I'm not sure knowing that you were in the 35%ile or 85%ile in your particular class at Temple would tell me anything useful.

[gaspar]

If the capital of the United States were moved to, say, San Luis Obispo, California, or Salt Lake City, a Harvard degree wouldn't be worth a plugged nickel. Its reputation survives through inertia not excellence.

[madprof98]

When my son was doing his doctorate at Harvard, he taught several sections of a difficult undergrad science course. He said most of the students were conscientious and did outstanding work. After all, they wouldn't even have gotten into Harvard if they had not been bright and studious. But my son recalled one young man who refused to come to class or to turn in any work. He didn't take the tests either. The professor in charge of the course instructed the grad students to give the slacker an "A" anyhow. The prof said that was the way things were done at Harvard.

[Tijeras_Slim]

This comes about because of grading and evaluation logic that says, "if this person was smart enough to get in here....".

This is an interesting take, and good look at how liberal intelligentsia have replaced one "elite" with another. That the professors can't see what is wrong when 91% graduate with honors is amazing. In any sufficiently large sample, whould not the usual distribution apply (ie. bell curve)?

[xzins]

Grades, grades, grades. Worry about grades. Oh my gawsh!

Harvard is supposed to get all the near maximum score SAT and ACT kids, right? (I mean, except for the celeb kids.) They SHOULD do well. If these kids DIDN'T do well, I'd be more suspicious of Harvard than if they did.

I thought the issue was learning the material, not imposing some arbitrary standard by which someone who has learned the material gets graded down. In my book, if a student masters material at a 93% level, then that person is keeping pretty phenomenal pace with what's happening in a class. (If this is the crap that Bill Gates had to put up with, I can see why he left...and formed one of history's most successful businesses.) There are idiotic questions that can be asked, of course, like "What's the 15th word on page 327 in the history text." That kind of foolishness certainly separates students based on something, but God doesn't even know what, and it has absolutely nothing to do with their mastery of subject matter.

Then there's the infamous "curve." You know what? If I gave you the smartest kids in the world, and you came back to me and told me that 40% did average or worse in learning the material, I'd be much more inclined to think that you're a crappy teacher who can't instruct the brightest minds out there, than that they have trouble learning. Them -- trouble learning -- that's insane. There's also integrity as an issue with the curve. If I have a class where everyone scored 93% or higher, and someone was giving "F's" to 93's and "C's" to 96's and "B's" to 98's, then I'd know for a fact that the grader was out of touch with some basic notions of ethics...fairness, balance.

Leave the profs alone. Leave the students alone. And for you prospective Ivy Leaguers out there....scratch Yale and Princeton off your list....sounds like Harvard not only has the best faculty, but also the most thoughtful and most human.

The administrators sound like they have poles up their ___, though.

[twigs]

Where my husband teaches, professor's promotions and raises are almost entirely dependent on student evaluations. And students often evaluate on the basis of their anticipated grades.