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.
Also:
"He said he believes Harvard should adopt an anti-inflation strategy used by Dartmouth College and some other schools: Students receive transcripts with two grades for each class: the grade earned by the student and the median grade in the class. This way, graduate schools, corporate recruiters, and professors themselves know when an A is a common grade or a rare one."
This technique at least offers truth in advertising. However, it can still be abused. A prof can make half the grades (plus one) a "B", and have 49% of the grades "A's", with no "B+" or "A-". Thus half the students will show an "A" compared to the median "B", and the other half will be right at the median, leaving it like Lake Wobegone, with "all the children above (or at) average."
Tell me the Dartmouth profs haven't already figured this one out.