Harvard's wholesale honor roll © St. Petersburg Times, published October 12, 2001 (Full Text Below)
Harvard apparently has the most above-average students this side of Lake Woebegon. More than 90 percent of last year's senior class graduated with honors, maintaining at least a B average. We're more interested in what happened to the 9 percent who graduated without honors. Had they quit attending class three years earlier? Were they in jail? Or Yale?
Harvard selects its student body from among the top young scholars in the country, but so do many other top universities. At other Ivy League schools, the seniors graduating with honors ranged from 51 percent at Yale to 8 percent at Cornell. Only 20 percent of Stanford's seniors graduated with honors. The rate was 28 percent at Duke and 35 percent at Johns Hopkins. Did Harvard's seniors perform that much better than their peers? Or has grade inflation gotten even more out of hand at Harvard than at other top universities?
The most pernicious effect of grade inflation is the blurring of the lines between truly outstanding academic performance and merely satisfactory work. At many elite universities, failing a class is virtually impossible, and even the gentleman's C's that President Bush claims to have compiled at Yale have become endangered species.
Grades -- and honors -- should mean something. If nothing else, Harvard should consider copying the policy of its neighbor, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which doesn't award graduating honors, on the theory that an MIT diploma is distinction enough.