Last month, Harvard University faculty voted to cap the number of A’s students can earn, limiting “A” grades to 20 percent of class enrollment with an additional 4 A’s per class. Professors of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted 458 to 201 to reduce grade inflation, a growing concern amongst universities across the country.
Grade inflation is the fear that the number of university students earning A’s has increased so much that the definition of an “A” no longer represents the exceptional students of a given class. In fact, the average college GPA has increased by 21.5% in the last 30 years, suggesting this is less of a fear and more of a reality.
As grade inflation increases, Dr. Fred Whiting, director of The University of Alabama’s Blount Scholars Program, said it’s important to think about why we use grades and whether we find them important. If grades are truly important, they must have meaning; insofar as grade inflation continues, then grades will continuously lose their meaning.
The issue isn’t for lack of concern, rather contention stems from Harvard’s use of relative student performance to preserve the meaning of an “A,” mobilizing competition amongst its students instead of traditional grade-point averages as a barometer for student success. While well-intentioned, this will have an adverse effect on students’ perception of both themselves and their education.
“The notion of quantitative reduction, the notion of output, the increase of efficiency, the relation of all these things. It’s part of a package at the root of this, you know, sort of interpretation of Adam Smith is sort of that markets and people are best when they’re competitive,” Whiting said.
By treating education as a means to an end, mobilized competition for ranking leaves undergraduate education to be nothing more than a box to check for work or a barrier to graduate. This imposition of competition doesn’t improve academics, driving 85 percent of the Harvard student body to reject the grading cap.
Harvard’s choice to cap the number of A’s is an artificial curve down on otherwise unchanged curricula. For both myself, Whiting and a reader of the Washington Post, the natural conclusion is a question: how does this competition affect academic standards and the university community?
“Instead of reducing the number of A’s, universities should focus on improving the quality of instruction and assessment (that they charge ever so much for),” wrote a Letter to the Editor at the Washington Post. “Harvard is not the Federal Reserve, and student learning should not be treated like an economy to be artificially regulated.”
By imposing the grade caps, Harvard mitigates the number of students with an “A” on their transcripts, but it doesn’t address a greater problem: academic standards. The Times of Greater Education said this artificial redistribution of A’s does more to preserve the appearance of academic integrity rather than address the substance of course curricula or productive educational communities.
“Students are no longer expected to excel. A college degree, which used to represent mastery in one’s field, now represents mere relative competence,” said Ava DiGiacomo, a student journalist at American University. “The diploma received after four years in undergrad is no longer a testament to late nights of research, hardened work ethic and excellence: it is a mere baseline for employment.”
Academics require a deeper connection to education. The Blount Scholars Program at UA focuses on this heavily, with community at the center of what has become an unorthodox liberal education. If competition overshadows deeper discussion, close readings and academic rigor, students lose the love to learn and the interest to develop their understanding of the world we live in.
“We call ourselves a living-learning community,” Whiting said. “To make the transfer into academics, I think competition is just exactly nowhere.”
Harvard’s grade cap could mitigate grade inflation at the most surface level definition of the word, yet without a unified movement against the use of an “A,” it means nothing for students other than increased competition within the institution intended to be a community of higher education.
If universities are to remain places of higher learning rather than mere sorting mechanisms for corporate HR departments, they must protect the learning experience from the encroachment of the marketplace. Harvard’s policy may successfully deflate its GPAs, but it does so at the cost of the very collaboration that drives true intellectual discovery.
After all, if competition takes over the classroom, we may end up with perfectly regulated transcripts, but we will also be left with a much emptier world of ideas.
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