Expectations
Grade creep and Harvard A's
After our arrival in the USA in 1970, my wife and I set about adapting to our new homeland with the optimism of youth, and with no idea what we were getting into. We had emigrated from South Africa, where certain standards, in sport, in school, in life, were applied with the emotional generosity of a Victorian headmaster. You either met the mark or you did not. The mark did not adjust itself to meet you.
America, we would soon learn, had a different philosophy: the mark or grade was a suggestion, a vague estimate.
The first shock was that American parents were expected, socially required, to attend their children’s sporting events. Every single one. In South Africa, this was not merely unknown; it was regarded as embarrassing, the sort of behavior one might expect from a parent who had no friends and nothing better to do. Games were for children. Adults had lives.
And yet, there I stood, year after year, in horizontal rain on a field designed by someone who had only heard of mud secondhand, watching small humans chasing a soccer ball. As I pulled on my third layer of clothing on a Saturday morning, I would offer a quiet prayer to whatever deity oversees children’s athletics that my offspring would be eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. An early exit was a mercy afforded to all of us.
The second shock was the trophy. Not the trophy awarded to the winner or the best player. That I understood and respected, but the trophies awarded to everyone else. In South Africa, exceptional players at school received “colors”: a special braid worn on the school blazer, signifying that this particular child had done something genuinely worth noting. They were the alpha males or females. It was selective by design. The braid meant something because most blazers did not have one.
In America, I was introduced to the participation trophy: a gleaming monument to the proposition that showing up is an achievement deserving of commemoration in plastic and gilt paint. The children were not fooled. They knew perfectly well who could actually play and who was simply occupying space on the field. The trophies fooled only the adults, who seemed to find the whole arrangement deeply satisfying, perhaps because it also spared them the discomfort of telling a child an unpleasant truth.
I should note, in the interest of fairness, that my own son has had a wonderful experience attending his grandson’s ice hockey tournaments in Wyoming. Long drives, close quarters, and the particular warmth that comes from shared suffering in a cold arena. They have grown enormously close. I do not dismiss the enterprise’s bonding value.
The sporting world’s allergy to honest assessment was merely the rehearsal. The main performance was in the classroom.
I had been assigned to direct and run a school of medical technology at the university: a program that trained students in laboratory science before placing them in clinical hospitals around the state. At the end of the first semester, I graded on a curve, as I had been trained to do, and as common sense and basic statistics would suggest. The overwhelming majority earned a C, which is, by any rational definition of the word, a passing grade. A handful earned As. The rest were distributed across the remaining letters in the conventional manner.
The following morning, I arrived to find thirty students queued outside my office, several of whom were in various stages of genuine grief. “I have never received anything less than an A,” one informed me, in the tone of someone reporting a crime. Others nodded. I resisted the urge to point out that this was, statistically speaking, the most alarming thing I had ever heard.
I was summoned to the Department Chairman. “Denis,” he said, in the patient voice one uses with the recently arrived and the genuinely confused, “that’s not the way we do things here.” Grades, he explained, are important for the students’ future employability. I agreed that they were, which was precisely why I had assigned different ones to students of different abilities. He suggested I recalibrate my expectations. I understood him to mean: recalibrate the grades.
And so I joined the consensus. I began awarding grades like B+ and A−, the pedagogical equivalent of saying someone is “very tall for their height.” I confess I was never entirely sure what distinguished a B+ from an A−, but neither, I suspect, was anyone else. The students were grateful. The Chairman was satisfied. The hospitals, presumably, were puzzled when they discovered what C-level work actually looked like.
Grade inflation, I soon discovered, was not a local eccentricity but a national fetish, pursued across institutions with the dedication usually reserved for large infrastructure works. A few highlights of the achievement:
At Princeton, the average GPA rose so reliably decade over decade that the university eventually tried to cap As at 35% of grades. It was a reform so controversial that it was eventually quietly abandoned. Princeton, apparently, decided that a policy of honest assessment was too much to sustain in the face of student displeasure and donor relations.
In a survey of American colleges, the average GPA climbed from roughly 2.5 in the 1950s to above 3.1 by the 2010s. This is a rise achieved not through any measurable improvement in student performance, but through the quiet, steady generosity of the people doing the marking. The students, one supposes, were the same. The pencils were softer. The assessments were generous. And don’t get me started on the various cum laude categories and their criteria.
The United Kingdom, not wishing to be left out of a race toward meaninglessness, obliged. In 1990, barely 7% of British university students graduated with a first-class degree. By the early 2020s, that figure had risen to nearly 40%. This is a remarkable improvement in either the quality of students or the flexibility of markers, and the students have not changed that much.
Medical and law schools, alert to the reputational risk of graduating someone incompetent, developed their own elegant solution: they largely abolished grades altogether in favor of “pass/fail,” which has the advantage of making everyone look identical on paper while presumably permitting the faculty to remember, privately, who was actually any good.
Harvard, which has been awarding As to more than half its students for years. This figure emerged during a 2013 faculty meeting and apparently surprised no one who had been paying attention. It has recently been announced that As will henceforth be capped at 20% of grades, with an additional 4% reserved for exceptional cases, presumably to ensure the truly extraordinary are not lumped in with the merely excellent.
The students have not welcomed this news. An A from Harvard is, as they correctly observe, a meal ticket. It is a credential that opens doors, softens rejection letters, and suggests to future employers that one attended an institution of genuine rigor. A B from Harvard is, by implication, a mildly embarrassing document best kept in a drawer. That a Harvard B remains, in objective terms, a remarkable academic achievement is a point the students have not yet found consoling.
I am not optimistic about the reform’s survival. Every previous attempt to address grade inflation has encountered the same obstacle: the people best positioned to resist it — faculty, administrators, and institutions — are also the people with the strongest incentives to permit it. Students with high grades are happy students. Happy students write positive reviews, make donations, and do not sue. The logic is not complicated.
I am not a cruel man. I am not suggesting we return to the days of public humiliation, scarlet letters stitched onto the blazers of the academically modest, or the ritual reading aloud of examination results in descending order. Kindness is a virtue. Encouragement is useful. The recognition that people learn at different paces and in different ways is something.
But there is a difference between kindness and truth. When we tell every student they are excellent, we tell none of them anything at all. We deprive the genuinely excellent of recognition, and we deprive the genuinely struggling of the honest information they need to improve. In the end, the grade is a form of communication. When it always says the same thing, it has stopped communicating.
The students in every class know quite well who the brightest star is among them. The children on those muddy fields knew who could play. They always do.
My father told me that in the 1930’s on the first day of medical school students were told to look to their right and left and then told that one of those students would be gone in a year. (He was never in med school.) By the time I got there 40 years later, once one was accepted, the chances of graduating were over 90%.