“Harvard’s Faculty Burst Out Laughing”: How Harvard’s Grade Inflation Became a Bad Joke

A recent article in The Atlantic contained a notable account of the final meeting of the Spring 2024 semester for Harvard’s college faculty. As part of his annual report, then-Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana could not keep a straight face when reporting that the average grade at the school was now 3.8. As Khurana chuckled at the lunacy of an average of an A, the rest of the faculty joined in the laughter. It appears that, after years of runaway grade inflation, Harvard’s grading system has become a bad joke even among its own faculty.

All schools have experienced grade inflation, which is often mandated by grading curves that prevent faculty from assigning more accurate grades. Harvard has long been the leader in this race to the top. The ripple effect is that other schools have sought to match the generous grading to appease students who are used to such generous grading standards from high school. The result at Harvard is that the grading scale runs from A to A+.

Here is the account in the article:

During their final meeting of the spring 2024 semester, after an academic year marked by controversies, infighting, and the defenestration of the university president, Harvard’s faculty burst out laughing. As was tradition, the then-dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, had been providing updates on the graduating class. When he got to GPA, Khurana couldn’t help but chuckle at how ludicrously high it was: about 3.8 on average. The rest of the room soon joined in, according to a professor present at the meeting.

They were cracking up not simply because grades had gotten so high but because they knew just how little students were doing to earn them.

Harvard faculty jettisoned any academic integrity in pandering to student expectations. It is the same motivation that we have seen in the purging of conservatives and libertarians from faculty ranks. It is simply easier. Faculty have little burden in grading when everyone gets an A. They become more sought after teachers and receive higher evaluations. It is the same with creating faculty echo chambers. They face few challenges in departments if everyone runs from the left to the far left. What is most striking is that this is not even a Pass/Fail system. It is a Pass/Pass system.

Harvard is not alone. As we previously discussed, Yale was at 80 percent years ago. We also previously discussed how, at Spellman College, economics professor Kendrick Morales was fired after objecting to the school raising his grades without his consent, even after the grades were massively increased.Morales worked for two years at Spellman, teaching two upper-level courses. In one class, he added a 28-point grade bump for one test at the request of his department chair.

When students overall performed poorly on the final, Morales “pre-emptively” raised their scores by 36 points, so that a student receiving a 57 would receive an A. Yet, even with that increase, 44 percent of that class would still fail. Indeed, they had failed, but Morales says that Undergraduate Studies Dean Desiree Pedescleaux bumped up the students’ grades again without his approval.

Grade inflation is only the latest sign of how school administrators have lost control of universities and colleges. It also reflects a growing expectation among students for higher GPAs. Schools now attract applicants and professors attract students with assurances that virtually everyone will receive an A.

It is easy to say that this is the byproduct of the “trophy generation,” but this is not their fault. Years ago, I had an interesting conversation with one of my classes over this negative image and one student said that they never wanted participation trophies. She noted it was my generation that wanted them to have them, not the kids. Another student said that she would routinely throw away trophies as meaningless and insulting.

The same could well prove true for grades, which will become worthless and discarded if this trend continues. That will undermine the critical role of universities in evaluating student performance. That role not only helps future employers. It is even more important in offering students an accurate appraisal of their work. Often students will pursue degrees for the wrong reasons and not consider other fields that may be better suited to their talents and interests.

Harvard’s grading wipes out any distinctions between students in a system that only the character Syndrome would celebrate:

We are also producing future workers who have been coddled within a system that does little beyond praising and pandering them. Once they enter the workforce in an increasingly competitive market, they can find a shocker as their performance is actually measures and compared to others.

This generation of administrators and faculty have destroyed the credibility and integrity of higher education because it lacks the courage to maintain academic standards. Instead, faculty now just laugh at their own lunacy.

When John F. Kennedy was given an honorary degree at Yale, he quipped “it might be said now that I have the best of both worlds. A Harvard education and a Yale degree.” The question is whether the Harvard education or the Yale degree hold much distinction when you receive an A by just showing up to class.

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Author: jonathanturley

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