Harvard has awakened to its problem with grade inflation, and the students it has admitted are having their own problem.
A recent internal report found that Harvard is dishing out too many A’s, and that the current undergrad system is “failing to perform the key functions of grading” and “damaging the academic culture of the College more generally.”
In an honest grading system, taking a letter grade scale of A-F, where A is best, F is failing, and C is average, it wouldn’t be the case that a school, much less an allegedly elite one like Harvard, would be dishing out too many A’s. Under such a grading regime, the large majority of grades would be C’s—after all, the majority of a population clusters around some measure of average, whatever the population is. Maybe 10% of students would get A’s and 10% would get F’s. The rest would be roughly evenly distributed between B’s and D’s.
The grades lower than A would (or should) be spurs to work harder and do better. Those getting F’s would be candidates for dropping, or being dropped, out of Harvard and so no longer wasting their parents’ money.
Consider some numbers reflecting the level of effort Harvard’s students put into their classes.
The average time students spend studying outside class has barely changed, from 6.08 hours a week for each of their courses in fall 2006 to 6.3 hours this spring, according to the report by Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education.
Let’s assume a heavy class load of four classes, each meeting three times per week for an hour and a half for each meeting. For spring 2025, that works out, according to my run-of-the-mill third grade arithmetic, to some 18 hours per week in the classroom. Those 6.3 hours per week per course on “homework” works out, according to that same arithmetic, to 25.2 hours per week of homework. That sums to 43.2 hours per week on classwork.
That’s an outer bound. When I went to a top-drawer private college, I took four classes per week, but those that met three times per week met for one-hour sessions. The classes with hour-and-a-half sessions met only twice per week.
Oh—the strain.
The nature of the students’ problem is made plain by this plaint from one student:
You admitted these students because they have straight A’s, and now they’re getting a lot of A’s, and it’s, like, “This is a problem.” And I’m thinking, how on earth is that a problem?
What these Precious Ones need to understand is that they’re no longer competing with run-of-the-mill high school students for grades. Now they’re competing with a much higher, much more capable, collection of students, students who really are their peers. It’s a different population than the one of which they were members in high school. Of course the grade definition of “average” has gone up, as has the grade definition of “superior” and “best.”
What Harvard’s managers, and especially its teachers, need to understand is that, after explaining this difference (which should be obvious to the students; they are, after all, the cream of their high school classes), there’s no need to discuss the matter further. The students who can’t handle the new regime of grading—being expected actually to work for their A’s—need simply to be dropped from the school.