85% of all grades awarded at Harvard are either A or A-. 67% are A.
In the Harvard class of 2025, 21% of the graduates finished with a perfect 4.0!! That’s more than 300 students.
(SIDEBAR: I wondered how they select a valedictorian when there is a 300-way tie for first? It turns out that they don’t. The concept of “valedictorian” no longer exists.)
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What does that mean in reality?
Imagine a class of 100 students. The best student in the class gets the same grade as the 67th best. One can essentially graduate cum laude at the bottom of the class.
B is the new F.
Many educators feel, probably correctly, that this has two important negative effects on society:
1. Employers and grad schools who want the very best students have no idea who they are. They have to resort to logic like “This guy got a B in one of his classes. He’s probably cognitively impaired.” (This was especially true when the use of standardized tests was declining, although I have read that elite universities are going back to the standardized tests after a brief experiment with abandonment.)
2. The students are not encouraged to really master the subject matter when 67th best produces the same results, leading to an overall decline in competence in all fields.
Do the brilliant educators at America’s most elite university have a solution?
Well, maybe.
Basically Harvard is now pass/fail.
I miss the good old days when the nut jobs got weeded out and only the best minds matriculated from Harvard like US president George “Dubya” Bush, the Unabomber, and the rage against the machine guy. Geniuses.
The Unabomber actually clearly is (or was) highly intelligent. Nut jobs can easily be highly intelligent people, I don’t know if there’s much of a correlation. If you broaden it out to highly intelligent people that still do stupid things, there’s even many more people from Bill Clinton to Robert McNamara.
Since I couldn’t think of a second person off the top of my head in addition to Clinton, I did a google A.I look and some of this is amusing: Richard Nixon is another obvious example.
Garry Hoy (Lawyer): In 1993, a brilliant articling lawyer fell to his death from the 24th floor of a Toronto building while trying to prove to students that the windows were unbreakable.
Robert McNamara & The “Best and Brightest” McNamara and a team of Harvard experts mismanaged the Vietnam War through a mix of arrogance, abstract analysis, and failure to apply common sense to a social situation.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Author): The creator of the highly logical Sherlock Holmes was consistently fooled by fraudulent séances and mediums, showcasing how high intelligence can allow people to rationalize nonsense.
Gottfried Leibniz (Mathematician): While inventing (discovering!) calculus, his pursuit of complex, abstract ideas led him to devise ideas that were practically nonsensical, highlighting the tendency of intellectuals to overthink.
NASA Engineers (1999): Scientists failed to convert Imperial units (pounds) to Metric units (Newtons) during a Mars probe calculation, resulting in the loss of a $125 million orbiter.
Isaac Newton, one of the most brilliant minds in history, believed in all sorts of things that seem utterly insane. He spent a lot of time on alchemy and numerology, for example.
Similar to the NASA example, Neil deGrasse Tyson failed to convert temperature to Kelvin when applying the Ideal Gas Law in the deflategate controversy, and Bill Nye the Science Guy made a slightly different middle-school error. (He neglected to add the existing atmospheric pressure to the measured air pressure of the ball.)
Tyson looked at the correct math, admitted he had made an error, and issued a revised conclusion.
Nye, on the other hand, when confronted with his error, doubled down on it!
Newton also shoved a needle into his eye…
I believe it’s Newton who is described as both the last alchemist and the first scientist.
The more I learned the bios of the inventors of quantum mechanics, the more I wanted my ignorance back. People’s lives are messy, bad events in the world really screw them up royally. Psychologically, they flail randomly and adopt weird ideas trying to cope. They were genius, but they were nut-cases. I hate that.
But what if 67 people learn and can demonstrate the material? Shouldn’t the reality be that they all get A’s?
It’s a matter of defining what an A means, and what “learning and can demonstrate” means. That is totally arbitrary. In the old days, you could graduate with a 2.0 GPA. Theoretically, that meant that you had learned the material, and they gave you a degree. In the modern day, that same student, displaying the same competency, would have a 3.5.
That alters the difference between the valedictorian and the bare achiever from two points to half a point. I don’t know whether that is a good thing or bad. I guess it doesn’t matter as long as you know that today’s 3.75 (bottom half of the class) is not the same as yesterday’s 3.75 (top 5% or so).
I guess you can also argue that everyone who was smart enough to get into Harvard in the first place (excluding legacies) is probably an A student, at least by some definition, so most grades should be an A.
Again, it’s all a matter of definition.
This is kind of how everything is now. It’s either a five star review or a one star review. There is no more in between.
The other day I bothered to weed out the 10’s & 1’s from an iMdb ratings chart. I recalculated the weighted average of the 2’s thru 9’s. Then I did the weighted average of the 10’s & 1’s. I got about the same number. Either one was a decent substitute for the overall average. I still think these ratings are unhelpful to anyone looking for some kind of guidance. But I was wrong to simply assume it’s the 10’s & 1’s that are pathological.
You are correct that the number of ratings that are at the rails indicates a lack of discrimination. It also bares the fact that the voting is polarization driven. I can’t help but feel this is bad culture.
Or it could just mean they all have merit to do a job and employers are always trying a way to filter people out based on the smallest amount of minutia, often subjective to hiring managers themselves that really have no subject matter knowledge.
There are a lot of individuals that can move up the DIKW pyramid to wisdom, but their ability to do a position or not is often determined by intangibles that have absolutely nothing to do with the status of a University. Many employed right now in a large corporate enterprise that are looking at this minutia has tons of people employed that fall within the cracks and meet the limbo pole of not screwing up enough to garner anyone’s attention.
Besides that, the larger and more ridiculous way Western society determines merit is how good of an opportunist you are to play the meta of Capitalism rather than the invention itself. Especially in the tech world. You could have a team out there discover superconductors, cold fusion, or a dozen other holy grail scientific advancements and what will their reward be? Chances are, a lot less than the investors, vulture capitalists, private equity, intellectual property lawyers, executives, etc that play the meta of the system through hierarchy rather than wisdom of the individuals behind it.
So, the essentially gradeless college doesn’t meet the needs of employers. But, is that the proper purpose of education? An argument could be made that it isn’t. On the other hand, if a school is to survive financially, it had better serve employers’ interests in a capitalist society or governments’ interests in a communist society.
Perhaps my understanding of capitalism is too narrow, but in a purely capitalistic society, the college would meet the needs of the people who pay for it. The more satisfied the customers are, the more successful the institution ought to be. If the customers demand easy marking, the college will probably deliver it.
At least for undergraduate programs, the primary customers are the students, or more likely, their parents. I suppose those parents prefer the A grade for their precious snowflakes, as do the actual snowflakes.
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On the other hand, the economic health of universities, especially on the grad school level, is based on more than tuition. Their other “customers” are the government grants, corporations and other rich donors that fund their research.
Fat drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.
Senator Blutarsky would disagree.
the Bell curve is for losers
I used to think grade inflation was wrong, but I changed my mind after becoming a legal recruiter (headhunter for lawyers). Top firms (the ones that will pay recruiting fees) will hire graduates from the Top 10 law schools or who graduated from lower-ranked schools in the top 10% of their class. I made the mistake of going to the best law school where I was accepted. I graduated in the top third of my class at a top 20 school, but I wouldn’t have been considered by any of my client firms. In retrospect, I would have been much better off going to a lower-ranked school where the competition wouldn’t have been as intense, where I would have had a better chance of graduating in the top 10%. I would also have likely been eligible for scholarships.
I graduated from one of the best high schools in the country. The Bronx High School of Science was a wonderful school where I got a tremendous education. However, there are some very good reasons not to go if you are accepted. First, it is a very large school where it is easy to be anonymous. There were over 800 students in my graduating class. That’s not a great environment for some students. However, there is also a competitive penalty for going there in terms of getting into a top college. I graduated with an 88/100 GPA and a high SAT score. However, I was rejected by 6 of the 7 colleges where I applied. A B+ average at Bronx Science should have been treated as an A from most high schools by admissions offices, but it wasn’t. My mother used to teach at a Catholic high school in the Bronx. I would almost certainly have been valedictorian if I had attended that school. At the very least, I would have had an A+ GPA. What’s more important to you? Get the best high school education you can, or get into the best college?
So I understand why elite schools inflate grades. Elite students don’t want to be penalized with a lower grade that might affect their job prospects or their acceptance to an elite graduate school. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if grade inflation has reached Bronx Science, Stuyvesant H.S., and Brooklyn Tech (3 elite high schools where admission is based on a competitive exam).