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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.
Last year, the university set out to study the state of academics at Harvard. The Classroom Social Compact Committee released its report in January. Students’ grades are up, but they’re doing less academic work. They skip class at a rate that surprises even the most hardened professors. Many care more about extracurriculars than coursework. “A majority of students and faculty we heard from agree that Harvard College students do not prioritize their academic experience,” the committee wrote.
And yet, these students report being more stressed about school than ever. Without meaningful grades, the most ambitious students have no straightforward way to stand out. And when straight A’s are the norm, the prospect of getting even a single B can become terrifying. As a result, students are anxious, distracted, and hyper-focused on using extracurriculars to distinguish themselves in the eyes of future employers.
[From the November 2024 issue: The elite college students who can’t read books]
Of course, plenty of Harvard students are still devoted to their schoolwork, and rampant grade inflation is not unique to any one college. It affects all of elite academia. But Harvard is a useful case study because administrators have examined the issue, and because as goes Harvard, so goes the rest of the sector. And now Harvard is, at long last, embarking on an effort to reverse the trend and make its programming more academically rigorous. In doing so, it’s confronting a question that would be absurd if it weren’t so urgent: Can the world’s top universities get their students to care about learning?
The road to grade-inflation hell was paved with good intentions. As more students applied to Harvard and earning a spot became ever harder, the university ended up filling its classes with students who had only ever gotten perfect grades. These overachievers arrived on campus with even more anxiety than past generations about keeping up their GPA. Students sobbing at office hours, begging their professor to bump a rare B+ to an A–, became a not-uncommon occurrence.
At the same time, professors were coming under more pressure to tend to their students’ emotional well-being, Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, told me. They received near-constant reminders that Harvard was admitting more students with disabilities, who’d matriculated from under-resourced schools, or who had mental-health issues. Instructors took the message as an exhortation to lower expectations and raise grades. Resisting the trend was hard. Few professors want to be known as harsh graders, with the accompanying poor evaluations and low course enrollments. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker told me that, 20 years ago, he gave a quarter of the students in his intro psych course an A or A–. Then students stopped signing up. Now almost two-thirds of the class are in the A range.
The pandemic only made matters worse. In 2011, 60 percent of all grades at Harvard were in the A range (up from 33 percent in 1985). By the 2020–21 academic year, that share had risen to 79 percent. Students were more anxious than ever, so professors further eroded norms to help them.
Taken together, this has led to a regime in which most students get near-perfect grades, but the grades mean something different to everyone. Outside observers might still think of grades as an objective assessment of a student’s work, and therefore a way to differentiate between levels of achievement. But many professors seem to conceive of them as an endlessly adaptable participation trophy. Claybaugh recalled a recent talk with an experienced science professor who told her that some students get A’s for excellent work. Others get the mark because they’re from less-privileged backgrounds and demonstrated improvement throughout the semester. And still others get A’s because they were doing strong work before a mental-health crisis derailed their progress. “So pretty much everyone gets A’s,” Claybaugh told me. “That’s where we’ve ended up.”
Without the threat of poor grades, students have largely stopped trying in their courses. Pinker told me that student performance on the multiple-choice portion of his final exam (which he has kept mostly the same) has declined by 10 percentage points over the past two decades, even as he gives out more A’s. An incoming Harvard junior, who requested anonymity to avoid affecting her future job prospects, told me that, for all the hand-wringing about student self-censorship, her peers mostly don’t read texts closely enough to form opinions in the first place. “I feel like college has become almost anti-intellectual,” Melani Cammett, a Harvard international-affairs professor, told me. “This is the place where we’re supposed to deal with big ideas, and yet students are not really engaging with them.”
That easy A’s would lead students to phone in their coursework should have been predictable. What’s genuinely surprising is that the system has also failed to reduce stress. The percentage of first-year students who have received counseling has nearly tripled in the past decade. This tension nagged at me during my own time in college. I graduated from Yale two years ago. While there, I experienced many of the same dynamics that Harvard professors and students described to me. The classes were mostly easy. Hardly anyone did the reading. We could all expect to be rewarded with an A or, at the very worst, a B. And yet students were always panicking. It felt at times as though campus was in the throes of a collective psychotic break. It wasn’t until I graduated that I, like Harvard’s professors and administrators, came to see these issues—lax grading, high stress—as connected.
When everyone gets an A, an A starts to mean very little. The kind of student that gets admitted to Harvard (or any elite college) wants to compete. They’ve spent their lives clawing upward. Khurana, the former dean, observed that Harvard students want success to feel meaningful. Getting all A’s is necessary, but insufficient.
This has created what Claybaugh called a “shadow system of distinction.” Students now use extracurriculars to differentiate themselves from their peers. They’ve created a network of finance and consulting clubs that are almost indistinguishable from full-time jobs. To apply, students submit résumés, sit for interviews, and prepare a fake case or deliverable. At this point, the odds of getting into some clubs within Harvard are similar to the odds of being accepted to the college in the first place. The Harvard junior told me that she hadn’t considered going into consulting or investment banking before she arrived in Cambridge. But because the clubs are so exclusive, everyone wants to be chosen. She ended up applying. “There are a handful of clubs that you can just join, but the clubs people want to join are typically not the clubs everyone can join,” she told me. “Even volunteering clubs or service-oriented clubs have an application process. They’re highly competitive.” Things have gotten to the point where some students feel guilty for focusing on schoolwork at the expense of extracurriculars, she told me.
Max Palys, an incoming Harvard senior, told me that coursework doesn’t prepare students to answer interview questions for finance and consulting jobs. The only way to get ready is through extracurriculars or on one’s own time. By sophomore year, his friends were fully absorbed in the internship-recruiting process. They took the easiest classes they could find and did the bare-minimum coursework to reserve time to prepare for technical interviews.
This hypercompetitive club culture advantages students who come from fancy high schools. Maya Jasanoff, a history professor and a co-chair of the Classroom Social Compact Committee, pointed out that Harvard devotes considerable resources to helping less-privileged students succeed academically. But that kind of assistance is useless to the extent that extracurricular clubs, which prioritize students who already have experience, are the coin of the realm.
Now that they know that making college easier doesn’t reduce stress, Harvard administrators are attempting to rediscover a morsel of lost wisdom from the ancient past: School should be about academics. In March, the faculty amended the student handbook to emphasize the highly novel point that students should prioritize their schoolwork. The university has advised professors to set attendance policies and make clear that students, contrary to their intuition, are expected to come to class. And it formed a new committee to consider how to rein in runaway grade inflation. The committee is considering proposals such as switching from letter grades to a numerical scale (to get rid of students’ frame of reference) or reporting grades as the difference between what a student earned and the course median. In the meantime, Claybaugh has asked each department to standardize and toughen its grading policies. Faculty will need to move collectively so no one gets singled out as a harsh grader.
[Franklin Foer: Can this man save Harvard?]
Fixing grade inflation, however, is easier said than done. Princeton, for example, experimented with an informal 35 percent cap on the share of A’s that professors were expected to give out. It abandoned the effort after a 2014 faculty report found, among other things, that the policy made it harder to recruit students, particularly student athletes. Beginning in 1998, Cornell began including courses’ median grades on student transcripts. Far from mitigating grade inflation, the practice only made the problem worse by giving students extra insight into which classes were the easiest. Last year, the faculty senate voted to end the policy.
Claybaugh assured me that Harvard is committed to bringing about a lasting culture change around learning. She thinks of the change as a matter of fairness. Harvard students have access to a trove of intellectual treasures and the chance to commune with many of the greatest living minds. “If we have the world’s biggest university library, then our students should be reading these books,” Claybaugh told me. “And if the students we’re admitting don’t want to read those books, or if we have set up an incentive structure that dissuades them from reading these books, then that is immoral, and we need to reincentivize them to do so.”
If Harvard is to succeed where Princeton and Cornell failed, it will be because the political environment has given its initiative an extra level of urgency. The Trump administration’s assault on elite institutions generally and Harvard in particular has put the university’s public standing at stake. Claybaugh believes that the best way to help Harvard is to acknowledge its flaws and try to fix them. Bringing rigor back to the academic mission seems a natural place to start. “We should be making sure that we are living up to our mission to restore our legitimacy in people’s eyes,” she told me. “I don’t want people all across America thinking, It’s a place of ideas I find somehow troubling or offensive, and also, no one goes to class.”
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