Reply to Harvard faculty vote to limit A grades to no more than 20% of the class

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Anybody who does A work needs to get an A on their transcript. Doing otherwise means the grades are meaningless.

What grades others get has nothing to do with my grade. [/quote]

Most people do not produce true A work. The average grade should be a 3.0. Only those very much above average should get a 4.0. Grade inflation is bad for everyone [/quote]

What's your evidence for this? Why should an average grade be a 3.0. Clearly your education didn't teach you to make arguments coherently.[/quote]

Because a B grade is historically defined as "above average" and "good" work.  90% of students can't be above average in the real world.[/quote]

Your education didn't teach you the difference between an opinion or a fact either.   Grades can be normative (where students receive grades relative to the performance of their fellow students) or fixed (attainment of some pre-determined learning standards.)

Both grading options have their strengths and weaknesses. Grading on a curve at Harvard is rough.  Brown writes that 47% of its students were valedictorian or salutatorian of their HS class.  It's probably well above that at Harvard.[/quote]

+1 I hate to burst your bubble, but 90% of students at Harvard are academically "above average."  If they've shown mastery of learning standards for the course, there doesn't need to be an artificial curve such that only 20% of them can get As.  They shouldn't be penalized just because they're with a much smarter cohort than the average university.

[/quote]

Back in the day, my STEM major courses at an elite school were curved, which definitely limited the number of A's to even fewer than the 20% that Harvard is currently proposing. And all the students admitted to this university had top grades and standardized test scores. And yet, rarity of As was fine, because it was not the expectation that everyone got A's just for showing up and doing an average job compared to your classmates, even if it on a very difficult exam. The times I did earn As were noteworthy, because I knew I had accomplished something special.

Rampant grade inflation actually hurts many students. Graduate schools, law/med schools, recruiters etc. can no longer distinguish who the exceptional students are, and everyone's A average is now basically worthless. This forces students to try and stand out in other ways, all of which are even more stress inducing than working to earn good grades. [/quote]

I am not disagreeing that grades should reflect actual knowledge and competency. If a student has not mastered the material, then that should not be rewarded with a high grade. What does not make sense to me is imposing a quota or forced distribution on grades because that introduces something artificial into the evaluation process. If competency has genuinely been achieved, then it should be recognized with the appropriate grade regardless of whether the neighboring student is also competent.[/quote]

The idea that you deserve an A because you are competent is itself the problem that this is trying to tackle. They want to move back to a system where an A is not an expectation but a mark of exceptional good work. Theoretically it’s possible that you have a class where everybody is truly exceptional, I guess, but clearly that’s not what Harvard faculty see.

The fact that a student gets straight As in high school and a good SAT score doesn’t mean she will do exceptionally good work in a college level class. And experience suggests that, even at a place like Harvard, there’s a bell curve of achievement.

The goal is to make an A representative the right side of the bell curve again and not just the minimum level of competence. [/quote]

Make the coursework even more rigorous if needed to differentiate.  That's one solution.  But a grading policy that polices how many students can get a certain grade is ridiculous.  There should be no mandate on specific grades, but a mandate on rigor.  That's on the professor and a department to decide and not a blanket one-solution policy coerced by a school.[/quote]

The professors are choosing to mandate a cap to give themselves leverage to make the course harder and stand up to relentless student pressure to increase grades. [/quote]

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