Thoughts on the Grading Asymptote

“[The Committee on Raising the Standard] believes . . . that by defining anew the Grades A, B, C, D, and E, and by sending the definitions to every instructor, the Faculty may do something to keep up the standard of the higher grades. It believes that in the present practice Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily—Grade A for work of no very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity.” More broadly, the Committee opined, lax grading was compromising the very significance of a Harvard degree. “One of the chief obstacles to raising the standard of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work. . . . These students maintain themselves in technically good standing with so little work that our degree would be seriously cheapened if its minimum cost were generally known.” 

Back in 2001 I did my best to reconstruct historical data; it seems that grades have been rising for a long time, not continuously, but more or less without interruption, except for the decade of the 1970s. I noted that "the present rate of increase can't go on forever." The news about the median and modal grades at Harvard don't settle the question of changes in grade point averages, but I'll bet they have continued to rise, though at a slower rate simply because they can't be higher than 4.0 in the Harvard system. What is to be done? With all due respect to my friend and colleague Professor Mansfield, it is not clear to me that anything needs to be done. Sorry to sound complacent, but almost any remedy I can think of would have side effects that are worse than the problem (which I dissect in detail in Excellence Without a Soul and will not burden you with here). Toughening up on grading practices would run counter to other educational issues with which we are dealing. For example, grading is higher in smaller, less anonymous courses. And we are trying to reduce the number of larger, more anonymous courses. It's pretty reasonable to think that faculty are softer on students they know well, and the trend is to try to improve education by making the experience more intimate. (That is actually implicit in the other story in today's Crimson, the success of the multiple, smaller life sciences concentrations.) We are also trying to reduce stress, and arguably tougher grading might raise stress levels. Though it is not really clear to me; there is always going to be competition as long as more than one grade is possible. And students get stressed even about ungraded courses they are virtually certain to pass -- they get stressed about their performance as a matter of personal pride even if the professor's assessment means next to nothing. In any case, given the long history of claims of imminent harm from soft grading and the difficulty I have in finding a lot of slackers in my classes, I am skeptical about the direness of the problem. When new colleagues ask me what the community norms are, I typically tell them to grade however they want, as long as they will be able to look back in 3 years and remember who was a star, who was a workhorse, and who was just getting by. Of course the situation in computer science may be atypical, since almost no employer asks candidates for transcripts. They administer a kind of oral quiz in the interview and try to figure out what the candidate knows. Grades are pretty irrelevant. Having said all that, here are two suggestions that I think might help. 1) Require every department to have a discussion of grading once a year. Hand out the grades assigned by everyone in the department so they have to look at their own and their peers's practices while everyone is watching. Have someone from the administration go to the meeting to make sure it happens. No quotas, no rules, just information and a requirement for talking to each other about what grades are being given and why. The underlying idea here is to make the conversation more inti