Three months after the University released a bombshell report on runaway grade inflation—a problem that intensified dramatically in the last decade—Dean of undergraduate education Amanda Claybaugh emailed Harvard College students and faculty on Friday with a proposal for reforming the grading system. Developed by a subcommittee of the faculty’s Undergraduate Educational Policy Committee, the 19-page document includes a set of recommendations intended to “restore grades to their role as meaningful indicators of student performance and feedback.”
There are two core recommendations, both of which would require a full faculty vote. First, the subcommittee proposes that instructors limit the number of A grades to 20 percent of the students enrolled in a class, plus four additional A grades. (The impact of the additional four A grades would be greater in small seminars of 10 students, for example, to avoid discouraging students from taking more advanced, challenging classes.) This allows some wiggle room in cases where 20 percent of the class might be “an unreasonably low number” of students, the report stated. The proposed cap is not a grading curve—there would be no limit on the number of A-minuses, B’s, or lower grades that a faculty member could award.
By mandating a maximum number of A’s, the proposed rule would help overcome the collective action problem, which otherwise puts faculty members at a disadvantage if they try on their own to give fewer A’s than the norm. According to a University fact sheet that accompanied the release of the proposal, nearly two-thirds of all letter grades currently are A’s, and almost 85 percent are in the A range (A-minus to A-plus).
Second, for internal rankings—which are used to determine honors, prizes, and fellowships—the subcommittee recommends jettisoning grade point average (GPA) as the principal metric, since grade inflation has rendered it almost useless. Student GPAs are now clustered together so tightly around the 4.0 mark that any numerical differences are more likely to be caused by “random noise” in the grading system than meaningful distinctions among student performance, the proposal says. To calculate students’ eligibility for summa cum laude graduation honors, for instance, University officials must carry out GPAs to five decimal points. “When honors and opportunities rest on distinctions this fragile,” the proposal argues, “the results are not only unreliable but unjust.”
Instead, the committee advocates using average percentile rank (APR) as the base metric. Essentially, APR shows the percentage of students at or below a particular student in the class—measuring students’ academic performance relative to each other, rather than measuring each student’s absolute performance, as a letter grade or GPA does. (The APR calculation works the same way as percentage rankings in standardized tests like the SAT—someone in the 99th percentile scored better than 99 out of 100 other test-takers).
The proposal outlines a handful of other related recommendations. Instructors who want to opt out their courses from the 20 percent limit on A’s should be able to petition to do so, it says. Those courses would then be graded on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis (pass/fail, essentially), and those courses would not be included in the internal APR calculations of student performance. In courses where the A limit is applied, the proposal recommends that faculty members submit, in addition to their letter grades, any student scores or rankings that would help calculate APR.
These changes are not yet official policy. For now, the proposal is under deliberation, and administrators are soliciting feedback from students and faculty alike. If advanced to the next step, it would become formal legislation, which would be voted on by the full Faculty of Arts and Sciences, likely sometime this spring. In her email, Claybaugh did not give a specific date for that decision but announced that she would host two town hall meetings, on February 12 and 24, for students and faculty to discuss the proposal.
