Harvard Awarded 79% ‘A’ Grades in the 2020-2021 School Year
“…faculty may feel compelled to give good grades because they are linked to positive course evaluations required for professional advancement.”
I guess Harvard isn’t so hard. 79% ‘A’ grades in one school year. Just wow:
A newly released report revealed 79 percent of grades given to Harvard students in 2020-21 were in the A range, nearly a 20 percent increase from a decade ago.
Approximately 60 percent of grades given in the 2010-11 year were in the A-range, The Harvard Crimson reported Thursday.
“Mean grades on a four-point scale were 3.80 in the 2020-21 academic year, up from 3.41 in 2002-03,” according to The Crimson.
Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh and Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana presented the report at the first meeting this year of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
The “report establishes we have a problem — or rather, we have two: the intertwined problems of grade inflation and compression,” Claybaugh said at the meeting.
Claybaugh told The Crimson that faculty may feel compelled to give good grades because they are linked to positive course evaluations required for professional advancement.
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Doesn’t pass the laugh test.
You have to give high marks to people that believe, literally, that words are violence and violence is expression. That’s pretty smart stuff!
I want to hire the straight, white men who received Cs.
I notice it doesn’t say, “Students earned….”, but rather, “Harvard awarded….”
Could be both, if the classes at Harvard ae that easy.
My experience is with medical school. When I started in 1970, we were told that 30% would not be passed on to the second year and their names would be turned over to their draft boards, they were automatically medics and not expected to live very long.
Since I became a professor of medicine and found no one was failed, zero.
We had better doctors in the past.
But what are our boys doing for medics?!
So now c students can claim to be well better than in fact, the are.
Harvard students are like the children of Lake Wobegon who are all exceptional.
I went to another Ivy League school for my PhD and was shocked when I TAed first-year undergrad classes and discovered that I was expected to have a class average of A-. Students expected to only do an hour/week/class of homework. And grade inflation has continued in the decades since.
Harvard has a graduation rate of 97% — it is almost impossible for anyone to fail out. Getting a Harvard degree, or any other Ivy-league degree for that matter, just means that you were admitted.
This kind of grade inflation is occurring at most colleges. Ever since colleges started treating students as pampered customers, it’s been professionally hazardous for faculty to give them realistic grades. In most cases, the average grades in science courses are somewhere in the high B range, and grades in humanities and social studies are nearly all A.
The grade inflation at Harvard goes way beyond the overall trend…. It’s a diploma school at this point
If you work here, you must always remember two rules:
Rule #1. The PAYING CUSTOMER is always right
Rule #2. When the PAYING CUSTOMER is wrong, see Rule #1.
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Is there really anybody out there today in 2023 who is naive enough to believe that Harvard is anything other than a Harvard Diploma Retail Store?
Rather like a grocery retailer, but much more profitable.
It’s not just a diploma retail store. It is a store filled with carefully selected diverse students of a certain type.
Harvard is clearly a BS school not providing anything close to a rigorous course of study in anything….kids electing to go to community colleges are coming out better educated and more intellectually challenged…. Anyone impressed with someone with a degree from Harvard or proud of having one from there must be full blown idiots
I haven’t looked at my student evaluations in years. They are given questions that they can’t possibly answer and/or don’t care to. When we moved to online evaluations (from paper–you know, to save the trees), the response rates plummeted. From 100 students I might get 10 evaluations. Not worth my time.
I was a first year medical student about 40 years ago when I was handed my first Professor Evaluation to complete.
I couldn’t believe that I was being asked to evaluate a professor
I am aware of the arguments pro con & in between
I thought at the time that this cannot lead anywhere good, and it hasn’t.
Ivy League schools have been an academic joke for 40 years. I knew a guy who went to Brown 40 years ago. He was a complete stoner and never went to class. He told me point blank that he never got less than a B and it was common knowledge among students that it was virtually impossible to fail out.
No wonder America is in decline with “geniuses” such as these burrowed deep into business and government.
America is akin to a raging alcoholic who must reach rock bottom before choosing to fix itself…it will not be pretty.
My undergraduate major was selective, in that you had to have completed at least two years of undergraduate work and then apply to get into the program, the acceptance rate to the program being below 50% in a school where the original acceptance rate was in the 30-35% range. So the faculty who taught us assumed that at least some of us were highly motivated. They explained to us that the highest score on an exam told them how well they had taught the subject, which was their problem. If the highest score did not reflect what they considered adequate knowledge of the subject to unleash us onto helpless patients, they would go over it again, more intensely. The lower scores told us how well we had done relative to what we could have learned, which was our problem. Under this scheme it would have been possible for ALL of the grades to be tightly clustered in the A range, without any bias based on intra-faculty competition.