Harvard Students Receiving Fewer As After Grade Inflation is Exposed
“Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh shared statistics showing the number of A grades fell by about 7 percent from last year”
It’s amazing what getting caught will do to change behavior.
The College Fix reports:
Harvard gives fewer As after report exposed massive grade inflation: dean
Harvard University students received fewer As in their fall semester classes following concerns about academic rigor and massive grade inflation at the Ivy League institution, the campus newspaper reported this week.
In an email to faculty Monday, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh shared statistics showing the number of A grades fell by about 7 percent from last year, The Harvard Crimson reports.
Still, more than half of students’ grades were As. According to Claybaugh’s email, “the share of flat As fell from 60.2 percent last year to 53.4 percent in the fall.”
Her email comes after a report published by her office last fall warned that mounting grade inflation has been “damaging the academic culture of the College.” The 25-page report found that 60 percent of all undergraduate grades are now A’s – a 35 percent increase compared to 20 years ago.
On Monday, the dean addressed professors’ fears that giving out fewer As could hurt their teaching evaluations, known at Harvard as “Q reports,” according to The Crimson.
“I know this change wasn’t easy,” Claybaugh wrote. “Some of you report that your Q scores went down, and you worry about the effect this might have on reviews or enrollments.”
“With respect to reviews, I can reassure you that we look at Q scores alongside difficulty scores and median grades—and that we recognize and appreciate your efforts to restore rigor,” she wrote.
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Comments
they’ve social promoting the students forever
now its just more dangerous b/c its the left that has taken over and has
doctors and atc and pilots installed where they shouldnt be
Fewer what?
Never mind…
You and me both. Technically, the construct “A’s” is ungrammatical, but still preferable in a context when leaving out the apostrophe causes confusion with an unrelated word, AS in that headline..
50+% A’s is still ridiculous.
The teacher/profs are all upset because they are rated by the students and fear the backlash of giving out deserved grades. They lose courses, students and promotion when they don’t placate the little brat offspring of previous grads by giving out A’s like candy.
I’m positive that was a contributing factor to my not-so-great student evaluations. I stuck to a 90-80-70-60 grading scale and graded accordingly, which was not generally appreciated.
Students tended to have the attitude that they paid for college, and therefore the unspoken expectation was that they’d pass. They’d freak out after midterm grades came out and the realization that the C they so desparately needed for their scholarship or whatever was probably out of their reach.