70% of Faculty Vote to Overhaul Harvard Grading with A Cap
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: 70% of Faculty Vote to Overhaul Harvard Grading with A Cap
#2> Faculty voted 458 to 201 for the first plank of the three-part proposal, which will limit A grades in undergraduate courses to 20 percent of enrollment, with flexibility for up to four additional A’s.
Looks like its best not to enroll in classes with more than 5 students.
Cynicism aside, seems like a good step.
Re: 70% of Faculty Vote to Overhaul Harvard Grading with A Cap
#3The framing that a 20% A cap distinguishes "extraordinary" from "merely strong" work is self-defeating. It measures performance relative to a single cohort, not against any absolute standard of mastery. If 40% of a class genuinely does exceptional work, 20% get mislabeled as mediocre. If it's a weak year and only 5% are truly exceptional, 15% get a free ride. The signal is still noise ... with artificial scarcity bolted on.
Actual grade meaning would require criterion-referenced assessment: define what mastery looks like, grade against that standard, and let the distribution fall where it may across years and cohorts. That's hard and unsexy, so instead we get an administrative quota that launders the appearance of rigor while the underlying problem, that Harvard's admissions process selects heavily for wealth and legacy, goes untouched.
Harvard A's will now tell employers that a learner beat ~80% of a nepotism-filtered, endowment-curated cohort in a single semester. That's a relative rank, not a measure of exceptional work.
Re: 70% of Faculty Vote to Overhaul Harvard Grading with A Cap
#4Stack ranking. 10% of your class needs to fail, even if you specifically picked them for their ability to get great grades.
Re: 70% of Faculty Vote to Overhaul Harvard Grading with A Cap
#5This is ... curve grading, right?
It's a bit alien to me. Where I went to school, you used get scores from 1(lowest)- to 10 (highest) where 6 is "Acceptable". You could curve the questions, but not the students. So theoretically the whole class could all score 1s, or all could score 10s. This makes more sense to me, if everyone works hard, they should all succeed, and if they're all lazy they should fail.
You couldn't arbitrarily decide that exactly 20% gets -say- an 8. I've always wondered what the steelman is for curve grading.
Re: 70% of Faculty Vote to Overhaul Harvard Grading with A Cap
#6This is ... curve grading, right? It's a bit alien to me. Where I went to school, you used get scores from 1(lowest)- to 10 (highest) where 6 is "Acceptable". You could curve the questions, but not the students. So theoretically the whole class could all score 1s, or all could score 10s. This makes more sense to me, if everyone works hard, they should all succeed, and if they're all lazy they should fail. You couldn'…
It's kind of curve grading I guess? There's no limit on A- and below, so you could have 20%(+4) A students and 80% A- if you really wanted. Or 100% Fs if you want to retire from teaching immediately. I wouldn't say I'm a curving advocate, but it seems to me 400 Calc 1 students or whatever is a large enough sample that statistically curving will not do any great injustice.
Re: 70% of Faculty Vote to Overhaul Harvard Grading with A Cap
#7The framing that a 20% A cap distinguishes "extraordinary" from "merely strong" work is self-defeating. It measures performance relative to a single cohort, not against any absolute standard of mastery. If 40% of a class genuinely does exceptional work, 20% get mislabeled as mediocre. If it's a weak year and only 5% are truly exceptional, 15% get a free ride. The signal is still noise ... with artificial scarcity bol…
I think comparison within a cohort is likely more valuable and more tractable than ranking between members of different cohorts and/or ranking between cohorts.
An employer is looking to screen two recent harvard grads by GPA, not really between a new grad and a 5/10 year ago grad. GPA may not actually be a predictive metric within a cohort, but it's measurable and capping the A grades likely offers more precision in comparison; even if that precision is not an indicator of anything useful.
I do agree that an absolute standard of mastery would also be nice... But the diploma is supposed to indicate acceptable mastery.
Re: 70% of Faculty Vote to Overhaul Harvard Grading with A Cap
#8Send these teachers to remedial courses in game theory and statistics, please.
What if less that 20% of the class do "exceptional" work? What if more do?
Those pushing this either haven't thought it through, or simply want to be seen to be doing something to address grade inflation, and this is something (just not something useful).
Re: 70% of Faculty Vote to Overhaul Harvard Grading with A Cap
#9This is ... curve grading, right? It's a bit alien to me. Where I went to school, you used get scores from 1(lowest)- to 10 (highest) where 6 is "Acceptable". You could curve the questions, but not the students. So theoretically the whole class could all score 1s, or all could score 10s. This makes more sense to me, if everyone works hard, they should all succeed, and if they're all lazy they should fail. You couldn'…
It's kind of curve grading I guess? There's no limit on A- and below, so you could have 20%(+4) A students and 80% A- if you really wanted. Or 100% Fs if you want to retire from teaching immediately. I wouldn't say I'm a curving advocate, but it seems to me 400 Calc 1 students or whatever is a large enough sample that statistically curving will not do any great injustice.
> Or 100% Fs if you want to retire from teaching immediately
it's crazy to see that mentioned so non-chalantly. my expectation is that the teacher, when they grade, is meant to be impartial, as if they were doing nothing more than taking a measurement of the student's work, you could say (this is why, i believe, we value standardized tests in some settings, even though they are worse in other aspects). it's the student who is responsible for the grade. a teacher not being allowed to give F's to everyone suggests a corruption of the system to me.
can you share more? what pressures teachers not to do this, for example?
Re: 70% of Faculty Vote to Overhaul Harvard Grading with A Cap
#10This is ... curve grading, right? It's a bit alien to me. Where I went to school, you used get scores from 1(lowest)- to 10 (highest) where 6 is "Acceptable". You could curve the questions, but not the students. So theoretically the whole class could all score 1s, or all could score 10s. This makes more sense to me, if everyone works hard, they should all succeed, and if they're all lazy they should fail. You couldn'…
> I've always wondered what the steelman is for curve grading.
assuming that by "steelman" here you mean "the justification", i believe the point is that a curved grade shows how you compare to others. the idea is that "getting 40% of the answers right" is meaningless if you don't know how hard the test is, so you'd rather have a grade that says "top 5% of the class".
this what i see as the justification, at least. not an endorsement of the idea