The 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.
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.
> 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.
that's a really good point, actually. in every situation i can think of where someone is looking at your grade (always admission to the next step in the ladder, in whatever form), you are being compared to people "from the same time" as you.
and i'd like to reiterate how difficult it would be to have a "stable" standard of mastery, no matter how nice. technical fields change a lot, and fast, these days. all across STEM, in 20 years everything changes. everything's so niche, as well, sometimes it may be hard to compare two degrees with the same name of different institutions. maybe we could do it with the fundamentals (mathematics and physics)? but look at a textbook from 100 years ago (say, Whittaker and Watson) and you'll find that even this changes. and even if the field doesn't change, the world does: i'm imagining how old-timers could claim that in their time information wasn't so easily accessible.
> 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.
Having been on the grading side of things, this essentially never happens. As soon as you have a pool large enough where it is mathematically sound to have a curve (30 people or so), you will not find a situation where 40% do excellent work.
Coursework follows Sturgeon’s law. In a class of 30, there’s maybe 3-4 people who do excellent work, and there is a rapid fall off from there.
Agreed, but there are differences between different classes too: the students vary somewhat in intrinsic quality and motivation, and in those years I've done a particularly good job of teaching and motivation the results can be better overall because the students are putting more effort in.
Similarly the other way. There are classes I've given no first class (~A) marks in, because nobody earned one. Still a curve in practice, but with the top at an upper second.
> 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.
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.
Students and their often overinvolved and influential parents put a tremendous amount of pressure on instructors to provide high marks regardless of performance. This was always an issue but has become more and more uniquitous in recent decades.
Although some manage, it's extremely hard for indivudal instructors to stand up for earnest critical grading in the face of all this pressure. However, an institional policy like this lets them point to that policy as a sheild that deflects responsibility from
individual teachers to a faceless, indiffent bureaucracy.
That's not to say that this is the best possible such countermaneuver, but that's the role it's trying to fulfill.
The grading system is already long broken -- far removed from your own meritocratuc ideal -- and this is a meager attempt to do something about it.
> 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
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?
Same argument about distributions cuts both ways to me imo. Like you taught 400 students and you couldn't get a single one over the line? I think the immediate suspicion would fall on the common factor of the teacher. For a crazy event like that it seems much more likely that the instruction or assessment was flawed.
Mostly though I was just chuckling in my head about an old curmudgeonly professor of mine who was literally retiring at the end of that semester. We were all actually quite scared he would go out with a bang given his disdain for us. We weren't like 100% Fs or anything, but I think it was obvious we thought the material was pretty phooey and the lectures interminable.
Ok, so this is where I really show that this is all foreign to me. For sure: There probably should be questions asked if a class scores all F's anywhere. Obviously. Something went wrong there.
But why would this automatically cause the teacher to be the one to retire?
Are there documents or books on this? This system seems so alien to me. And yet it does seem to produce some amount of competent graduates who can -eg- launch a spacecraft into lunar orbit.
Send 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).
No, it’s the standards getting higher at every round. Many of the desirable employers who come to Harvard can afford to pick through people to separate the good Harvard grads from the mediocre ones.
That's why when I go to a fancy restaurant I always send one of the courses back. They need the incentive to improve, and I know they appreciate it because they never thank me.
As others have said in the thread, it's noise over the signal. The top colleges only accept A students, don't they? If I take a class and clearly produce A quality work, I should get an A for it. The fact that all of my cohorts are also A students isn't my problem -- in fact it's no one's problem at all that we're all super good. Forcing a curve is just a deliberate attempt to screw with the data so it looks like it fits that curve better, and how does that help anyone?
The 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.
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.
> 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.
that's a really good point, actually. in every situation i can think of where someone is looking at your grade (always admission to the next step in the ladder, in whatever form), you are being compared to people "from the same time" as you.
and i'd like to reiterate how difficult it would be to have a "stable" standard of mastery, no matter how nice. technical fields change a lot, and fast, these days. all across STEM, in 20 years everything changes. everything's so niche, as well, sometimes it may be hard to compare two degrees with the same name of different institutions. maybe we could do it with the fundamentals (mathematics and physics)? but look at a textbook from 100 years ago (say, Whittaker and Watson) and you'll find that even this changes. and even if the field doesn't change, the world does: i'm imagining how old-timers could claim that in their time information wasn't so easily accessible.
[flagged]
> 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.
Having been on the grading side of things, this essentially never happens. As soon as you have a pool large enough where it is mathematically sound to have a curve (30 people or so), you will not find a situation where 40% do excellent work.
Coursework follows Sturgeon’s law. In a class of 30, there’s maybe 3-4 people who do excellent work, and there is a rapid fall off from there.
Agreed, but there are differences between different classes too: the students vary somewhat in intrinsic quality and motivation, and in those years I've done a particularly good job of teaching and motivation the results can be better overall because the students are putting more effort in.
Similarly the other way. There are classes I've given no first class (~A) marks in, because nobody earned one. Still a curve in practice, but with the top at an upper second.
> 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.
This 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.
It's a countermaneuver against grade inflation.
Students and their often overinvolved and influential parents put a tremendous amount of pressure on instructors to provide high marks regardless of performance. This was always an issue but has become more and more uniquitous in recent decades.
Although some manage, it's extremely hard for indivudal instructors to stand up for earnest critical grading in the face of all this pressure. However, an institional policy like this lets them point to that policy as a sheild that deflects responsibility from individual teachers to a faceless, indiffent bureaucracy.
That's not to say that this is the best possible such countermaneuver, but that's the role it's trying to fulfill.
The grading system is already long broken -- far removed from your own meritocratuc ideal -- and this is a meager attempt to do something about it.
> 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
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?
Same argument about distributions cuts both ways to me imo. Like you taught 400 students and you couldn't get a single one over the line? I think the immediate suspicion would fall on the common factor of the teacher. For a crazy event like that it seems much more likely that the instruction or assessment was flawed.
Mostly though I was just chuckling in my head about an old curmudgeonly professor of mine who was literally retiring at the end of that semester. We were all actually quite scared he would go out with a bang given his disdain for us. We weren't like 100% Fs or anything, but I think it was obvious we thought the material was pretty phooey and the lectures interminable.
Ok, so this is where I really show that this is all foreign to me. For sure: There probably should be questions asked if a class scores all F's anywhere. Obviously. Something went wrong there.
But why would this automatically cause the teacher to be the one to retire?
Are there documents or books on this? This system seems so alien to me. And yet it does seem to produce some amount of competent graduates who can -eg- launch a spacecraft into lunar orbit.
Send 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).
Stack ranking. 10% of your class needs to fail, even if you specifically picked them for their ability to get great grades.
No, it’s the standards getting higher at every round. Many of the desirable employers who come to Harvard can afford to pick through people to separate the good Harvard grads from the mediocre ones.
That's why when I go to a fancy restaurant I always send one of the courses back. They need the incentive to improve, and I know they appreciate it because they never thank me.
no one said fail. C is passing / adequate.
As are for those who excel.
the question is if you'd prefer a C student from Harvard vs. straight A's from a we-take-anyone online college.
As others have said in the thread, it's noise over the signal. The top colleges only accept A students, don't they? If I take a class and clearly produce A quality work, I should get an A for it. The fact that all of my cohorts are also A students isn't my problem -- in fact it's no one's problem at all that we're all super good. Forcing a curve is just a deliberate attempt to screw with the data so it looks like it fits that curve better, and how does that help anyone?