Harvard students are distraught over the university’s recent report calling on administrators to reel in grade inflation.
The Ivy League institution released a report on Monday that found more than 60% of grades awarded are now A’s, up from about 40% a decade ago and just 25% twenty years back, leading the university to doubt the “integrity of our grading.” Students are now panicking over Harvard’s suggestion of limiting the number of A+ grades professors can award in order to crack down on grade inflation, according to The Harvard Crimson.
“The whole entire day, I was crying,” Sophie Chumburidze, a freshman at Harvard, told the Crimson. “I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just sobbing in bed because I felt like I try so hard in my classes, and my grades aren’t even the best.”
“It just felt soul-crushing,” she said.
The school’s lenient grading was blamed on professors going soft, worried about bad student reviews, and told not to over-stress students or to be too hard on the less “prepared” among them. But now Harvard is finally concerned the lower standards are “damaging the academic culture of the College.”
Students who spoke to the Crimson were worried that tougher grading would increase the workload and affect “students’ mental health.” Some students shared their deep concern that the changes may cut into how much fun they have with their Ivy League classwork.=
“It makes me rethink my decision to come to the school,” Harvard freshman Kayta A. Aronson told the Crimson. “I killed myself all throughout high school to try and get into this school. I was looking forward to being fulfilled by my studies now, rather than being killed by them.”
“I can’t reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I’m so anxious about the midterm, so anxious about the papers, and because I know it’s so harshly graded,” Zahra Rohaninejad, another Harvard freshman, said. “If that standard is raised even more, it’s unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes.”
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Some insisted students were already working hard for their degrees, while others lamented the idea of giving up their extracurriculars in order to study harder.
“If you go to Lamont or Cabot at 12 a.m., that place is packed every single night,” Rohaninejad said. “People care about their work. People sacrifice sleep. People sacrifice friend activities. People sacrifice so much for their grades already.”
“What makes a Harvard student a Harvard student is their engagement in extracurriculars,” Harvard freshman Peyton White said. “Now we have to throw that all away and pursue just academics. I believe that attacks the very notion of what Harvard is.”
“It’s doing students a disservice because it’s not really accounting for what we have to do on a day to day basis, and how many hours we’re putting into our team, our bodies, and then also school,” Hudson C. McCarthy, Harvard student and member of the lacrosse team, said.
However, some students agreed in part with the report, but suggested other schools should also raise their standards.
“Addressing it only at Harvard is potentially dangerous for these students that are looking to go on to the next level or need these high grades,” Stephen A. Behun, Harvard sophomore, told the Crimson. “I just worry that we’re putting the cart before the horse when it comes to fixing this without fully understanding how it’s going to impact students professionally, even if it academically helps them master subjects.”
The report found that the number of students receiving an A grade has risen by 20 percentage points since 2015, spiking in particular during remote learning due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the report also suggested “that students are working as hard as they ever have — if not more,” averaging 6.46 hours of work outside of class each week, according to students’ self reports.
But some professors doubt these claims, reporting “that they’ve had to trim some readings and drop others entirely, that they’ve had to switch from novels to short stories, and that it’s difficult to keep assigning reading in the face of increasing student complaints,” the report states. That’s resulted in “a fair number of students in reading-intensive courses” who say they are “doing lower than the average hours of work outside of class.”
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