Harvard swings at grade inflation and misses

Vincent Phillip Muñoz is a professor at the University of Notre Dame.

University administrators have long known that grade inflation is a problem, but no one has been willing to do much about it. The Harvard faculty, to their credit, took a stand last week and voted to limit the number of A’s they give in each course. It’s a fine start, but it doesn’t go far enough.

Four of the faculty members who developed Harvard’s policy inadvertently revealed a fundamental problem with inflated grades in a statement released after the vote. “A Harvard A grade,” they wrote, “will now tell [students], as well as employers and graduate schools, something real about what a student has achieved. An A will once again be what Harvard’s guidelines have long said it is: a mark of extraordinary distinction.”