Harvard doesn't have an Engineering School anymore, does it? No doubt too plebian for such rarified environs. The point being that while there were 1 or 2 percent of professors, lecturers, graders, and even undergraduate TAs in my Engineering school who were considered "easy" if you really needed one such class, 99% of the teachers there had no problem "pushing back" : it was called the red pen, the C, the D, and involuntary transfer to the Business School.

Heck, in my 3 years as a grader I used up 2 full Bic pens of red ink, which if you have ever tried it is a LOT of ink.

Since Economics is so heavily math-dependent these days, perhaps Econ students at Harvard should go down the river and take their Maths at MIT? I believe there is an exchange program...

Ha ha ha.

Cranky

I thought this Douchehat guy was supposed to be a conservative? Whatever happened to personal responsibility? Is he against the nanny state, but in favor of the nanny university?

Let me see: college student goes to college, paying (or someone is paying) for education, and spends a lot of effort to avoid being educated. Seems like the college student is in need of some psychiatric help. Why are the teachers supposed to do the work for the student? Another case of a lazy person who took advantage of his parents and society and then blames everyone except himself for doing so.

It seems to me that Douthat makes (directly or indirectly) a few good points, and dismissing his argument because he personally seems to be feckless or a whiner or shallow is a cop-out. Yes, its annoying that Douthat is criticizing a whole institution when he himself admits to lacking the virtues that would have allowed him to get a good education at Harvard. But I don't know Ross Douthat so I frankly don't care that he may be a jerk. I do care about the issues he raises though.

The issues raised by Douthat's original piece, which I feel are serious and worthy of discussion, are:

1) Grade inflation has left traditional academic grading meaningless at Harvard (and a lot of other places). Its a very competitive tournament to get in, but once there the formal measures of performance are inadequate at sorting the brilliant from the mundane and the studious from the lazy. Sanctimonious carping about how if "you really are self-motivated to learn it shouldn't matter anyway" glosses over two issues. One, college students, like everyone else, respond to incentives. Yes, there are intrinsic rewards to education. But society has an interest in people working hard and making the most of college even if they lack the inner light that compells them to study when there's nothing at stake. We should be re-enforcing intrinsic rewards with external sorting systems. Perhaps the solution is to replace traditional academic grading with force ranking (or bucketing). Two, external audiences rely on grades (among other things) to let them know which Harvard students deserve jobs and graduate fellowships. To the extent that grading has broken down it is harder to do so, which creates all sorts of costs born by society as a whole.

2) In certain academic fields it is very difficult to assess perfromance, and the professoriate in these fields has failed to take seriously the need to do so. Douthat's piece notes that at times he was assigned research papers and he essentially turned in complete bullshit. He got good grades anyway. Now, this sort of thing is generally not possible in the natural sciences and the more empirical branches of the social sciences, but it is very easy in the humanities. This concerns me greatly because I value the humanities a great deal. I think that humanistic study is a very important part of an education. But it hurts the credibility of the humanities if professors in humanities departments can't be bothered to call bullshit bullshit. Yes, standards of excellence or "correctness" are inherently more fluid in some fields than in others, but a capable English professor who actually gives a shit about the health of his discipline can generally tell carefully researched and reasoned papers written by students who care about the subject and have engaged seriously with the underlying texts from complete bullshit. To the extent that professors at elite universities don't do this they contribute to the devaluing of their own fields.

3) Harvard's undergraduate core sequence is so fluid as to be meaningless. I think this matters for two reasons. One, I think there is a body of core knowledge in the Western tradition that any university graduate ought to have exposure to. Nothing extensive here - but there are a few things that a person should just know. To the extent that Harvard's core requirements can be fulfilled with esoterica at the expense of courses dealing with some of this core knowledge, then I think a Harvard education is deficient. Two, I think a liberal arts community functions better when everyone has a common cultural language to draw on in discussions. I myself attended a small liberal arts college that required a two semester world cultures sequence of sophomores. The course had a very stable curriculum from year to year. As a result, in upper level courses in any department a student or professor could throw out references to the Analects of Confucius or the Book of Job or Souls of Black Folk and everyone around the discussion table could pick up the reference immediately. This facilitated classroom discussions to a great degree.

Rea: Conservatives specialize in blaming other people for their failures and congratulating themselves for their successes...

SD,

I think the point was made in earlier comments that what is rewarded at Harvard is the ability to get into Harvard. It's a set of social skills and connections that counts. And getting through Harvard or many other top places is generally rewarded.

If you want something else, you can get it at Harvard, but you have to make that decision.

If you are hiring Harvard grads, you can take the well-connected ones who drift by, or you can work at finding the ones who took advantages of the brains and resources found there.

It sounds like Douthat was a BS artist then and is a BS artist now. He's been called on what he said but still won't fess up.

sm has it right. I have been at both large universities (including Harvard) and small colleges. It is definitely easier to slide through at a large university if that is your goal. But if you are self propelled there is a lot of stuff there - more than enough to challenge anyone.

But I notice a tendency over time for ticket punching and GPA's to become more and more important to more and more students - so even the ones looking for a challenge are reluctant to wreck their GPA even if they would learn a lot.

My own opinion is that you will get a better education at the best small liberal arts colleges - after all you can only take 32 courses (more or less) wherever you go. But go to grad school at the biggest and best.

sm:

Again, I don't care a bit that Ross Douthat has been "called on" this or that shortcoming he may have. I continue to be frustrated with the reaction to the Douthat piece, because I'd say 80-90% of the commentary I've read amounts to a personal attack on Ross Douthat. Fine. I conced all points. Ross Douthat is lazy - a hypocrite - a pretendeder - an opportunist - a shallow opeartor - an immature little boy. Whatever.

But I maintain that his piece raised several important issues that have not been adequately addrsses.

My firm hires Harvard graduates every year. So I care that Harvard grades are meaningless because it makes it more likely that we will pass over a deserving and promising candidate in favor of silver tounged slacker. Yes, we can try to sort the wheat from the chaff ourselves. But we interview people for a couple of hours. Harvard has them for four years. Who is better positioned to tell us who is truly gifted vs. just conventionally intelligent? Who is better positioned to tell us who is truly driven vs. lazy?

I believe in the humanities and think that they should play a more important role in our educational system and broader society. So I care that Harvard humanities professors can't be bothered to grade papers closely and rigorously, because every time some yahoo turns in 15 pages of crap, gets an 'A' and brags about to his friends all of the people who don't believe in the humanities get more ammunition for their argument that non-technical fields are inherently bullshit tournaments. After all, how can there be any "Truth" in literature if English majors are all pot smoking slackers who start papers the night before they are due and get good grades anyway?

Finally, I believe in liberal education because it equips people to converse intelligently about complicated current events with a frame of reference that is common enough to facilitate dialog. To the extent that Harvard lets students string together courses in Victorian pornography, the history of 19th century prarie socialism, jazz hermeneutics and Japanese cinema and call it a broad general education, Harvard has made a mockery of such an education. Not that any of these subjects aren't worthy in some way, but you don't substitute Manga for Homer and pretend that you've wrestled with the important issues of human civilization.

I think the exact same argument can be made in any situation, in any university, in any company, in any one's life.
You have to work hard to do hard work, that's pretty much it.

re: students "didn't do a good job picking... (I don't know what the advising system was like in DeLong's era, but it's nearly nonexistent now), thirty-two classes out of the hundreds and hundreds of potential offerings that Harvard flings at you."

Flings.

The bastards, they gave him too many choices!

As noted, the writer made it clear that he *did* seek advice (on finding easy courses) and *did* make a choice (to slide through with the least possible disturbance to his mind). It's true that some students have difficulty making the transition to the wide range of choices but, yeah, this is the whining of the extremely overprivileged. Harvard has one of the richest menus of classes anywhere, and lots of students elsewhere would have been happy to have had Douthat's choices.

I've heard lots of rhetoric, but I don't feel I have enough real information to have an informed opinion on the reality of "grade inflation." My sense is that some of it is likely due to shifts in the way entry-level jobs consider grades after the huge expansion of the population attending college over the past several decades. For this reason, I'm disturbed by proposals such as re-instituting grading on the curve.

Specifically, I think a considerable percentage of employers ask for GPA and consider it seriously (because it's a hard number), but have less ability to judge how tough the university is. So if I'm pretty brilliant and go to Harvard and do well enough to get straight A's at a less competitive university, but not as well as a good portion of my even more brilliant classmates, I damn well expect to get good grades. If I get C's because I'm "just average" compared to my equally brilliant classmates, I'm going to be screwed if I take that anywhere else, because "Harvard" on the diploma and resume isn't going to make up for it.

The end result will be that either students will be less likely to challenge themselves, which would be a waste, or less likely to go to schools like Harvard even if they can get in, which would also be a waste. "Grade inflation" doesn't exist in a vacuum.

(Douthat sounds like he was a waste in any case, and should have gotten some academic guidance in the form of being flunked a few times, but all his protestations don't make him typical.)

> My firm hires Harvard graduates every year.

Would you be willing to post a bit more on why you do this, and why you think they are a good value? We pretty much gave up on top-50 university grads around 1995 and hire primarily from city commuter schools - particularly evening students who worked full time while going to school (many of whom in turn are new immigrants or children of immigrants). We find that they produce a much higher value/buck. What draws your organization to Harvard grads?

Cranky, but curious, Observer

In my experience on computer industry hiring committees in the past, people don't look at GPA. If the entry-level applicant comes from a "name" college with an appropriate major, they assume that the fact that the person got into the college shows he or she is very bright. And since what they took in college is only marginally related to what they will be asked to do on the job, it is their presumed intelligence that is screened for. People who went to less impressive institutions had their relevant experience (college jobs, summer jobs, internships) examined, just as a non-entry level applicant is screened. And then there are personal references. Grades are simply not considered particularly significant or comparable across candidates from different schools who took different curricula.

In addition, all the examination of credentials was used for was a first-level screening mechanism to reduce the pool who needed to be interviewed. So I doubt that an effort by Harvard to lower their average GPA to B- or C would actually affect their graduates' entry level job prospects very much, nor assist their employers.

Where I teach this problem of grade inflation (or falling standards)is aggravated by: 1. a focus on "teaching" that combines an emphasis on frequent modifications of the syllabus with student "evaluations"; 2. an adminstration that allocates resources based on course enrollments; and 3. students wholly (but alas intuitively) wedded to the signalling theory of education.

1 and 2 are explicit. Instructors and programs must compete for students, so grade inflation isn't entirely a question of laziness.

As for 3, were students to value course content (human capital) as much as grades (the signal), they would spend time devising incentives to get me to teach. Acting interested would be a good place to start, and seems pretty low cost.

calf wrote:

"So I doubt that an effort by Harvard to lower their average GPA to B- or C would actually affect their graduates' entry level job prospects very much, nor assist their employers."

The problem with grade inflation isn't that grades are too high per se, its that grades are too similar. A gooding grading system should clearly seperate the best from the average and the average from the worst. But in a world where the average grade is B+, its very difficult to tell what an A- means. Does it mean only slightly better than average, or only slightly worse than perfect? Who knows? In a world where the average grade is C, then we can be confident that an A- is a pretty good mark (assuming something like a bell curve distribution of grades).

My firm uses GPA as a critical data point in determining who gets an interview slot. We give case-based interviews (sort of like a test), so once a candidate gets an interview the ONLY thing that matters is how well they do on the cases - not their grades, test scores, undergraduate institution, or other activities. So as long as we're interviewing the right people, we're OK.

But we get 7-10 times as many applications as we have interview slots. Its critical that we have decent numeric sorting mechanisms to determine who gets to interview with us. We don't use SAT scores extensively. Our internal data tells us that people who scored below a 1400 don't do well in the job, but that above the 1400 threshold there's no correlation between SAT scores and performance. Besides, we tend to recruit at schools where almost everyone has a score above 1400 anyway. So we use grades, but grades are much less reliable than we'd like, leargely because of grade inflation.

We don't want to simply pick all of the 3.8s, 3.9s and 4.0s, since a kid can be a very good student, work hard, study seriously and learn a lot, but still decide to be involved in extra-curriculars and thus end up with a 3.5. So what we need is a way to tell that kid apart from the kid who doesn't work hard, doesn't study seriously and doesn't learn a lot. The problem is, at Harvard (and most othe top schools), the slacker kid has a 3.5 too. What we need is a system where the studious but well rounded students get noticably better marks than the clowns.

Is there some chance we are looking at the wrong problem? Douthat describes the nonsense he went through to get in, and the lack of effort needed to successfully get out. Maybe Harvard is deceiving itself by looking at memberships, awards, social achievement and the rest. An admissions system that encourages students to shape their lives to gain admission is perverse. An admissions system that then accepts the little perverts is a broken system. Sadly, Harvard is not alone.

What, exactly, is wrong with high school students taking the hardest courses their schools offer, doing their homework, getting good grades, then applying to universities according to their location, educational style, rigor, course offerings and the like? Do we really want our "leaders of tomorrow" to be calculating little scamps who game the admissions process to get into Harvard, or Yale or Chicago?

So how about this - along with the PSAT and the SAT, why don't universities require DIT scores as part of the admissions process, and forget all about all the other nonsense?

sd has good points. incentives matter.

I can't blame people for trying to get good grades. If someone wants to be a doctor, she really should try to have good enough grades to get into medical school.

"college student goes to college, paying (or someone is paying) for education, and spends a lot of effort to avoid being educated."

Carol, you and Brad make the same mistake of thinking that education is a "good" in itself. For most people it isn't (thinking is painful). The good that Harvard offers is easy access to a privileged life, and if it can be reached without the pain of having to think then those people will do everything in their powers to avoid incurring this cost. Harvard, with its ability to attract the cream of the crop might get a higher share of people who consider education a good, so the need to "push back" might be less pronounced, but even Harvard's filters are less from perfect and it needs to install filters that keep free riders from graduating.

Yes, "B" is now what "C" was many years ago, the roughly median grade, and as an individual grader you can't be too far below that median for the reasons David notes.

Of course you can always make finer distinctions within a smaller interval. At my institution, for example, we give grades in increments of tenths: 2.6, 3.3, 3.9 etc. But if it's just A,B,C then you're pretty limited.

At the same time I'm a little dismayed (as is sd) by sd's firm's practice. At moments like this I see the point of abolishing grades for written comments -- exactly how much of the employer's work in sorting out potential employees am I supposed to do? There are ways -- ask to see a portfolio of the student's best work, for example -- that will let you make better distinctions. But they can't be boiled down to a number.

"I've heard lots of rhetoric, but I don't feel I have enough real information to have an informed opinion on the reality of "grade inflation.""

The reality of grade inflation is that students who pay $40,000 a year (or their parents) have a lot of bargaining power, and as long as there is no cost to giving good grades instructors who grade harshly do it on principle rather than act in their self interest.

SD,

I work at a small university that next to no one has heard of, and we occasionally get flack here for grade inflation. The average grade here is about B-/C+. When I hear we have a grade inflation problem, I want to point to Harvard.

I am sympathetic to your defense of the liberal arts -- that's my field -- but that makes Harvard's practice more indefensible. (We agree here, I think.) If a Harvard education is worth what it likes to think it is, then a Harvard B- should be worth an A- at my place. They should be playing a tougher more demanding game than my students.

Colin Danby wrote:

"At moments like this I see the point of abolishing grades for written comments -- exactly how much of the employer's work in sorting out potential employees am I supposed to do? There are ways -- ask to see a portfolio of the student's best work, for example -- that will let you make better distinctions. But they can't be boiled down to a number."

I understand your frustration. True, its not your job to help me figure out who to hire. But at the same time the following is certainly true:

1) A university has an incredibly large amount of useful information about its students: Who is bright, who is hardworking, who is driven, who is creative, etc. It accumulates this information in the normal course of affairs. If every one of the hundreds of employers that came to campus to recruit had to replicate this information base there would be a huge economic deadweight loss. Thousands of man hours would be wasted. And its not just for-profit employers, but also graduate schools, scholarship committees, law and medical schools, etc. that would bear these costs. Even then, it would probably be impossible to do as good a job of sorting talent as a university can with a captive candidate pool for four years.

2) In reality, most employers and graduate schools wouldn't replicate this information base - its just far too costly. Thus hiring and admissions decisions would become more arbitrary - more random. This would impose a huge loss on society. Indeed, the most likely scenario would be a re-invigoration of hereditary privledge. After all, if Harvard grades cease to be a useful way of sorting the best Harvard students from the worst Harvard students, I might as well just hire the kids who went to $20,000 a year prep schools before college. It would be a terribly inaccurate system, but my odds of getting top caliber students would be better than a coin flip.

> Thus hiring and admissions decisions would become
> more arbitrary - more random. This would impose a
> huge loss on society.

I have often thought that the best job filling process for large organizations would be the following:

1) Set some basic criteria (3.0 GPA or equivalent experience {too many hiring decisions turn on meaningless college degrees anyway}, demonstrates basic skills {classwork, submitted work samples, Joel on Software-type-interview, etc}, doesn't smell too overpoweringly offensive, etc) As required but by no means walk-on-water stringent.

2) Take all the applications that meet those criteria and select the required number at random from the pile

3) Hire those randomly selected dudes/dudettes

4) Detailed performance reviews at 3, 6, and 12 months

5) Ruthlessly weed out those that don't make it after 12 months

6) Repeat as needed

It seems to me this would save an enormous amount of time and money, knock out the issues of interviewer/hiring manager bias (overt and subconscious), increase diversity of the workforce {which I consider a good thing because it increases the number of viewpoints}, and have a better chance of finding the "diamond in the rough" than the standard process.

Cranky

"Carol, you and Brad make the same mistake of thinking that education is a 'good' in itself. For most people it isn't (thinking is painful)."

While I agree with Brad's point (college students are responsible for what they get out of college, and Douthat self-admittedly didn't take responsibility for himself), I was making a different point, in reaction to sd. I don't think a GPA is a very useful metric for comparing entry-level candidates for a job, and certainly not any other later job, and thus I don't think flogging Harvard or anyone else to try for less grade inflation is useful.

To believe that GPA is a useful metric you have to believe that it is comparable among candidates, that a high GPA reflects the attributes that will contribute to good job performance, and that you can use this single number without doing the investigation that would give you far better information about the candidate. I simply don't believe any of those three things.

The GPA of two individuals is not measuring the same thing when the two candidates attended different schools, took different coursework at the same schools, or attended the same classes taught by different professors. You would have to talk to the individual about what they learned in the classes they took relative to the skills or habits of mind you think are important to a job, or rely on a recommendation from a respected reference.

The particular coursework leading to a high GPA may not be relevant to your GPA or may reflect low risk taking by the student. Again, you have to use more direct methods to find this out.

Finally, if you use the more direct methods to understand what the GPA is telling you, you don't need the GPA.

I think it is natural to look for an easy numeric fix to sort people, but it is seldom as successful as simply reading the response to written questions, calling references and conducting telephone interviews where you can evaluate the person directly.

I agree with the comments to the effect that this is true for any school any where. If you want to get into a prestigious school, you must work hard to get in. Once you are in, half the work is done. Now you need to learn the game to succeed. The game always involves doing the least amount of work for the biggest payoff. Learning that is a lesson in itself. There is nothing wrong with being economical in the allocation of your time, in college, at work, where ever. Some people go the extra mile because they want to -- they love it. Others need to be more careful with their time. If that results in success so be it.

sd, the universities don't have to do a better job of telling you about their students--you have the power to make the students do it.

When you request resumes, assign a task/project/report/whatever.

If your final decision is based on performance on a case, use a similar method for the initial screening.

sd,

You write that what you need is a system that doesn't give the slacker the 3.5. If that were just a question of fixing grade inflation, you still might have a problem if the actual courses weren't that challenging. I think Harvard has to do something about grade inflation, and (I'm sure you agree) for many reasons other than because it should view hiring conundrums like yours as a priority. I do think it's a fairly simply matter to peruse the transcript course titles and get a general feel for trends on "guts." Really, this all takes a tweak with grade inflation. This Douthat has said nothing else useful.

DeLong on the other hand has. "Damned if I know what can be done to keep those 'studious primarily in... avoidance of academic work, and brilliant largely in... maneuverings to achieve a maximal GPA in return for minimal effort' from wasting their time. The smarter and more energetic they are, the harder the problem." Straight up.

It's very peculiar that Douthat, the glib slacker, was given a forum at the Atlantic for his pissy remarks. It's even more peculiar that a **different** glib slacker, Walter Kirn, was given a forum in the previous Atlantic for a similiar whine. (This issue included Brad's piece on the American economic future, and also a fluffy little thing by Douthat on Islam in Europe).

So maybe slackers slack at Harvard because they know that The Atlantic will hire them anyway? Hm, don't we have two layers of inanity here, one at the authorial and one at the editorial level?

And does the word "agenda" pop into anyone's mind?

What the Atlantic Editors could have done is find a hard-working, talented, ambitious student who went to Harvard and found that there were no challenging classes for him. I suspect that the reason they didn't is because there are no such students with that complaint.

People who know me know that I am by no means a defender of the present university system, and in particular that I have no investment in it. But the Atlantic's two pieces are just trashy culture-war squibs of the drug-addled P.J O'Rourke genre, and show us that the undead hand of the execrable Michael Kelly still has weight.

A college education is hardly a meal ticket, anyway. A college degree is only a license to hustle. Is Douthat really controverial enough to make me want to read The Atlantic?

I'm a grad student instructor at an Ivy League University--all ye tremble and dismay! Anyway, I teach the basic writing course, perhaps the most problematic course in the curriculum and the one almost always taught by the least experienced teachers. Why? Because it's a pain in the ass.

This is almost always the course referenced by right-wing types as the Class That Convinced Them That Liberals Were Fascists. That's because it's tricky to encourage students to clarify their writing while pointing out to them that their ideas are baseless. It requires enormous tact, which young teachers--particularly grad students who've been groomed in tetchy seminars--have not exactly been taught.

And of course tactfulness doesn't exactly meld well with nasty grades. I taught for a while in Germany, where tuition is cheap and a failing grade essentially disappears from your transcript, and my hard-won tact was seen as extraordinary compassion. Not so in the US. I've had tears, I've been over-ruled by my director, I've had subtle threats. A grad-student friend of mine was promised a bribe--and was horrified that, the student having actually earned an A-, he might feel that the power-play worked.

You have to understand: if grad students overrun our guaranteed teaching slots, we have to have some record to stand on when we plead for extra cash. Our advisors can only do so much; the people who grant non-tenure track jobs look at teaching records. Teaching records depend on two things: 1) the ability of the subordinate to suck up to the administrator, 2) the knee-jerk reaction of the students to the class, which is largely dependent on the students' perception of their own grades.

Grade inflation is at least in part a result of the instable situation of teachers in the academic market.

At a school like Harvard, each professor is looking for a few exceptional students that can be mentored into positions that will assist him or her personally in the future. Outside the top ten percent, they see students as an annoying drain on their time. The easiest thing to do is to give them all B's regardless of how hard they work and send them on their way. And the best way to justify this lack of involvement is to have contempt for students as lazy slackers. Students can tell when faculty members don't care, and they respond predictably- with alienation.

At lesser universities, the faculty are concerned with the school's reputation, so they want ALL their graduates to reflect well on them. Harvard faculty don't need to care about that.

And of course, the admissions office and the faculty have NOTHING to do with each other. The fact that you have to be smart to get through the Harvard admissions office doesn't mean that the faculty have to care about teaching you once you're in.