| dariwal |
Posted
on 03-Feb-02 05:11 PM
CAMBRIDGE - Trevor Cox is in the throes of his greatest challenge at Harvard University: A senior honors thesis about Abraham Lincoln's wartime attorney general. It's exciting and gut-churning, he says; it's also his first Harvard paper that doesn't feel like a sham.
''I've coasted on far higher grades than I deserve,'' said Cox, who has a B-plus average and leads Harvard's student volunteer group. ''It's scandalous. You can get very good grades, and earn honors, without ever producing quality work.''
This is Harvard's dirty little secret: Since the Vietnam era, rampant grade inflation has made its top prize for students - graduating with honors - virtually meaningless.
Last June, a record 91 percent of Harvard students graduated summa, magna, or cum laude, far more than at Yale (51 percent), Princeton (44 percent), and other elite universities, a Globe study has found.
While the world regards these students as the best of the best of America's 13 million undergraduates, Harvard honors has actually become the laughingstock of the Ivy League. The other Ivies see Harvard as the Lake Wobegon of higher education, where all the students, being above average, can take honors for granted. It takes just a B-minus average in the major subject to earn cum laude - no sweat at a school where 51 percent of the grades last year were A's and A-minuses.
''Honors at Harvard has just lost all meaning,'' said Henry Rosovsky, a top dean and acting president at Harvard in the 1970s and '80s. ''The bad honors is spoiling the good.''
With Harvard's new president, Lawrence Summers, focused on improving undergraduate studies and set to deliver his inaugural address this Friday, the Globe reviewed the university's academic records and internal memos over the last 50 years to analyze the rigors and rewards of a Harvard education.
The documents indicate that Vietnam and the protest movements of the '60s led to an increase in lax grading campuswide, and that the faculty never recovered. Harry Lewis, the current dean of Harvard College, wrote in one e-mail that humanities professors today can't tell an A paper from a B paper, partly because of a ''collapse of critical judgment.''
Many Ivy League schools now limit honors, but Harvard says that's unfair - today's seniors are better students than a generation ago, and those who do honors work deserve the distinction.
''After teaching them well, and after they perform well, would it really be fair to give them low grades or deny them honors?'' said Susan Pedersen, Harvard's dean of undergraduate education.
A Harvard College education is undoubtedly one of the best in the world, and at least some of those thousands of A's can be attributed to the fact that the campus is full of high-school valedictorians with perfect 1600 SAT scores who do superior work.
Yet Pedersen also admits that grade inflation is real. As at many schools, at Harvard, the A to F grading range has unofficially turned to an A to B-minus range. As a result, the university's current honors requirements make Harvard unique: It inevitably rewards grade inflation with honors.
''A Harvard graduating class with 91 percent honors is the most impressive indicator of grade inflation I've seen in a long time,'' said Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University's Teachers College and an authority on grading. ''Rather than singling out who performs best, they're singling the 9 percent who perform the worst. Harvard has done away with true honors.''
Besides the comparison with other elite universities, the Globe study of Harvard's honors and grading practices also found:
Undergraduate honors increased from 32 percent in 1946 to 91 percent in 2001, with the greatest growth in the 1960s and early '70s, and then again during the last 15 years.
Vietnam-era draft boards panicked Harvard students and teachers, so that inflated grades became the moral equivalent of opposition to the war, helping prevent all but 19 Harvard College men from dying in Southeast Asia;
1969 was the defining moment in grade inflation: SAT scores for entering freshmen fell for the first time in years, yet the proportion of A's and B's shot up by 10 percent and the rate of honors continued climbing sharply;
The arrival of 120 black freshmen in 1969 - up from 60 the year before, because of aggressive affirmative action - was partly the result of lowered admissions standards, but was not a primary cause of grade inflation, as one Harvard professor contends;
Graduate-student teaching fellows have exacerbated grade inflation because of their power in the classroom and a lack of guidance from professors, who are often consumed with research.
Yet no matter how much grade inflation drives honors at Harvard, the credential has retained real cachet in society. It adds luster to resumes and graduate school applications, and sticks in people's minds during networking conversations. Corporate recruiters especially value honors - some say they won't even interview applicants who aren't cum laude material. In a tight job market, the credential helps a candidate stand out. And honors is still a nice touch for the Sunday wedding pages; Harvard alumni regularly note that they graduated cum laude, a cultural status symbol.
Yet some academic insiders say that when 91 percent of Harvard graduates can claim honors, it becomes more like a reward for good attendance than for excellence.
''From age 3 nowadays, students compete to get into nursery school, primary school, high school, and then Ivy schools, and each stage they have to present their credentials: grades and honors,'' said Isaac Kramnick, Cornell's vice-provost for undergraduate education, and himself a 1959 summa from Harvard.
''Now they're paying $35,000 at Harvard, and they expect something to show for it,'' he said. ''But honors cannot speak for itself anymore".
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| ashu |
Posted
on 03-Feb-02 10:55 PM
Harvard is the most visible of American universities.
People love it and hate it for all kinds of reasons.
And that's life.
Despite all these attacks and more, Harvard, I predict, will
continue to attract the best possible undergraduates, graduate
students and faculty members from around the planet.
In Nepal, one of my joys is informally encouraging fellow-Nepalis
(from all kinds of social, economic and school backgrounds) who might
otherwise not apply there to give it a shot, and see what happens.
Like anywhere else, it's really up to the students to make the best of
what Harvard offers. For a motivated, driven, energetic, extracurricularly
active and intellectually searching student who values learning, Harvard can
be a treasure-trove of incredible learning and, dare I say, useful
networking opportunities.
As a Nepali, I remain grateful to the university for providing me with
a first-rate, challenging education over-all, and for making the process
of learning exciting as a lifelong venture, not to mention providing with
many, many good friends, some of whom now live and work in places as
diverse as Ulan Bator (in Mangolia) and some remote lab in Antartica
and more.
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
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