No A for Effort

A friend of mine once told me that on his first day at Stanford Law School, the dean greeted the incoming students with an unsettling remark: “I’m sorry to tell you this, but half of you are about to become the bottom half of the class. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”

The story came to mind this week, when I read that Harvard students are up in arms about a university report that criticizes grade inflation and calls for stricter evaluation standards. One student interviewed by the Harvard Crimson said: “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.” Another claimed that “People care about their work. People sacrifice sleep… People sacrifice so much for their grades already.”

The story didn’t surprise me. The competition to get into elite universities is ferocious, and applicants go to extreme lengths to appear excellent by every possible metric. Why should their attitudes change once they matriculate? Nor is there anything new about grade inflation in these institutions, or the anxiety students feel. Thirty years ago, when I was directing the senior essay program in the Yale History Department, a student complained to me about the A- she had received and asked for a review of the grade. I told her that the rules did not allow it. She protested that the A- was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. I could not resist replying that if this were the case, she had so far led a charmed life. “Don’t be so damn condescending,” she snapped, and stormed out.

But the attitude of the Harvard students also reflects a very common belief among college students, at least to judge from my own experience as a college teacher: the belief that top grades should be given in large part as a reward for effort, for trying as hard as possible.

Once upon a time, this idea would have struck most educators as ludicrous. The purpose of taking a college class is to master a particular subject. The grade should reflect how well this task is accomplished, and little or nothing else. If you take first year French and still can’t conjugate the verb “être” at the end of it, you shouldn’t receive an A—or even a passing grade—no matter how much time you have spent studying. And to be fair, most college courses still observe this principle to a certain extent. A student who utterly fails to master the material will still get a failing grade.

But at a place like Harvard, very few students do this badly (and when they do, the university rushes in to give them tutoring, counseling, appointments at the “learning center,” and so forth). The grueling admission process ensures that nearly all the students who get in are capable of doing the work and doing it well.

Some, however, do the work better than others, and there’s the rub. As the Harvard report argued, grade inflation means that the principal record of students’ performance will not reflect these differences. Instead, it will cover them up.

One might think that students would themselves object to extreme grade inflation. If student A does significantly better in a course than student B, it only hurts him or her when B receives nearly the same grade. But to judge from the coverage of the Harvard report, few students support reversing the trend. Why is this?

One reason, I suspect, is that they simply don’t want to confront the following problem. Imagine two students who put equal effort into a course. But student A masters the material much better than student B and performs much better on the course assignments. What explains the difference (assuming student B was not going through a crisis at the time)? Is student A simply more talented? Has student A had better pre-college preparation, having attended (say) Andover as opposed to an underfunded inner-city high school? Or has the course itself been constructed in a biased manner that favors certain students over others? Just posing these questions means potentially stumbling into a political hornets’ nest.

This hornet’s nest, of course, has its origin in the long debates about affirmative action policies in the United States. Conservative critics have consistently argued that these policies favor certain candidates for university admission or jobs over better qualified, more talented competitors. Defenders of the policies have often replied that the standard metrics for evaluating qualifications and talent (such as the SAT) are themselves biased; that they do not take into account diversity of background and preparation; and that, in any case, they measure only a few of the many qualities that admissions offices should take into account in making their decisions. The Supreme Court and the Trump administration have now fully embraced the conservative position and are engaged in a ferocious campaign to ban DEI anywhere and everywhere, treating serious, well-reasoned arguments in its favor as ipso facto absurd.

A short Substack column is not the place to resolve these debates. But I will say that the debates themselves have made it enormously difficult for Americans to have a serious discussion of how to define “ability” or “talent,” or how they can be fairly evaluated. At least in my own field of History, professors will often call particular students “good,” “smart” or “brilliant.” But we are much, much more hesitant, especially in venues such as faculty meetings, to call one student more talented than another—even more so to say that a student is “not good.” As a result, it is all too easy for us to play the game of grade inflation, in which the difference between work we consider excellent and mediocre becomes the difference between an A and an A-, especially when we believe that the students in question have devoted more-or-less equal effort to the assignment. I plead guilty to going along with the general trend. But how could I not? In a university where a C+ has become a mark of unutterable shame for many, it would be unfair to give students that grade just because it corresponds to my own personal idea of what they deserve. For many years, the Harvard political scientist Harvey C. Mansfield insisted on grading students purely according to his own standards (thereby gaining the nickname “Harvey C-minus Mansfield”). After many years, he changed the practice and started giving students two grades: the official one, which acknowledged grade inflation, and, in his written comments, the grade he felt they should have actually received. So even Mansfield gave in, in the end.

But grade inflation is destructive, both to the students who do excellent work, and to society as a whole, because the practice makes it much more difficulty to recognize who has done the best work. At least in non-scientific fields, universities over the past few generations have devoted very little time to defining “excellence,” leaving evaluations—at least in the institutions where I have worked—almost entirely up to individual faculty members to figure out for themselves. Is it possible, especially in our superheated political environment, to have an honest discussion about the issue? Perhaps not. But it might be worth trying.

Let me finish with another story from long ago. When I was a senior at (yes) Harvard, I went to talk with my thesis advisor about the possibility of going to graduate school. I told him I was concerned that I had not done as well in my courses as some of my classmates. He reassured me that I had done well but then added: “it’s not always the smartest students who make the best historians.” He meant that many qualities other than sheer intelligence go into the production of excellent historical work, but of course my immediate reaction was: “yikes! He doesn’t think I’m smart.” But in the end, he did me a great favor. No, I was not as smart as some of my classmates—certainly not as measured by things like SAT scores, or an IQ test. But his remark also implied that there are different sorts of talents and abilities, and that if your own personal combination of them doesn’t suit you for one sort of career, it might suit you for another. This might seem an obvious point, but it is one that the current generation of students has found very difficult to acknowledge. They might benefit from doing so.