Harvard capping high marks; should we?

[poetryandwine]

Harvard University academics have voted to cap the percentage of ‘A’ grades awarded in undergraduate course modules to 20% of enrolled students, plus or minus four students. There is no cap on other grades, including the grade A- ( ‘A minus’). This will be from Autumn 2027. The change will be assessed after three years.

About 70% voted in favour of the cap.

The grade of A at Harvard is supposed to be reserved for work of exceptional merit. The last time the percentage of A grades was as low as 20% was 2005. In 2024-25, about 60% of awarded module grades were A’s.

Students are not happy. There is a fundamental difference between what students want from assessment and what academics and employers want from assessment.

UK First Class degree awards have undergone a similar but less dramatic change over the last few decades, especially since tuition fees increased. We know employers don’t find undergraduate marks and degree classifications as useful as they used to, and why they now set such high bars.

Do MumsNetters think that capping the percentage of First Class Marks in each undergraduate course module, which can easily be achieved by rescaling marks similarly to what we already do, would be a good idea, or not?

I agree, and it is fair to ask how much grades and degree classifications reflect knowledge.

We know, and PP have stated, that some students, particular those with SEN, are at a disadvantage. OTOH, academics also know that some students get into the habit of learning for the short term. Although they may get good marks in the prerequisite modules to important advanced modules, in no way have they mastered the material. As students exert more pressure to keep exams similar from one year to the next, it is possible - though not clear to me - that this problem is getting worse.

Also, @RockyKeen , I don’t see intelligence and hard work as opposites n any way. Ideally a first class degree reflects both.

Do you feel that somehow you snuck through? I hope not.

Lots of US schools and universities graded on the curve for decades. Im more surprised that Harvard doesn't.

No. I did a linguistics degree with Spanish I’m bilingual , so probably had an advantage in one sense but not in another .
dd2 has a 2.2 in her degree , it was hard going for her not the archaeology side or history side but the classics as she’d never done Latin before . She did however get the 1st ever distinction for her masters which had been running for 6 years ( both at an rg uni) . She’s very passionate about what she studied and very knowledgeable but it was steep learning curve . She’s got an excellent job and gets a lot of praise and always manages to impress employers. Grade and knowledge and passion and self discipline to keep up to date in your field don’t always go hand in hand .

How do they decide who doesn’t get an A between students who do equally worthy work?

I'm not sure I believe a masters running for 6 years before one student got a distinction. After 2 years of no distinctions we would have had to seriously review our admissions processes and assessment.

The more thoughtful the assessments and marking rubric, the less likely this is to happen.

If it does, well - the caps are maximums. I suppose the fairest thing is to make the cut off high enough that neither of the two (or more) get the highest mark.

Edit: my post above was for @ButterYellowFlowers

Your DD can have been smart and hardworking but simply failed to grasp the content or assesment briefs… a 2:2 isn’t for someone who is clearly understanding the work and demonstrating knowledge. Clearly something wasn’t clicking for her

How does anyone get on a masters with a 2:2? I thought that would not be good enough. The masters must have been desperate to recruit.

Plus why are bilingual people doing MFL degrees? Hardly a challenging choice given prior learning.

Is it good, bad, or of no consequence for our undergraduates and new graduates to know, via assessment schemes, roughly where they rank relative to their peers?

At present course module marks and degree classifications do not give them this information. Well, if they care to look up statistics for their particular university retrospectively, which might get rather involved, they could get a rough idea. Nothing like the information provided by knowing you were being assessed on a bell curve, or by centiles.

I went to an American uni for my full undergrad degree. The way they grade is very different to over here, the a grades are per class, generally a class is 3 credits, you need 120 credits to graduate. So you can excel in one class and get a higher grade point average and then do worse in another class and get a lower GPA for that class but it all goes equally towards your undergrad GPA score. So hard to explain in a short post. The best students ace every class and get a 4.0 GPA (you can do extra classes to get that GPA higher, an A gives you 4.0, B 3.0, C 2.0, D 1.0, lower and it’s 0. if they fail a class then thst GPA could be 3.9 all the way down to a 2.0, lower than that is an overall fail. You can redo a class to get a higher grade, but the overall would still be an average including both times you took the class. You really can’t compare it to a first etc.

Isn’t bell curve marking the norm at UK universities?

No. We do standards based marking.

We are giving msny more high marks and high degree classifications than 15-20 years ago, and many many more if you go back further.

I taught in a public Ivy for over 15 years and this is a pretty good summsry! Thank you.

Some employers and many PG programmes are now requesting full transcripts. I agree they are much more useful than a degree classification.

You can make the classes harder. There is a certain type of student who is just going to study more. There is a very high concentration of that type of student at Harvard.

the idea behind this is that the grades are artificially inflated. Whether that is true or not doesn’t really matter when we consider the impact of the changes. There is now a cap. That means every student is competing against their classmates for a top grade.

There is now a disincentive to help one another learn. Before, cooperative learning and study was an advantage. Help them today and they may be able to help you tomorrow. Sometimes these arrangements are even formalized, breaking up reading and sharing notes and study guides.

Now, helping a fellow student could hurt you. This makes an already competitive school into a cutthroat environment.

It was so hard to explain. As I’m sure you know, there are other intricacies but as a sweeping generalisation it’s a decent explanation. I didn’t even want to start on incompletes, lol. I like the way it is in the US but then that’s what I know. My DS went through uni here and my DD is there now, they have to explain it to me, bizarrely it seems more complicated to me.

A lot of American universities mark on the curve. It encourages competitiveness. If you want to be in that top percentage, you work your tail.off and then work it some more. You get an accurate representation of who is really able in the end.

They calculate your high school GPA too, and throw in the added complication of a weighted GPA, meaning it is possible to get a GPA that is over 4.0. I have read the local high school method of calculating weighted GPAs several times but could not explain it if my life depended on it.

The weighted GPA comes into play when you take AP classes or accelerated classes or sometimes honors level classes, depending on District policy.

I thought that would just make the whole thing so complex to explain, lol. So I just said “extra classes” to get over 4.0. It seems so complicated but when you live with it it seems so obvious.

A browse of WhatDoTheyKnow.com shows its common for students to put in FOI requests for module grade profiles, which they presumably use to inform module choices. This isn't just because some professors mark more harshly than others, but because some professors are simply worse at teaching than others. Many university students experience poor teaching at uni, and its understandable that they want to avoid it.

@poetryandwine The issue is that few employers believe they are seeing better graduates than 20 or 30 years ago. So universities must have changed their requirements to get the higher marks. Years ago you could not conceive (in Buckinghamshire) that a dc who got 103 in our grammar selection tests, when 121 is the mark required for a grammar, is getting a first from an ex poly in an academic subject. Other dc who scored full marks (141) have firsts too but there’s truly a difference between these young people. I know people find their feet at university but we do reward the less bright with firsts. The 2:2 has all but disappeared as a result. Go back 50 years and a 2:2 was the biggest category of degree. Degree classifications are now farcical in too many universities.

Presumably, consistent low marks for a module would be noticed in the moderation process and the cause investigated. In my experience, marks returned outside the expected norm, above or below, require a written justification.

This is a big part of the Harvard students’ argument. Obviously it is true in the aggregate.

However in a course unit of hundreds, you are likely part of a small group helping each other. The cap on A’s for the unit overall should not change the workings of your small group.

I feel positive about the capping policy for Y1 and Y2 course units (these are typically General Education requirements) with large enrolments, where it should not promote competitiveness amongst friends and study colleagues.

In small, upper level courses the dynamic may be very different. Aside from anything else, the leeway of plus or minus four A grades specified by the policy may be a large percentage of the enrolment. Ideally it would be possible to revert to reserving the grade of A for work of exceptional quality without a formal cap.

I am not surprised by employers views.

Few academics think students are getting better, either, even as degree classifications continue to inch upwards. IME a number of them, however, are excelling at doing exactly what they are told they need to do.

Resisting the pressure to re- issue the same assignments and exams year after year ( for which model solutions are readily available), the pressure to pre-mark UG dissertations, the anger that any surprises can so easily generate, gets very tiring. Again, TBC in no way do I mean all students! But being very, very diligent without putting in much intellectual effort (which can actually hurt if you aren’t used to it) has become a path to a lower First or upper 2.1. That didn’t used to be true.

The thing is, students who prepare this way feel that they are working very hard. In a way, they are. What they aren’t doing is growing.

I do not think employers are seeking graduate entrants whose main strength is following very precise instructions. @Araminta1003 ’s comment upthread about box ticking or jumping through hoops is very much on point, however.

I am finding these comments very interesting.
For avoidance of doubt, I am using them to inform my own thinking and participation in local discussions.

In no way is this thread being used for research or official purposes.

I remain grateful and interested in further comments