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. There should be stringent guidelines for getting a first. I remember a boy in the third year getting a first in my subject when I was in first year and we looked at him as if he walked on water. It was that rare. An Upper Second was what hard-working, bright students aspired towards.

But turn academia into a business model and students become customers who desire a First for the insane amount they are charged for a few hours' teaching a year.

Grade inflation should be tackled I agree. Not sure this would be the best way though.

And start with standards at GCSE level, not waiting until degrees.

They should make the targets harder, if too many students get top grades so you can't tell who are actually the top students the work and/or exams are too easy. If the expectation is that nearly everyone gets top grades it's no wonder employers can't use the grades to distinguish between applicants.

I agree that perceptions have changed so that the business model rules. It is much worse in America.

Harvard is historically a bit of an exception. However student evaluations of course units are important for young academics and harsh marking can be career suicide.

This is especially true in the Ivy League. UGs are used to thinking of themselves as straight A students and don’t fancy adjusting their mindsets to a bigger pond. Parents regularly complain to the central administration team, and the phrase ‘I’m not paying $80K a year for B’s’ is far too well known.

It is a mess.

I have some thoughts on this, as an employer of bright young things.

Firstly, I think there is fairly good evidence that graduates are getting better at passing exams. Universities are teaching to the exam more and students are more bothered about their grade. So I am not sure exams are getting easier.

However, being better at passing exams does not make you a better employee necessarily. I say this as someone who is hiring lawyers so it is quite an intellectual job.

I also see a huge lump of (mostly male) people in their late 40s upwards who are not particularly bright or productive but got in at a time when having a daddy working at the firm or at a client or having been to the right sort of school got you a massive leg up. There is also a very real phenomenon of vaguely useless chaps who have been earning around the 100k mark in middle management being driven out once someone demands some results and finding themselves pretty unemployable. You can see it reflected on mumsnet - lots of DH can't find a job posts. So it's not like it used to work really well to have a much smaller pool of graduates - they were just more homogenous.

Anyway not sure where this takes me except that I try to be quite radical in my own hiring to avoid relying on old fashioned metrics such as where someone went to school or on simply looking at stellar exam results.

Very interesting post.

I don’t think exams are getting easier. The demand is for great predictability. Many in my field think it is good to see what students can do with one new idea as a differentiator - usually separating out the strongest, although there are sometimes nice surprises.

Students do not like this, or anything else that they perceive as deviating from past papers.

Do you screen candidates according to a system of your own?

I’m really torn about the whole US grading system….(dc studying there)… most of her classes have hard grade boundaries (95 for A, 90 A- etc) where the professors can give as many As as they want. A few classes taught by grad students have caps on grades which is really u fair when they are compulsory courses but you can’t get into the uncapped ones taught by professors. Then youve got the fact that grades in all subjects are used…so there’s a huge incentive to pick easier courses rather than challenge yourself. US students in the uk will potentially never have had a mark as low as 85% - they’re asking how everyone else did because they don’t understand UK marking. FWIW dc gets told top mark, range, mean and median for their classes so they can know how they are doing without seeing everyone’s marks. Which I think is really useful…

and then you’ve got the fact that I really cannot believe that all 4000 universities examine to anything approaching the same standard… if they did I would expect all of Harvard to be 4.0 gpa …in the same way as I really would expect vastly higher percentages of firsts from oxbridge if they are examining to the same standard as universities accepting cohorts with average a levels of CCC.

if we want genuinely university blind job applications then there has to be a much more honest conversation about what degrees are actually measuring, and how that matches to what employers need to know.

Yes I do my own screening, practical exercises and a lot of observing how they communicate information. I head up legal for a largish company and by far the most useful skill to me is the ability coherently explain legal problems to editorial people or sales teams. Also the practical drafting - often people do a great job with it technically but with no thought to how it will land commercially. So I've seen very bright/academic people suggest things like making the liability cap £1 for us and unlimited for the customer.

I am absolutely swimming in people with unbelievably great exam results - increasingly often including an Ivy League stint and/or a year in Asia. The CV arms race is extraordinary to me honestly. It's so hard to filter for actual skill and having the right sort of attitude.

My best recent hire was a person embarking on a second career actually - he's in his 50s and just fantastic at all the soft skills elements.

I agree with you that American students simply aren’t used to British marking standards. Once explained, they are fine. With a greater use of transcripts now in the UK I don’t see much difference in attitude between students in the two countries. IME Americans are somewhat more open minded, willing to experiment and grow intellectually, and British students are somewhat more self reliant. Obviously that is a gross generalisation.

The myth of common standards in the UK is one that we, as a society, probably cannot afford to puncture at the moment. Whether or not the idea has any other merits, capping degree classifications (at the upper levels) would be a workaround, I think: we know that a First from Oxbridge is much more demanding than a first from MyNeighbourhoodUni. If each is capped at 20%, at least society gets one kind of consistency. (For a long time STEM had much better degree classifications at Oxford than at Cambridge. It didn’t seem to hurt Cambridge students’ prospects but it was strange.)

I agree completely with your final paragraph and I suspect I am not alone in that!

Your DD’s American uni sounds slightly unusual to me. I guess it is meant to relieve pressure on the PG students but I am surprised that it has, presumably, survived challenges in that society.

How cool.

Perhaps universities should give a student’s ranking within their cohort alongside degree classification. DS graduated from Cambridge in 2023 with a degree classification and a ranking and he cites both on his CV and in LinkedIn.

Interestingly, I am often asked by students for references for post-grad courses and one of the first questions they ask referees is: Where did your student rank among their cohort: top 5%, 10%, 20%, 40% etc. It's a good guideline.

This is intriguing. It has a lot of merit. The big drawback, to me, is that students may be discouraged from choosing difficult course units unless those are marked generously, discouraging intellectual growth.

What do others think?

Yes, all PG programmes ask for this IME but few if any employers.

I think the rise the standard of work is down to the easy access to information. I was at uni in the 80’s, if I had a question I had to walk to the library, go through the catalog, find the book I wanted in the stacks and read chapters to get what I needed, with no other little snippets being linked to it, now they carry all that information in the palm of their hands. I don’t think the rise in standards is down to students being more intelligent. I think this needs to be considered and capping is a step towards it, if everyone has access to the same info then those using it to a higher standard should be the ones getting the A’s.

I will be honest, there were many times I couldn’t be bothered with a trip to the library when my mates were getting ready to go out, lol. Now I’d just Google it and that part of my paper would be done in minutes rather than hours.

On average, Cambridge limits first-class degrees to around one-third of its graduates with ranking. Conversely, many other universities have experienced significant grade inflation over recent years, an issue that now needs to be tackled.

This is a very commonly requested when an employer asks for a reference.

I don't think the US and UK systems are comparable in this regard. US students (even at Harvard) literally get points for showing up. UK students don't.

So what? You could just as easily say that UK students only need 70% for a top grade and US students need 95…

less than half of dds classes this year gave marks for attendance btw…and the ones that did were ones with practical elements where attendance really matters..

they are different systems with different rules and requirements. Some courses in the UK require you to turn up too btw…

We live in the US - close to Harvard - and know and have worked with many harvard grads. The school is insanely difficult to get into and attracts a very intense student (unless you donate a million or so like Jared Kushner's dad did). I was saying to DH last night that the harvard undergrads are going to eat each other because of this. I hope the school has taken this into account in planning their pastoral care.

Then you'd need to do this across all unis. As PP said above, you'd end up with the situation when Oxbridge graduate would have a lower grade than Wolverhampton one.

As to Employers can’t currently differentiate the extraordinarily able from the quite able as both receive the top grade - very few employers are actually looking for extraordinarily able students, maybe in some niche research areas, otherwise they will always prefer an able one with right people skills and attitudes

@nearlylovemyusernameYou already do! That’s the problem! Firsts are not the same everywhere are they?

They are just using AI now. Upload the assignment brief, upload the course guidelines, upload the lecture slides and even videos/video transcripts and voila.

We are moving the oral exams throughout as a result which will no doubt disadvantage ND and possibly international students but it's hard to know what to do.

@Mithral My DD is a lawyer and isn’t swimming with the best qualifications. It does appear other attributes do mean something in her field! As she’s self employed - getting work from solicitors and networking matters. A string of top results doesn’t give you commercial awareness and an ability to get work and certainly doesn’t give confidence.

I think employers have no option but to test applicants for their own needs. Universities don’t have the best doing their degrees. They have 37% of young people doing the degrees and quite a few of these simply aren’t good enough. Basic things like spelling mistakes, inability to grasp basic engineering concepts and general lack of problem solving thoughts were common threads with DH when trying to employ grads. Obviously some are fine but others are poor. It’s not entirely their fault. It’s poor teaching, lack of correction and never being required to design anything in the real world. Spoon fed grads simply aren’t much use, except to proud mums and uni stats.

My DD is a lawyer and isn’t swimming with the best qualifications. It does appear other attributes do mean something in her field! As she’s self employed - getting work from solicitors and networking matters. A string of top results doesn’t give you commercial awareness and an ability to get work and certainly doesn’t give confidence.

Absolutely that's the point I was trying to make. I know not all lawyers have the best grades but certainly I get huge amounts of young people with incredible CVs applying for our junior roles. As in straights As plus international internships, highly impressive music and sporting stuff going on. I think it's very tough out there for anyone with a "normal" level of exam results who is trying to qualify.

I do think this means that real gems are missed but it's so hard to know how best to recruit. It sounds like your DD is further on in her career and exam results do mean less then. I don't have any education on my CV anymore!