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?

Actually @ceramiq and the other PP, think the two perspectives you raise and the tensions between them are fascinating and relevant.

The BBC is reporting now on Alan Milburn’s study of NEETs. We have over 1,000,000 now, second only to Romania amongstI a number of European countries charted, and a sad proportion including some interviewees are graduates. All interviewed are putting great effort into finding employment.

We don’t know what they studied or whether they are retrospectively happy with their choices. I do think most who attend university expect a decent job at the end of it. How realistic this is, including, importantly, the success records of their degree programmes and how honestly these have been presented, is variable.

In STEM we probably see more pragmatism than in the Arts, Humanities and possibly Social Sciences. But we do have a fair amount of academic passion, and students in the other areas are not unmotivated by the notion of good remuneration. I have a lot of respect for the IFS.

All academics are primarily concerned about students’ intellectual growth, and one of the links upthread (I think the one from @Owlbookend ) did link career and financial success over time to degree class. Some of the studies started a while back, probably before classification inflation. This suggests (to the happy surprise, IIRC, of @Owlbookend and certainly to me) that employers really value either academic growth or attributes developed concomitantly.

An aside: There is a fascinating Opinion piece in the NY Times yesterday by Rebecca Winthrop. She is at the Brookings Institution, a highly respected centre-left think tank in DC. She led their task force on AI and Education.

She has stopped using AI in her own significant writing, even for ethical purposes such as @ceramiq discussed on an earlier thread. She felt it was dulling her. (She is not critical of the ethical use of AI by adults). She discusses a number of studies of the use of AI by pupils and UGs. One fascinating finding is that AI prose is lively and holds our attention, but the content is repetitive and thin. YP are in no position to appreciate the latter, and experts argue it is destroying their creativity.

My post above was also for @MeetMeOnTheCorner but MumsNet rejected it with the inclusion of her name. Perhaps I was misspelling it at the end of a long day, I apologise.

@poetryandwine "One fascinating finding is that AI prose is lively and holds our attention, but the content is repetitive and thin. YP are in no position to appreciate the latter, and experts argue it is destroying their creativity."

Our DC all use AI extensively. The only DC still at university is by a very wide margin the best writer of all our DC and gets excellent feedback on written expression from tutors - but they don't use AI to write anything for them. It seems to me the younger the DC, the more creative potential some of them at least seem to leverage with AI.

I am very wary of gloomy generalizations about the impact of AI - and we also need to remember that a lot of writing at work is not meant to be creative but rather succinct and accurate. Our older DC and indeed my DH, who is also an adept, love the clarity of expression of eg AI meeting minutes.

Is your DC still at university the one at the top of their cohort? I don’t think one can generalise from that!l And as you say, they don’t use AI for the writing itself.

Of course we don’t know details of your DC lives, but a finding from a university study of 370,000 AI essays cited by RW is that AI has the most flattening effect on the essays of students further from the ‘norm’. It won’t connect unusual ideas or experiences. The very able don’t need it to do that; the others don’t know what their AI essays are missing.

Formatting succinct minutes is essentially a sorting process. That sounds like a brilliant use of AI. This seems to me analogous to the fact that in medicine, the use of AI to assist with diagnosis in medical imaging is proving very successful. These are two processes that can be complex and tiring but are not ambiguous. Perfect for an LLM.

I am not gloomy about AI per se, and I don’t know anyone who is, actually. Even Pope Leo’s encyclical is not inherently pessimistic. But everyone acknowledges (a) the potential for and actuality of misuse and (b) the need to rethink how we prepare people for the labour market as AI takes over a number of tasks.

I would add to this that AI is probably affecting students’ intellectual and personal development, of concern to us both, in ways that aren’t completely clear yet. Less able students are probably more affected, overall, than more able students.

Tbf I’m British and this used to annoy me intensely too - if the top mark that will be awarded is 85, fine, but let’s not pretend 75 is then 75 out of 100 when it is actually a mark of 75 out of a possible 85!

@poetryandwine A shocking statistic today is that 1 in 8 grads is a NEET. That’s so worrying. Interviewees today were a paramedic degree holder, a marketing degree and an undisclosed one from an elite uni. It’s clear that degrees, even in health services, are offered but there’s no jobs. Someone else said more sports journalists graduate each year than there are jobs in the whole industry. How has this been allowed to happen? It’s immoral. Selling false dreams. Students feel they must do the degrees but of course, years ago, journalists worked their way up via local papers as cub reporters. Now we sell unrealistic dreams at a very high price.

There must surely be accountability for this? Many training courses were at local college and were not degrees at all and I’m not convinced paramedics were awful back then. I would now like to see a proper evaluation of what degrees are really required and which ones have decent employment prospects if they are vocational. We keep saying vocational is better but the young people doing them are still unemployed. It’s dismal!

"I would add to this that AI is probably affecting students’ intellectual and personal development, of concern to us both, in ways that aren’t completely clear yet. Less able students are probably more affected, overall, than more able students."

I have read comments from academics in the UK, US and France to the effect that the best students are way better than in the past through effective use of technology (including but not limited to AI) that allows them to access, process and engage with way more information from varied sources than ever before. However, assessment formats have to allow students to express their greater abilities for this to be possible and that isn't always the case, thereby limiting some high potential students. My impression is that there is going to be a great divide between the people who can leverage AI to their own intellectual advantage/development and the majority who will use it as a shortcut.

I agree with you on this, @Ceramiq , and I think you put it well.

The limitations resulting from the use of AI come from using it as a shortcut, which the large majority cannot resist. Almost all discussions of the impact of AI on UG students are based on this premise.

When I read some discussions by academics of the impact of AI on UG students I am often frustrated by the fact that they have not themselves got to grips with the potential of the technology. They are framing AI as merely a shortcut mechanism because they haven't tried it out properly. Quite a few of these academics seem to think that the correct response to AI is an across the board return to handwritten exams in controlled conditions. My DC still at university is very clear with herself (and me) that exams are an incredibly limiting assessment format vs research essays. I have also read research (I need to look it up again) that supports the far stronger assessment value of few, very long research essays vs lots of short essays that cannot, by virtue of the time allocated to them, engage with a very wide/deep research base.

I agree we need accountability, particularly for courses that sell unsubstantiated dreams. (We have those in STEM, also.) I also agree we have dignified many training courses with the title ‘degree’ that aren’t worthy of the name. There seems to be a growing consensus that this is a problem of major proportions.

The question of to what extent employers value the information conveyed by our very generous degree classification system was part of the reason I started the thread. I also wonder what YP themselves think. My sense from them is that if they get a good degree and a decent job they are quite happy for others to have the same chances: I think, on the whole, this is not a hugely competitive or exclusionary generation. That’s part of a spectrum of attributes - some positive, some negative.

I agree completely that not training programme - not even every excellent, highly competitive training programme providing an entree to the middle class - need come in the form of a degree. I have read on this Board that the big accountancy firms are starting to offer very competitive direct entry after A Level and I think that is fantastic.

However parents will naturally continue to want the best for their DC and too many believe that A Degree is a ticket to the middle class. I think it follows in their minds that any attempt to limit university places is at attempt to limit the aspirations of families like theirs. IMO this is why successive governments have such a reluctance to tackle the mess which is, as you say, immoral.

It is easier in a society less obsessed with class stratification. And many years of economic stagnation are exacerbating the problem.

Ideally universities should be for YP (and others) who want to really stretch themselves on the way to becoming productive members of society. I would define ‘productive’ broadly.

@Ceramiq
I was wondering whether students could do lots of research before an exam for a supervised research essay. They could organise and print out their journal articles or photocopy key parts of books and then bring them into an open book controlled assessment, which is supervised over 2 days so AI can't be used on the actual writing part.

I'm dead against 24 or 48 hour exams. I think they reward endurance more than they reward intellect and while endurance can be an important success factor in life it shouldn't be a critical measurement at university. I also think that a proper undergraduate research essay (of the type our youngest DC is required to do at university) it completely AI proof anyway and AI admits as much itself when questioned.

@poetryandwine Apologies - my post was a bit off topic, but outcomes matter. I’m not sure parents now see a degree as necessarily the best pathway for DCs. I believe many would like the work and study model. I think not getting a job isn’t confined to working class degree holders either.

I do think young people are sold degrees on getting a training for a job, eg marketing. However nearly every grad could go into this work. There are numerous similar degrees. I do hope the government can open up more apprenticeships. I think A1 is closing down jobs and dc are wanting vocational degrees and then grads flood the market. The report doesn’t consider the dc working in non grad roles and that’s a large number too.

@Ceramiq I agree that 24-48 hour exams are silly. I meant 4 hours on one day and 4 hours on the second day in an exam hall supervised with a gap for lunch so it is not about endurance. Not sure whether that is enough time to write a good research essay as I am from a STEM background.

@MeetMeOnTheCorner Absolutely agree that the government needs to fund more apprenticeships. I also think it is a luxury for a student these days to just follow their passion without considering whether they can get a job at the end. I think the rough cost of getting a degree now is £63,000-£75,000.

@fairyring25 I do think we need a broadly educated workforce so I don’t want history and MFL degrees consigned to obscurity but I don’t think enough students think about preparing for work.

As a complete aside, my DH did a 7 hour open book exam (decades ago) for his MIStructE exam! Took a suitcase into the exam hall in London. No computer design but engineering skills were required!

You cannot cut the writing in half that way over two days - students would continue working in between making a de facto 28 hour exam. I personally think that it would create far more problems than it would solve. My DC who writes research essays spends up to 3 months on each - starting before the module even begins and refining the research question for the first 5 weeks of the module before confirming it with the Teaching Fellow mid-module.

BTW I am also alarmed at the termination of less lucrative degree programmes such as MFL.

In fact graduates have quite decent success rates getting various types of graduate jobs and further training. Same for various liberal arts degrees: a good programme develops analytical capacity which is always in short supply, and can be monetised.

The problem with History and MFL degrees is not that the subjects are inherently poor preparation for the world of work but that the quality of the degrees themselves is often not good enough. One of our DC's tutors is on record online bemoaning the fact that his undergraduate students' MFL capabilities are too weak for them to do independent research in the MFL. This isn't a problem intrinsic to MFL but a problem about standards in UK universities in certain subjects.

Nothing to apologise for.

Outcomes and intellectual development both matter. Ideally they would coincide, or greatly overlap. @Owlbookend ’s link suggests that there may be something in this.

Interesting.

If I understand, the tutor is moaning gently about UG students on a degree programme in his own School?

I think this is your very able DC, so I will assume the entry standards are reasonable.
Do you think this reflects that A level standards have become inflated, so students arrive without sufficient preparation? Or does the tutor think that the students arrive well prepared, but the degree programme does not challenge them enough?

I realise you may not know the answers, which may be more complex. Others with knowledge of MFL programmes may have insights also. TIA to all.

@Ceramiq
Would it be possible for this to work?
Research question refinement all done beforehand, research essay plan completed and bibliography completed.
Research organised and printed out beforehand.
Once research is brought into the exam hall, nothing can be added to. All notes left in a box in the exams office until the next day.
On the first day of writing their research essay they get 4 hours and then 4 hours the next day under supervision. They know their research question beforehand so surely all the planning is already done months in advance. There would be no need to do work in the middle as they can't bring anything else in. This stops AI being used when writing the essay but develops the research and planning skills.

Many will be going online between exam sessions, @fairyring25 , regardless of the regulations. Even if they can’t bring written material to the exam hall, some have remarkable memories.

How does this fit into your scheme?

It was actually about students in a previous university and the academic in question (a cultural historian of France) has made a sideways move in terms of academic field since and seems a lot happier with his current students ;) who are not MFL students but mostly plurilingual by background.

Hopeless and I don't really know where to begin! I appreciate that you are trying but it isn't possible to remove AI usage completely from an exam if you have any sort of break. And I can't really see what you would be testing in your scenario other than memory.

From my understanding, in certain disciplines this is established research. In others including mine consensus on the best use of AI for undergraduates is not yet established, but many of us agree with the principle that long form assessments are more meaningful, and more useful.

It sounds like your family takes the high road regarding the use of AI. The problem is that a majority of undergraduates at most institutions, and a substantial minority at any institution in the land, take the low road. Academics are deeply engaged in figuring out how to use AI to deepen learning, but when it comes to high stakes assessment bitter experience shows that students are persisting in taking the low road, blatantly cheating.

I think there was a shift during the pandemic and we never recovered.

There is an excellent Letter to the Editor in The Guardian today (currently on the front page of the free online paper under the Tech section of Letters) sharing your views and making some additional, similar points.