Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.
A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.
Yet many of the challenges Harvard outlined are commonplace in higher education. Professors fear tougher grading will lead to negative course evaluations. Instructors sometimes find modern teaching practices are difficult to align with grades. Students are putting more pressure on professors to raise grades they don’t like.
One of the report’s most compelling findings is that Harvard students almost universally speak about grades in terms of how much effort they put in. If they spend a lot of time studying and do all of the work asked of them, they believe, they should get an A. That misunderstanding is not unique to Harvard, say professors elsewhere.
And it’s rooted in generational changes fueled by shifting educational priorities, practices, and beliefs. They include developments in K-12 education, growing financial pressures on families and colleges, concerns for student welfare, and the undeniable sense that students are not finding meaning in their work.
Honestly, I think a lot of faculty may have lost the thread a little bit too. There’s a lot of grading for completion.
The solutions suggested in the Harvard report include resetting grading averages and returning to traditional teaching strategies, such as in-class exams. But for others in higher education — including professors unhappy with their own practices — the answer may lie in radically reimagining the process of grading. Whatever their position, many instructors are exasperated by, as one professor put it in the report, “a race to the bottom.”
“We’re getting a little bit tired of the mutual nonaggression pact, where I teach an easy class and then you give me good evaluations, and we just kind of call it a day,” says Robert Talbert, a math professor at Grand Valley State University and a leader in the alternative-grading movement who speaks to faculty members across the country. “Perhaps nobody has ever been happy with grading, but I get the sense of deep dissatisfaction with, and an awareness of, a real, inherent dysfunctionality in traditional grading.”
Meanwhile, a growing body of research on teaching and learning encouraged professors to move away from lectures, midterms, and finals and toward active learning strategies, lower-stakes assignments, creative projects, and group work. Grading became more multidimensional as a result. Participation, effort, creativity, and persistence all factored into how professors thought about student work.
The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated those changes and fueled new ones. Professors were encouraged to scale back their coursework to help students stay engaged during a deeply isolating time. Attendance requirements were dropped, and strict deadline policies lifted. Some K-12 schools shifted to no-fail policies, giving students credit for turning in assignments, whether or not they understood the work.
Today, students are arriving less prepared for college-level work, including with a more limited capacity to work independently and read at length, professors say. Many instructors say they no longer expect as much from their students as they did 10 or 15 years ago, so an A doesn’t mean what it used to.
Yet grades still serve an important sorting function, the Harvard report argues. And grade inflation — or specifically grade compression, in which a majority of grades are A’s — fails to signal who the strongest students are. That particularly matters at highly competitive colleges, as their students vie for top academic prizes, jobs, and graduate and professional schools.
Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education at Harvard University and author of the grading report, says that grade inflation also interrupts another kind of sorting function, one that students historically used to determine where their talents and interests lie.
“It used to be very typical that a student would come and think that he or she wanted to study something, and then take that first intro class and realize, oh, this is not for me. This is not my area of strength. I need to do something else,” she says. “What happens now is that students stay on the path that they think they want because nothing is pushing them off it. But the path that they think they want is not really their area of passion. It’s something that their parents think is a very good idea for them. It’s something that they think will get them a job.”
The result, she says, is that students persist in fields where they aren’t doing their best work and may not enjoy what they are studying.
But talking about reserving A’s for students who demonstrate mastery of a concept or subject can be tricky in an era where professors are exhorted to consider the whole of a student’s experience. At many colleges, faculty members are mindful that their students are carrying heavy burdens, such as housing insecurity or long hours at work to pay their bills.
One associate professor of English, who teaches in the University of California system and asked not to be identified in order to speak freely, said that “the loudest voices” in her department — not necessarily the majority — have said their major function is to “accommodate students,” given the many challenges they face. She thinks that talking with these colleagues about learning in terms of mastery, which is the way she thinks about grading, would not fly. “A lot of my colleagues might associate that with a kind of elitism or a return to a canonical sense of the discipline,” she says.
The notion that everyone can get an A if they work hard enough may be one reason students today are more willing than their predecessors to argue about the grades they receive.
Shawn C. Massoni, a senior instructor in the department of microbiology at Oregon State University, sees that on his campus, especially with female professors and faculty of color. They tell him that students who earn B’s are likely to show up at office hours to complain or send emails demanding changes. Students say things like, I’ve never gotten a B before in my life. This class is very hard. Your grading is inequitable.
Massoni, a white man, has not received that kind of resistance, but he says students have told him professors in their other courses give out A’s, as long as students turn in their work. “Honestly, I think a lot of faculty may have lost the thread a little bit too,” he says. “There’s a lot of grading for completion.”
Students often feel, he says, that they deserve a grade rather than earned a grade, without really understanding the difference.
During the pandemic, the hope was that a steady flow of low-stakes assignments, such as discussion-board posts and reading quizzes, would keep students focused and involved. Many of those strategies are still common — although they’re likely to be phased out as instructors find students using AI to do the work. But they changed the mechanics of grading, resulting in a complicated tapestry of points for attendance, participation, completion, and mastery.
We’ve made a lot of progress understanding that these approaches, when done well, are very helpful to students. We need to get better at helping people do them well — instead of just throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Some professors argue that certain pandemic-driven changes were also detrimental to learning. These changes signaled to students, particularly those in the K-12 system, that education was more about completing tasks or that coming to class and sticking to deadlines wasn’t all that important.
“No late penalties and all that stuff like that has done a real disservice to our students.” says Ethan Hutt, an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill. “I think that was a mistake.”
Others argue that these strategies distorted grading to the point where students could earn decent grades by completing smaller assignments, even if they were struggling to understand broader concepts.
The Harvard report raises the possibility that some lower-stakes assignments that professors use may focus more on completion, be too easy, or not align with the larger goals of the course, so students do not get a sense of whether they are actually comprehending the material. If that’s the case, says Claybaugh, students may get frustrated if they receive good grades on those activities but do poorly on exams.
Is the solution to return to more traditional ways of teaching and grading? The Harvard report suggests so. It lays out several ideas, including professors resetting their average grades to align with what they were a few years ago and reconsidering when grading how heavily they weigh effort — such as points for attendance and completion — versus mastery.
“There are fashions in pedagogy. And these new teaching techniques, which are excellent in themselves, came into prominence at a time when there was a fashion and pedagogy to be very skeptical of grades as such,” says Claybaugh. “Because of that, there was not enough attention with the new techniques to think about how they’re going to intersect with grading. And now we have a problem. But I think that just means we have to think about how they work with grading. It doesn’t mean just get rid of them.”
Claybaugh anticipates an increase in traditional teaching approaches such as in-class exams and cold calling on students. She argues that they are effective strategies to keep students prepared and focused, and to evaluate how well they have learned the material. Professors got rid of cold calling, she says, “because they listened to students who said, Oh, it makes me feel anxious. But what we’re finding is, well, it does make sure people are ready for lecture every day and engaged and paying attention.”
On a broader scale, she says Harvard is developing comprehensive ways to evaluate good teaching for the purposes of promotion and tenure, in order to reduce the pressure instructors feel to secure strong student course evaluations.
Proponents of modern course design and alternative-grading methods argue that these approaches are exactly what’s needed to move students toward mastery, and that they are backed by research demonstrating their ability to help students learn better. The strength of such practices lies in their specificity and clarity. They define exactly what mastery of the course means and provide students with detailed feedback alongside multiple chances to improve.
The problem, as these advocates see it, may lie in the execution of these ideas, which echoes some of what the Harvard report finds.
Nobody benefits from a reading quiz that’s so easy it doesn’t measure whether a student comprehends the material, or from basing most of a student’s grade on quiz retakes, says Viji Sathy, interim director of the Center for Faculty Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We’ve made a lot of progress understanding that these approaches, when done well, are very helpful to students,” she says. “We need to get better at helping people do them well — instead of just throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
Others believe that if grading no longer reflects what it’s supposed to, perhaps it’s time to reimagine the entire process.
“It would be cheaper and easier for us all to just give up on traditional grading and try something else than it is to try to tweak it,” says Talbert, the alternative-grading expert. “And what I see in the Harvard report is a lot of well-intentioned, well-designed, but ultimately will be ill-fated, tweaks to a fundamentally broken system.”
Peter Burkholder has been keeping track of grade inflation at his own college, Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he is a history professor. He thinks the reason for the move to higher grades is pretty clear: economic pressures. Seven out of 10 colleges in the United States either have open admissions or admit more than 85 percent of applicants. In short, higher ed is a buyer’s market.
“Harvard could get very rigorous tomorrow, and they would still have tons of people applying to that school,” says Burkholder. But if a tuition-driven university like his got tougher on grading, he says, “that could be the end of the school.”
Like other faculty members who work at less-selective colleges, Burkholder says the message from administrators is the same. “Nobody has said explicitly from the administration, OK, raise your grades,” he says. “They don’t have to. We get the signal. It’s always retention and graduation rates. That’s just hammered home all the time.”
Contingent faculty members, who lack the protection of tenure, are particularly sensitive to such messages. On many campuses student course evaluations are the only measure of an instructor’s teaching effectiveness. Several faculty members interviewed for this story say that some colleagues tell them they routinely give high grades to get better evaluations.
Faculty members also need time and training if they want to revamp their courses and better align their grading practices with their assignments and assessments. That’s an option that not many have, particularly at a time of intense fiscal austerity.
As for where grading is headed, it may be impossible to say just yet.
Professors who have adopted alternate-grading practices say they offer clarity and inspire students to do their best.
Megan Frary, a clinical professor of materials science and engineering at Boise State University, allows students to revise their work after she provides detailed feedback. “Does that mean I’m being an ‘easy’ grader? No! They are earning the grade by demonstrating learning,” argues Frary. “Sure, their grades would be lower if I only allowed a single attempt and then assigned a grade to that. But it goes against what I believe as an instructor and I would rather see them develop their skills (which happens to come with a better grade), so I allow for this.”
Many faculty members also continue to find low-stakes assessments essential as building blocks toward mastery. Yet others plan to scale back or eliminate lower-stakes assessments they used to do. And they are skeptical of ever more complicated grading metrics.
“The problem with many of these approaches is that they become burdensome and an increasing proportion of our limited time, energy, and student contact goes into the grading/assessment instead of teaching/learning,” says Alain F. Plante, a professor in the department of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Massoni, the instructor at Oregon State, would like to see a blend of the best of both worlds. Though he moved back to an exam-based grading system, he has continued practices to lower student stress, such as using numerical grades rather than letters.
He thinks it’s likely that each camp will just dig further into its own approach. One is moving back toward in-class exams and shedding smaller assignments, discussion boards, and points for attendance. The other leans even harder into modern teaching strategies and alternative approaches to grading.
“Whatever you’re doing, you’re becoming more and more entrenched in that,” he says, “and that divide is widening.”
