Harvard looks to raise bar for graduating with honors

By Patrick Healy, Globe Staff, 1/31/2002

arvard University leaders yesterday proposed eliminating honors degrees for students who earn only a B average, in the school's most aggressive attempt in years to stem honors and grade inflation.

A record 91 percent of Harvard seniors graduated last June with some kind of honors on their diploma. Officials touted the high rate as a sign of the school's success, but a Globe study last fall found that Harvard gave out honors far more generously than other Ivy League schools, such as Yale and Princeton.

About 26 percent of last year's honors recipients would have been excluded under the proposed changes.

The reason for the high honors rate, according to internal Harvard data and memos, was grade inflation and uneven grading standards: About half of Harvard's grades last year were As and A-minuses, mostly in humanities classes, while many hard-science classes were graded more rigorously.

Yesterday, Susan Pederson, dean for undergraduate education, proposed that the school no longer award honors to seniors who maintain a B average, calling it ''odd'' to reward high-caliber Harvard students for simply earning As and Bs in all of their classes. She told Harvard's Committee on Undergraduate Education that honors should recognize student excellence in their area of concentration, or major. Most of the honors awarded last June were the latter type, based on seniors' grades, thesis, and other successes in their major.

Pedersen's proposal, which will be discussed by the full Harvard faculty next month, is part of a broader campaign by new Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers to increase the intellectual rigor of a Harvard education and change the incentive system for students to push them harder academically.

''Harvard is rethinking the way it asks faculty to evaluate students, and the way it rewards students themselves,'' said Brian R. Smith, a Harvard senior on the undergraduate education committee. ''It will generate a lot of debate, but, I think, make us a stronger, tougher school.''

Grade inflation and honors inflation are linked because high marks breed more honors degrees, and Summers and Pedersen are attempting to attack both. A week after the Globe study was published, Pedersen asked all faculty members to justify their grading practices in writing and turn over the information to a Harvard committee by next month. Summers, meanwhile, began raising his concerns about grade inflation privately with some professors - most notably Cornel West, who felt so insulted by this and other critiques from Summers that he and two colleagues began pursuing a possible move to Princeton University. Another, Anthony Appiah, accepted a Princeton offer Saturday, and West is leaning toward going as well.

Many Harvard officials, professors, and students were chagrined and irritated when they learned about Harvard's higher-than-average honors rate. Latin honors are a much-coveted laurel that alumni use in personal and professional networking and which some employers use to assess job candidates. Most Ivies and leading US universities award honors only for outstanding work in a student's major. Several of them, including Yale and Princeton, cap total honors at about one-third of the graduating class as a way to protect their value.

Eliminating B-average honors would still mean more than half of last year's seniors graduated with honors. But Harvard officials believe such a move would spur further faculty debate about grade standards for the remaining forms of honors, and about grades and grade inflation as well.

''By moving this category of honors off the table, it may open up the talks about grading practices across Harvard and departments and concentrations here,'' said Jeffrey Wolcowitz, associate dean for undergraduate education and a Harvard economics instructor.

This first step, however, is expected to ignite a fierce debate in the full Harvard faculty of arts and sciences, which will begin discussing the honors proposal at its Feb. 12 meeting. The proposal is tied up with the issue of grade inflation, and professors often resent the inference that they are loose or sloppy graders.

''This is an important debate for Harvard to have, for educators to have, but it won't be an easy one,'' Smith said. ''We should be attacking honors inflation and grade inflation, but there are a lot of different ideas about how to.''

Smith, for example, believes that a 91 percent honors rate is too high, but he is reluctant to impose a percentage cap on honors, as most Ivy League schools do. Perhaps the answer is raising the grade-point average required for honors - from a B to a B-plus, say - to limit the influence of grade inflation on honors, he said.

Even more important, said Rohit Chopra, a sophomore on the undergraduate education committee, is that the faculty and the deans should agree to a system of grades that all Harvard professors use and that students can understand. Doing so, he said, will make grade inflation less likely.

Patrick Healy can be reached by e-mail at phealy@globe.com.

This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 1/31/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.