Inside the Fight to Save Higher Education

An Interview with Harvard Dean Amanda Claybaugh

Harvard has been in the news this week! The faculty voted to combat grade inflation by limiting the number of As assigned in each course. Harvard was the first university to take steps in addressing this rampant problem. Others will likely follow. The discussion of grade inflation raises larger questions about higher education, what students need to learn and which cognitive skills they should develop.

As it happens, I live with the person behind this initiative, Amanda Claybaugh, Dean of Undergraduate Education for Harvard College. I’m devoting this week’s newsletter to a behind-the-scenes interview with her.

- Grades had been creeping up for decades, but no one wanted to tackle it. It was almost like an embarrassing secret that people talked about in private. What made you decide the let the cat out of the bag?

It’s a good question! Grading was certainly not on my to-do list when I became Dean of Undergraduate Education. I was focused on more important things. I wanted to make sure our students were getting the full benefit of a liberal arts education, encountering an array of disciplines even as they focus on a single one. I wanted to make sure they were getting the full benefit of an education in a research university, learning about the cutting-edge work being done by faculty and also doing research of their own. And most of all, I wanted to help them see the connections between what they were learning in our classrooms and the things they want to do out in the world—and the people they want to become.

All faculty want these things for our students. But every time we took a step forward, we would stumble on the problem of grading. Faculty would redesign their courses to make them more meaningful, only to watch students choose less demanding courses instead; students would shy away from the courses that truly interested them, feeling compelled to take the courses that guaranteed an A. And so, I realized that we had to change our culture of grading before we could do anything else.

- As with monetary inflation, grade inflation is a difficult problem to tackle. Before proposing solutions, you needed to understand what had caused it. What were your conclusions?

Inflation’s a good metaphor, because it prompts us to think about what grades can buy. For students, As buy honors and prizes and admissions to medical school; for faculty, they buy higher course evaluations and larger course enrollments. As a result, there’s always been a strong incentive for students to push for—and faculty to award—more As than are deserved. Even though doing so inflates the currency dangerously.

This is a timeless dynamic, but it was intensified over the past 15 years or so by some new trends. First, new approaches to teaching. Some faculty replaced high-stakes exams with more frequent, lower-stakes assessments; some replaced exams and papers with creative assignments and group work; still others shifted to grading schemes that focused on assessing mastery of course material rather than differentiating student performance. In many cases, these changes improved the quality of our teaching, but they also increased the number of As we were giving out. Second, a new concern for the well-being of students. In recent years, faculty have been attentive to the fact that some of our students arrive at Harvard better prepared than others, that some of them have disabilities, that many struggle with mental health issues and stress. Concern for these students has made Harvard a more welcoming place, but it has also made faculty more reluctant to give a full range of grades. And of course, these trends weren’t limited to higher education. Similar things were happening in high schools, which meant that more and more of our students were arriving having never earned anything but As, and this made it even harder for faculty to grade rigorously.

Almost everyone saw the problem, but no one could solve it on their own. Faculty who grade harder than their peers risk lower evaluations and enrollments, just as students who choose challenging classes risk their ability to earn honors. (This year, a second A- was enough to disqualify a student from graduating summa cum laude). This is a classic collective action problem; it can only be solved by forced coordination. Recognizing this, the faculty committee I asked to address the grading issue arrived at the idea of a cap.

- Since you decided to call attention to the problem through your report on grading and education last fall, there has been a vigorous debate on campus and in the national press. What were the most common objections and how did you respond to them?

There was a lot of worry about student stress. I share the concern, but I think we should focus on helping students learn how to manage their stress, rather than trying to relieve them of it by giving out too many As. Because while it’s stressful to be, for instance, a pre-med, it’s also stressful to be a medical student or to practice as a doctor, holding life and death in your hands. And the same is true for the other career paths our students tend to pursue. Our students are stressed not because of anything we’re doing to them, but because they are very ambitious people who want to do great things in the world. And they can! But part of that is learning how to manage stress.

There was also a lot of worry about competition. Many students reported that they found their classmates to be collaborative and supportive, and they worried that a grading cap would change this. I can understand this concern, but I have more confidence in our students than that. After all, our athletes compete with one another for starting positions, but still play together as a team; our actors compete with one another for the best roles, then still work together to put on the show; and the same can be true in our classrooms as well.

Finally, there was a widespread sense that Harvard students deserve all those As. Some people cite the difficulty of getting into Harvard (with its 3% acceptance rate) and ask why we’re surprised when they earn a lot of As. But while it’s true that all our students are talented at something, it’s not true that they’re all equally talented at every discipline; we should still see more of a distribution of grades. Other people argue that professors should articulate standards and then give As to all the students who meet them—and that ideally all students would be able to do so. But we want to set a bar that not everyone can meet, and that’s because we want our students to do more than regurgitate what we’ve taught them. We want them to push themselves and surprise us with what they’re able to do, with their ability to ask new questions, discern new connections, make new discoveries. We don’t want to put a ceiling on their intellectual aspirations, but that’s just what the too-easy A can do.

- What surprised you the most in the debate about the proposal?

The variety of people’s responses. I’m an English professor, and I presumed that my fellow humanists would be leery of a grade cap while scientists would be in favor. But the reality was much less predictable. There was strong support for a cap among the faculty in the quantitative social sciences (economics, political science, psychology), but beyond that it was impossible to generalize by discipline. The only other pattern was that faculty who’d been educated abroad also tended to support the cap, which makes sense because grades in the United States are much more generous than elsewhere.

- Grade inflation has contributed to the erosion of trust in higher education—like monetary inflation, it devalues what it touches. How do you see this initiative shifting the political debate about higher education?

To be clear, I don’t think grading is the most important issue facing higher education, but I do think that reforming our grading will begin to restore trust. At the risk of sounding high-falutin, I’ll say that I believe universities have a crucial role to play in society. We serve as the arbiters of knowledge: we pursue the truth, we distinguish open questions from settled ones, and we strive to do so independent of power or profit or popularity. But when people see us give out As too easily—when they see us failing to distinguish the extraordinary from the excellent from the merely good—they have reason to doubt our judgments about knowledge as well.

Universities have another crucial role to play: we educate young adults and prepare them to lead. Schools like Harvard are fortunate enough to be richly endowed for this work. We hold a disproportionate share of the world’s educational resources (faculty and labs and libraries and the like), and we are able to attract a disproportionate share of the world’s most talented students. I don’t think people resent that we have those things so much as they expect us to steward them responsibly. But when some students start saying that they don’t really have to go to class, that it’s their extracurriculars that really matter, that they’re here mostly to network. . . well, it doesn’t sound like we are stewarding our resources responsibly. Put another way, every year we end up rejecting around 60,000 talented applicants; we have to make sure that the students we do admit make good use of what we have to offer.

Finally, there’s been a lot of talk in recent years about whether universities are capable of governing themselves. I think this vote shows that we are. Our faculty acknowledged a seemingly intractable problem, they grappled with it seriously, and they came together to solve it.

- Now that Harvard has gone public with the problem and implemented a solution, other universities are sure to follow. Based on your experience, what is your advice for colleagues at other institutions?

Ours is a Harvard-specific solution to a Harvard-specific problem. My understanding is that grade inflation is a problem across higher education, but I presume that the contours of the problem vary and so will the right solutions. The only thing I’d recommend is the value of research. Our proposal was designed by a committee of faculty who drew not only on their long experience as teachers but also on their expertise in their various fields. We had economists thinking about incentive structures, psychologists thinking about measurement, and a computer scientist who gathered the data set of all Harvard College grades in the 21^st century and modeled the outcomes of all proposed changes. The result was a proposal as rigorous as we’d expect faculty research to be, and that rigor ended up persuading their colleagues.

- You’ve said that tackling grade inflation is not an end in itself but the basis on which to address larger challenges facing higher education, especially with respect to AI. What are your plans?

Grading is such a straightforward problem compared to AI, which may well alter not only the way we produce knowledge, but also the way faculty teach and students learn. I’m going to spend the summer talking with colleagues, many of whom are already using AI in really interesting and creative ways, and we’ll see what kind of plans we come up with. Maybe you can interview me again when we know more!

Dean Claybaugh, thank you for this interview.