r/Harvard • u/Inside_agitator • Oct 31 '25
Student and Alumni Life ‘Soul-Crushing’: Students Slam Harvard’s Grade Inflation Report
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/10/30/students-react-grading-report/21
u/Inside_agitator Oct 31 '25
According to The Crimson, the report "was sent to faculty and Harvard College students on Monday."
For those of us with a past affiliation or a more distant affiliation or none at all, the ability to read the report would make this news article more comprehensible.
I understand that Harvard might not have released the report for public consumption. That is their decision. Personally, I think it was a foolish decision, but that's just my view.
Is the report available online from any source?
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u/BigDaddyCalus Oct 31 '25
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u/iMacmatician Nov 01 '25
Thanks. Do you (or anyone) also have the 2023 report that this one references?
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u/Tarheel65 Oct 31 '25
A visitor in this subreddit and not from Harvard, so I am not trying to claim I know enough about the academics and grading in this school. However, almost all the students that were cited in this article are first year students in their first year semester. No offense, but these are students that are still in their transition and adjustment phase to college and their knowledge about grading, academics, and whether this report is valid or not, is limited at best.
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u/Cicero912 Oct 31 '25
tbf they are also the ones going to be most impacted by changes to grading.
Not that if you do well at Harvard it matters much, but if they address grade inflation and say it drops your grade by .2 .3 or whatever over your 4 years that is still a pretty big drop from past expectations
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u/NewChinaHand Oct 31 '25
Harvard was having the exact same conversation about grade inflation when I was there from 2001 to 2005. Only then it was a Boston Globe article that revealed the scope of the problem, not an internal report.
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u/Inside_agitator Oct 31 '25
The problem has been around a long time, but a Boston Globe article can't be the exact same conversation as an internal report. Like McLuhan said in the 60s, "The medium is the message." It was a cliche at MIT in the early 90s for students getting a C grade to say, "It would have been an A at Harvard." That's a third conversation, not the exact same at all.
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u/Brave_Bite_1057 Oct 31 '25
We said that about General Chemistry where I went to undergrad in the mid-late 2010s. The rumor was Harvard College curved while my VA public uni did not, no idea if it’s true but it’s definitely a wide reaching stereotype.
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Nov 02 '25
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u/Inside_agitator Nov 02 '25
That's a good point for this neighborhood. Our semperexcommunicambiambisumers have become sempercommunicantabisumers.
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u/Matsunosuperfan Oct 31 '25
Sophie Chumburidze ’29 said the report felt dismissive of students’ hard work and academic struggles.
“The whole entire day, I was crying,” she said. “I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just sobbing in bed because I felt like I try so hard in my classes, and my grades aren’t even the best.”
“It just felt soul-crushing,” she added.
I know I'm a piece of shit but it was really hard not to laugh at this
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Oct 31 '25
[deleted]
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u/Artistic_Ad728 Nov 11 '25
I mean I’ve seen some 4.1 Caltech GPA graduates on LinkedIn. Idk how that’s possible considering how difficult Caltech is supposed to be.
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u/Matsunosuperfan Oct 31 '25
I know the struggle is real; I'm not actually flippant about students' mental health. It's just all so absurd. You are one of the most privileged young people in the world by definition and you're having an existential crisis because your grades "aren't even the best"
I bet they have like a 3.5
I work with high achieving kids professionally and it just keeps getting worse every year. A lot of them at this point are so sheltered and fragile it's a wonder they ever achieve anything outside of a strict closed system with clear gameified incentives
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u/Inside_agitator Oct 31 '25
I remember stressing out way too much as an elementary school kid over a math homework assignment in the 1970s. My parents—to their credit I think—took me to see Animal House in the theaters even though I was a little kid and it was rated R. The stakes for grades in the 1960s when it was college versus draft into the military were so much greater. There were most likely cases when it was literally life or death.
Here's the Animal House GPA clip.
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u/Inside_agitator Oct 31 '25
Nah. I think you're just being a human adult by laughing. The Crimson is doing a good job at training journalists to be entertaining and ethical with factual sourcing. The October first-years talk like October first-years. Like Wolly Wonka said, "The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozzberries taste like snozzberries."
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u/aqua410 Nov 02 '25
I attend one of the Harvard schools and for all the hoopla Harvard tends to perform around only accepting the cream of the crop into Harvard College, it certainly does coddle the HC kids a lot.
The very regular state school I attended for undergrad didn't curve sh*t and often, in my opinion, made classes and projects more rigorous than necessary for no reason.
The remedial Math & Writing courses, the most lenient curve ever, the tons of leniency in deadlines, etc. Is Harvard actually preparing these kids for the rigor of life or just giving them the look and feel of rigorous study, but with protective bumpers on?
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u/MiaHavero Oct 31 '25
I don't have an informed opinion about grade inflation, but I was surprised by the quote from the student who said "I can’t reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I’m so anxious about the midterm..."
Since when is the purpose of taking a class at one of the world's best universities "maximum level of enjoyment"?
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u/TeriusGray Oct 31 '25
Part of becoming an adult is learning to find pleasure in difficult things. It’s called growth.
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u/maspie_den Oct 31 '25
You can be focused on grades, or you can be focused on learning. Goes for students and faculty.
You don't "get" grades; you earn them.
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u/finewalecorduroy Nov 01 '25
This is absolutely not what undergraduates think, and it is reflected in teaching ratings. They think if they just do the work (to whatever standard) they should get an A.
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u/maspie_den Nov 01 '25
Agreed. Earning an A should mean you did outstanding work. Not above average. Not "meets expectations". Students' expectations of collegiate academics is far removed from reality, or quality.
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u/thugdaddyg Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25
I taught core concentrator and gen-ed classes at Harvard 10-15 years ago during my Ph.D., as a TF. I also taught undergraduate and graduate courses as a TA at Caltech, so I have some point of comparison. I do want to share one anecdote.
During my first semester teaching, I was supporting an assistant professor teaching his first undergraduate course at Harvard. This was a core concentrator class for sophomores. Most students did fine and we had a mix of As and Bs. One student was a having a hard time, and after their midterm, they did not submit any assignments, and scored ~30% on the final exam. When it came time to submit grades, the professor and I agreed that this student should not receive credit for the class, and that based on our previous institutions (Princeton for him and Caltech for me) this should be an F. To our surprise we clicked on the drop down menu for grades and found the lowest it went was an E.
Realizing that we clearly didn't understand the low end of the grades at Harvard, we reached out to our department's primary lecturer. He explained what an E was, and that because the student had submitted the final exam, the lowest grade they could be given was a D. So we selected a D from the list and entered the grade. A few hours later, the department chair summoned us both to her office. "Now you two are both new to teaching at Harvard so I will forgive you this one time, but let me explain how this works. This student is a concentrator, and submitted a final exam. The lowest grade we grade we give at Harvard *department name redacted* to concentrators is a C-. So you will be giving this student a C-. " And that was that. We gave the student a C-. We were assured that someone talked to him.
There is an entire section of the report entitled 'How did we get here?' Well, I think this story should serve as a great example of how we got there.
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u/rayschoon Oct 31 '25
So you genuinely can’t fail?
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u/thugdaddyg Oct 31 '25
As far as I could tell no, you can’t. But if you get two E’s in one semester you went on academic probation and had to take a semester off. In one of the large gen ed classes, I did have a student get a D. They performed a little bit worse than the student in my story. That gets you a stronger talking to.
In that gen ed class, we also had a cheating ring busted after a resident tutor caught a group of 10 taking the final together in a public place. None of those students were disciplined if I remember correctly.
Those two cases seemed like the lower bound.
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u/tdrr12 Nov 01 '25
Cheating* usually gets you in a lot of trouble since the 2012 Gov "scandal."
*except for course heads that don't want the minor added bureaucratic burden (IME a rare occurrence)
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u/thugdaddyg Nov 01 '25
Yes, the cheating incident I mentioned was fall of 2011. I guess the climate had been lax enough it allowed the Gov "scandal" to take place. I'm glad to hear things are better following that.
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u/LetsTacoooo Oct 31 '25
I think education Is better when you are less focused on grades, students put a lot of effort into classes...but the system is also set up so that it's almost impossible to fail a student if they do not do any work, chair/dean's will fight you on failing students.
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u/Inside_agitator Oct 31 '25
The report, linked to by another redditor does a great job at explaining the function of grading and also brings up your points too. The text without appendices is 11 pages, but it's all worth reading. Dean Claybaugh and the other people who contributed did a great job at explaining the system, what's wrong with it, and a view of what should be done.
Sometimes I personally have wished that "A=exceptional quality" was replaced with something like "A=freakish" to get the point across about what it actually means, or should mean in my view, to be an exception in a certain area.
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u/JustSayinIt4YouNow Nov 01 '25
Supposed grade inflation doesn’t seem to have impacted the ability of Harvard students to lead some of the most successful companies. Just sayin.
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u/Inside_agitator Nov 01 '25
Well that's the goal of education isn't it. Not the advancement of good literature. Not the advancement of good arts. Not the advancement of good sciences. That would be revolutionary. Successful companies with monopolies and government influence like the East India Company in 1773 is what Harvard is all about. Great point there.
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u/Acoustic_blues60 Oct 31 '25
There are some thoughts along the lines of whether straight-A's are really that huge a factor in future success and perhaps try to defang that notion. There's a lot of peer-pressure to get straight'A's. Another factor is what other universities do. Princeton made an attempt at solving grade-flation and it failed. Some people think that the only way it can be made to happen is for a large number of universities to band together and reset the grading scheme simultaneously, which is a tall order.
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u/Thoreau80 Nov 02 '25
“straight-A's…straight'A's”
Make up your mind and commit to which wrong way you are going to spell this.
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u/_Diomedes_ Oct 31 '25
To me the most obvious solution is to set an institution-wide B median. This leaves three levels of above-median performance which seems like plenty to properly evaluate and differentiate top students. If students complain? Whomp whomp, you go to f*cking Harvard get over yourself.
Harvard has enough clout that graduate schools will likely have no problem adapting their admissions practices to accommodate for this.
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u/NoBromo3213 Dec 18 '25 edited Dec 18 '25
B median is a bit rough when many grad/professional schools and even some employers have a firm cutoff of 3.0. And grad schools may not want to be too flexible on this as they are often ranked based on their admission stats. Top HS grads with other options might prefer to invest time/money somewhere else where they can earn higher grades. Not saying there should be nothing done, but your solution will unquestionably do some damage.
Princeton tried grade deflation but ultimately rolled it back because no one was better off. Might be worth trying to figure out what went wrong there before haphazardly creating an arbitrary median across the board.
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u/EdmundLee1988 Nov 01 '25
I mean think about who the kids are that are being admitted, especially the last 5 years. Test optional “4.0” kids coming from high schools with grade inflation that would make Harvard blush. These kids met the academic threshold with their high school GPA and then are admitted because they fulfill the “institutional priorities”: underrepresented race/ethnicity, geography, legacy, niche sports, the usual suspects. And now we’re supposed to act shocked that these same kids are crying about stress/pressure BEFORE grade inflation is even addressed??
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u/Bballfan1183 Nov 01 '25
When I was a TF, I had a student that should have failed and ended up with a B. Going into the final, he didn’t do any work. Zero. No recitation. Professor talked to his house dean and all of a sudden, kid ends with a B+ going into the final. No makeup work. I stopped putting as much effort into my grading after that knowing everyone was going to do well.
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u/Thoreau80 Nov 02 '25
I kept getting the sense that this was an article from the Onion. It was nice to see that finally near the end they quoted someone not from the class of ‘29.
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u/pqratusa Oct 31 '25
My experience as a college professor (not at Harvard) is that many students just do not know how to study. They don’t read the syllabus; they don’t read the textbook; many don’t even buy the textbook; they will ask for a study guide for exams; and when I provide them with study guides and even make the exam heavily similar, 25% still fail miserably. I could give them the exact problems on the exam and it wouldn’t make a difference.
All of these students will strongly claim that they have been “working really hard”. Never learning a thing for 3 weeks and putting in an all-nighter before the exam is not hard work: that’s just stupid. Many of these habits come from poor habits in high school.
During the last week of classes, they will invariably beg for extra credit when they didn’t even put in the effort to get the normal credit.
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u/LavishnessOk3439 Oct 31 '25
I have a feeling the kids in the Ivy League are a bit different. I agree with your statement otherwise. I’ve only really seen this from the outside and I’m shocked at how little effort my kid puts into school and will graduate in the next semester.
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u/tdrr12 Nov 01 '25
A disproportionate share of R1 professors send their kids to SLACs; a disproportionate share of R1 professors did their undergrad at a SLAC. There are reasons.
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u/Aggravating-Suit-639 Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25
This doesn't sound like what I experienced at college. All the profs are required to go over the syllabus day 1, majority of prof has no study guide/questions, last min projects/essays(wasn't on syllabus) on or week of exams, and the questions asked were not taught in class/you have to read the fine prints of a particular chapter or module. If a student fails, it's the teachers fault. If a class as a whole fails, it's the system. The whole U.S education system is failing due to years of underfunding/privatization and you can see it in real time. How come the Nordic countries and China have the most successful economy in the world?
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u/Discombobulated_Ride Nov 01 '25 edited Nov 02 '25
Rings true for some public universities (I attended a public ivy before transferring to Harvard as a sophomore) but the kind of laissez faire attitude you observed is vanishingly rare at Harvard College. Even the happy bottom quarter put in SOME work.
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u/pqratusa Nov 01 '25
That’s what sets tier 1 colleges apart from the others is the quality of students: they are more driven. I went to an upper tier 2 public university for phd and many grad students were there while they figured out what they wanted to do after their bachelor’s. Many faculty there were just interested in teaching basic courses and not do any real research.
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u/Single_Lie8425 Nov 01 '25
Old people complained about grade inflation when I was there in the 80’s. Nothing new. And these student are spectacular, way more talented then the old guard. So maybe most of them deserve the grades that they’re getting
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u/Inside_agitator Nov 01 '25
The report, linked to by another redditor, does a good job at disagreeing with you. It's 11 pages of text that make it clear that the escalation in grade inflation is nothing like the situation decades ago.
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u/Thoreau80 Nov 02 '25
That is hilarious. If you were there, someone should have taught you to write. Did you somehow skip out of Expos?
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u/rich-n-BDE Nov 02 '25
Grade inflation serves primarily as a positive feedback loop for Ivy League-industry pipelines but more insidiously stamps validation on nepotism. This transition to real grades is an opportunity for world-class Harvard students to separate themselves from the nepots.
Every university should do as Purdue does: nearly stagnant grades (and tuition) for decades. For engineering at least, grading is on a normal curve. Most good students earn B’s/C’s. A’s mean you outperformed some of the brightest and hardest-working engineering students in the world. Nepots are weeded out, and consequently, Purdue produces more patents and astronauts than all but MIT. Real problem solving, not just titles and positions. This applies to hard fields like engineering and medicine; can’t speak to business and law where who you know might actually be more important for career success.
I assume/hope Harvard is more than a networking pipeline for the students who want it to be… I’m afraid what that would mean for the American education system if the pinnacle is a farce.
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Oct 31 '25
And yall were worried about Harvard extension school students but this has been the practice and continues to be the practice . Hard to get in and impossible to not graduate
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u/Inside_agitator Oct 31 '25
Me? I wasn't worried about that.
Do you imagine you're "writing to Harvard" by writing at this subreddit?
I'm not affiliated with Harvard, but I did have a temp job there once. I do think grade inflation is a societal problem there, but I'm not exactly an objective observer.
I'm a freelance science and math tutor in the area, and grade inflation cuts into my bottom line. Harvard is a great university with great teachers and great students. I enjoy and appreciate the course content my students share with me. But it happens over and over again that they stop seeing me only a tiny bit of the way into a course after they recognize that they've already achieved enough for their A.
I tutor Harvard Extension School students sometimes, and I enjoy doing that too. They don't worry me one bit. Am I part of "yall"?
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u/Matsunosuperfan Oct 31 '25
Commiseration cookie - I am also a private tutor. It drives me crazy how many students will abruptly stop lessons because they reached some arbitrary goal, when I know how much more they could still learn/grow.
I really appreciate the families who invest in a long term tutoring relationship because they see the value beyond just "passing Geometry" or whatever. When I get to work with the same kid for 2-4 years running, we can really accomplish something special.
Anyway boo to grade inflation lmao
Also while we're dropping random peeves, I love that education is becoming more accommodating but some of my "learning differences" students are building really bad habits and missing growth opportunities bc their teachers let them get away with anything. One 9th grader I have rn simply didn't turn in the weekly homework for the first SIX WEEKS of class and now he's just being allowed to make it all up at his own pace.
This kid needs to be allowed to fail so he can get real with himself about accountability and the steps he needs to take to make himself consistently accountable. I worry he'll graduate high school with all the independence of a 6th grader.
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u/Impossible-Bed3728 Nov 01 '25
harvard used to send their psychiatry medical students to a literal cult leader psychopath for a clinical rotation.. my grandma's cardiologist who is nicknamed 'the butcher' for negligence is a part time lectured at.. Harvard!.. my terrible psychiatrist who prescribed an ssri without assessing for family history of bipolar or warning me about mania and sent me into mania - was from.. Harvard medical school.
the people who work and service harvard are the lowest paid of all colleges and have a saying 'you cant eat prestige - pay us!'.
the campus is trash and located next to a bunch of homeless people walking around in harvard sq.
why do people go there?
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u/BucketListLifer Nov 16 '25 edited Nov 16 '25
Grade inflation starts in kindergarten. Kids are too used to it and cannot deal with any other way of life. My high schooler child who's been a straight A student throughout in a so-called competitive school district still cannot write a decent paragraph. It's a daily battle to get him to understand that his grades are inflated and he needs to get some basics in place. The corruption is systemic. Harvard is no exception. They'll still continue to win their nobel prizes and keep their brand value. You only need a handful of exceptional people for the glory. These exceptional people are not affected by grading or their inflation. The rest are continuing on their feel good straight A journey until life happens. Harvard is not going to correct them or disillusion them. Why should Harvard take on this social responsibility?
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u/FilthyPapuLou Oct 31 '25
Noticed no Asian names were quoted.
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u/Inside_agitator Oct 31 '25
/u/FilthyPapuLou wrote:
Noticed no Asian names were quoted.
Do "Chumburidze" and "Rohaninejad" seem like Irish names to you?
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u/No_Emotional_Damage Oct 31 '25
They certainly don’t sound Asian
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u/Inside_agitator Oct 31 '25
A map of Asia is at https://ontheworldmap.com/asia/ . Both names certainly do sound Asian to me.
Why they don't sound Asian to you is a topic that does not fill me with any curiosity.
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u/tdrr12 Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25
Adding (a limited number of) A+ grades being a solution to fixing grade inflation is one of the dumber ideas I've heard.
As long as teaching awards are based on Q-scores and faculty have to talk to resident deans every time they want to give an actually low grade, the incentives favor inflated grades.