Grade Inflation at Harvard
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We didn't do GPA's in England, but it's no secret that I fucked up royally with my undergraduate degree in maths and physics.
EE was something I kind of fell into accidentally, although I think it would be rather flattering to refer to what I do as actual electrical engineering.
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I guess the game played by colleges is to place their undergrads in good grad schools.
I went to a Canadian engineering school - they couldn't care less about your GPA. In fact, some of the old school guys wanted to weed out the weak ones early and get them to switch majors. Some of our classes had a 50-55% average.
I did a double undergrad program. My GPA in the engineering part was 3-3.5 (Canadian scale doesn't translate). Then in Econ it was an easy 4.0+ compared to the engineering.
Very glad I did the econ - else I wouldn't have gotten into the grad school I wanted to, and probably wouldn't have gone.
@xenon said in Grade Inflation at Harvard:
Very glad I did the econ - else I wouldn't have gotten into the grad school I wanted to, and probably wouldn't have gone.
I did the same in undergrad. My first major had the lowest grade averages, the lowest professor ratings and several of those professors made it known they had contempt for their students.
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https://www.harvardmagazine.com/university-news/harvard-faculty-approve-a-cap-on-a-grades
PROFESSORS IN the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) have approved a proposal to cap the number of A’s awarded to Harvard College students, part of a broad proposal aimed at reducing grade inflation.
Starting in the fall of 2027, courses will limit A grades to 20 percent of enrollment, plus an additional four A’s per class. Voting was conducted by email over the past week, and the results were announced on Wednesday morning. Faculty members voted 458 to 201 to approve the grading cap, one of three provisions that were voted on separately and the central pillar of the proposed reforms.
Decisions on the other two provisions were split. By a vote of 498 to 157, faculty members approved a plan to calculate internal College honors and prizes using students’ average percentile rank instead of grade-point average. But they voted down a provision that would have allowed instructors to award a “satisfactory-plus” grade to courses that opt out of the grading cap; the vote tally was 292 for the provision versus 364 against. Those courses that opt out will be graded as “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” and will not count toward the average percentile rank.
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Harvard’s overabundance of A’s has become an increasingly acute issue in recent years and has been a subject of formal faculty debate since 2023. An FAS report released last October found that solid A’s comprised 60 percent of all undergraduate letter grades in 2025, up from just 24 percent in 2005.
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The approved provisions will be implemented in the 2027-28 school year. After three years, the Office of Undergraduate Education will present a review of the new policy to the faculty, although any changes to the policy would have to be done through the regular faculty legislative process.
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