Harvard has been in the news a lot lately. First there was the Cornel West Debacle, then Henry Louis Gates published what he believes is the first novel by a black woman, then there was the flap about Harvard's new and improved sexual misconduct policy (apparently its commitment to due process, accountability, and the U.S. Constitution offends certain campus constituents), and now there is the uproar over an Islamic student's commencement address, which was originally entitled "American Jihad" (after a petition, a death threat, national news coverage, extended ad hominem attack, and extensive blogosphere coverage, the student has changed the talk's title to "Of Faith and Citizenship: My American Jihad--I guess the logic here is that people who want to censor or kill you for touting the term won't mind a bit if it just comes later in the title).

Amid all the uproar, there has been another little development up at Cambridge, one that has received surprisingly little coverage and virtually no criticism: last month, Harvard voted to change its grading policies in order to curb grade inflation.

The pressure to do something about the grading system at Harvard began last October, when the Boston Globe reported that 91% of Harvard's 2001 graduates received honors. That's not a typo--I really did type 91%. (Point of comparison: at Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth, 40-50% of seniors graduate with honors.) The Globe ran a two-part series on grading at Harvard, which culminated in national embarrassment, pressure to do something about the problem, task forces and symposia, and, last month, approval of the great new policy that will restore Harvard to evaluative respectability. The only problem is that the new policy is a joke.

What are the terms of this new policy?

First, Harvard will move from its idiosyncratic 15 point scale to the standard 4 point grading scale. Under the old system, there was a disproportionate gap between the A- and the B+. Under that system, half of all undergraduate grades last year were an A or an A-. Under the new system, the distance between an A- and a B+ will be the same as that between any other two grades. The theory is that the reason there were so many A's under the old system was that professors were reluctant to give B's and B+'s when those marks would unduly burden the grade point averages of students. The hope is that the switch to a standard four point system will encourage faculty to start handing out the B+'s. Thus will Harvard restore its grading system to respectability.

Second, it is decreed that henceforth, no more than 60% of a graduating class can receive honors. The theory is that capping the number of honors recipients will restore honor to graduating with honors.

Some observations:

• Replacing a few inflated A-'s with a few swollen B+'s will not end, or even really address, grade inflation at Harvard. There is no reason, after all, to suppose that a B+ will be any more accurate than the A- it replaces. Grade inflation at Harvard is not a problem of too many B students getting A's, but of pretty much every sort of student getting A's. Giving the weakest A students the occasional B+ will not restore credibility to the A; it will simply inflate the B. Needless to say, all this emphasis on reviving the B speaks quite plainly to the fact that the C, the D, and the F are not in use and are not about to get resurrected.
• Changing the grading scale does nothing to address the reasons why, in recent years, grades have been climbing further and further up that scale. Evening out the grading scale does nothing to diminish students' sense of entitlement (parents do pay well for their kids' scarlet A's). Nor does it challenge professors to tighten up their lax standards (this is dangerous ground, as evidenced by Cornel West's prolonged, hostile reaction to Lawrence Summers' suggestion that he stop handing out easy A's).
• Awarding honors to 60% of graduate seniors reproduces, albeit on a smaller scale, the problem of awarding it to 90% of graduating seniors: when more than half of the graduating class gets honors, getting honors is not an achievement, but a norm. When more than half of the graduating class gets honors, the real achievement is not getting honors. Arguably, the 60% honors cap does more to diminish the accomplishment of those who do not get honors, than it does to distinguish those who do.

In other words, Harvard's new grading policy substitutes cosmetic changes for substantive ones. It reads more like sleight of hand than like a serious attempt to address Harvard's (and higher education's) increasing unwillingness--or inability--to judge student work firmly and fairly.

In a future blog, I'll offer some thoughts on why the new grading policy is so toothless. Stay tuned!