Harvard students fear tougher grading: 'I skipped classes and sobbed in bed'
- Joanne Jacobs
- Nov 1
- 2 min read
A Harvard report on grade inflation was "soul-crushing," one student told Crimson reporters Wyeth Renwick and Nirja J. Trivedi. “The whole entire day, I was crying,” Sophie Chumburidze ’29 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.”
Harvard undergrads expect A's for excellent, good and mediocre work, wrote Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education, in the report. More than 60 percent of grades are A's, up from 25 percent 20 years ago.
Students say they're working as many hours as ever, but professors disagree.
Some professors in humanities and social sciences said "they’ve had to trim some readings and drop others entirely, that they’ve had to switch from novels to short stories, and that it’s difficult to keep assigning reading in the face of increasing student complaints,” she wrote.
Harvard told professors to lower their standards, the dean admits. “For the past decade or so, the College has been exhorting faculty to remember that some students arrive less prepared for college than others,” she wrote. “Unsure how best to support their students, many have simply become more lenient.”
Instructors shifted from "providing critical feedback to emotional support," one professor said.
The call to “re-center academics” and raise grading standards will raise stress, students told the Crimson. “I killed myself all throughout high school to try and get into this school," said Kayta A. Aronson ’29. I was looking forward to being fulfilled by my studies now, rather than being killed by them.”
I got a B on my final paper, which determined my grade, in a literature course in my first quarter at Stanford. I was a very good student in high school, especially in English. I was shocked. When I read the professor's comments, I said to myself: The standards are higher in college. You'll have to do better. There was no soul-crushing and no crying involved.
A recent article shows that Harvard (annual tuition of 55K) is giving out way too many A's which is wrecking the overall value of conferred degrees...
Many professors are starting to worry at that institution...
At West Point, the upperclassmen warned us plebes that our grades on our first papers in freshman comp class would probably not be what we were used to in high school. "It'll probably be an F, but don't worry, so will everyone else's and you'll do better later on." I was never so happy to get a C+ in my entire life--and that was not what I was used to in high school!
Me too, Joanne! I had a high-enough SAT score that Gettysburg College placed me (and one other student) in a writing course for upper-division English majors. We used a book y Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, which was a revelation. It switched me onto a permanently higher track of what I should expect of myself, to my great future benefit. I thought my final grade, B+, was both fair and well-earned, and I was so impressed by the professor – Thank you, Dr. Pickering! – that I switched into his section for the second semester of the required freshman core curriculum (Columbia U.-style Contemporary Civilization).
– Linda Seebach, Gettysburg, '60