What is a Grade?

I read that the faculty at Harvard is considering a 20% cap on A’s in most classes as a way to remedy the rampant grade inflation at the institution. I don’t know how I feel about such a cap, but I am certain it will do nothing to improve the learning experience at Harvard. It will not even do much to improve grading there, because schools like Harvard, by virtue of the kinds of institutions they are, cannot honestly grade their students.

We are likely to describe the phenomenon of grade inflation as a matter of declining standards. We are likely to conclude that more students receiving A’s reflects less being asked of the students, and less achieved. In this sense, we are conceiving of coursework as a matter of mastery, of skills and content to be absorbed, with the grade serving as a gauge of the degree of absorption.

Well enough, I suppose, in many contexts, but in many others, clearly insufficient. When a teacher evaluates a student’s writing or speaking, or a student’s ability to draw to likeness, he is passing judgment on the student’s inherent talents, inclinations, even personality. Evaluations in such contexts are a question of proficiency, and the grade is a measure of how closely the student approximates standards of excellence in that field. In assigning a grade, the teacher is saying something about the capacity of the student to work fruitfully in that field – or not.

Grading in this sense is fundamentally a matter of honesty and discernment. The teacher is obligated to deliver a candid verdict on the level of merit displayed by the student’s work. The student, in turn, has a duty to acknowledge the legitimacy of that verdict, and apply it to his own continuing development. The true student knows that he is at school to “know himself,” and the grade is a source of insight to him about where his abilities lie, however dismaying or disappointing that insight might be to him.

Obviously, none of this is permitted in a typical modern school, let alone a puffed-up nursery school like Harvard. The whole ethos of these institutions is to protect the emotional placidity of their students at all costs, by shielding them from anything that resembles a critical gaze. Self-care, and not self-knowledge, is their aim. The idea that schools like this are suddenly going to abandon their therapeutic commitments is not believable.

Nor would the professors and teachers know what to do with themselves if they did so. No instructor in a modern school would ever admit that a central part of his job is passing judgment on children – though in the same breath he will acknowledge that he routinely “evaluates” and “assesses” those same children. More to the point, the whole modern grading regime is designed to maintain the charade that teachers are not agents of judgement, that the numerically precise grade affixed to the top of every last quiz, essay, and lab report demonstrates the “objective” criteria of evaluation in place, to the exclusion of the teacher’s “subjective” judgement.

This charade is necessitated by the much more systematic pretext of the modern school to support the egalitarian prejudices of modern mass society. By representing the process of grading as a matter of gauging mastery of skills and content, schools can uphold the pretext that any student can theoretically come to any field of study with equal chances of success. That this approach to grading requires teachers to ignore the most screamingly obvious fact they discover upon entering the classroom – namely, that the children they teach come to their studies with vast disparities in talent, inclination, and personality – is the sacrifice that must be made to flatter the prejudices of modern mass society.

So no, Harvard is not going to fix its grading problem because, as I noted, grading is fundamentally a matter of honesty, and Harvard and its kin are places that can no longer be honest with themselves or with their students. To be so would be to make them something other than the bastions of progressive delusion they are now instituted to be.