"The student is the proverbial donkey," the section man said. "But Harvard offers too much carrot, and not enough stick."

Who, then, has been responsible for fattening the carrot and shortening the stick?

Mansfield maintains that "the social sciences generally have not been at the rear of the movement toward grade inflation."

He cites an inevitable "bad conscience" among students responsible for pressuring their professors into giving them "better grades than they deserve by making the argument that they need them to get into graduate school."

"There is, of course, apart from this, an ideology which I guess comes from the left, which you could hear a lot of a few years ago during the student movement, that competition is a bad thing, and that a 'new society' must be constructed which would be quite utterly lacking in competition," Mansfield says. "And the symbol of competition, of course, is the grade."

Among the causes of grade inflation cited by students and faculty members over the past few years are the increased availability of pass-fail fourth-course options, more lenient course grading policies, and, according to Mansfield, "the increased publicizing and patronizing of easy graders."

"I think a publication like The Crimson Confidential Guide would do a much greater public service if it publicized easy graders less, and, more importantly, didn't behave as if it were the thing for a professor to be popular," he says.

Dean K. Whitla, director of the Office of Instructional Research and Evaluation, says that at Harvard in recent years, instructors have tended to grade students in small courses--tutorials, for example--higher than those in average-sized or larger courses.

Yet a more basic reason for an increase in the quality of grades at Harvard and elsewhere is often overlooked. With the waning of campus political activism, many students have simply been working harder. Teaching methods have improved (we are told); course requirements have been relaxed. The increasingly pre-professional orientation on college campuses has been responsible for an increasing focus on course work and achieving high grades.

"Why shouldn't students who are now working themselves sick instead of occupying the dean's office be rewarded with higher grades?" asks one member of the Harvard faculty.

And despite the ongoing dialogue on grade inflation, many are convinced that the trend is grader is, if anything, in the other direction.

Students in many Harvard science courses are often shocked to find that their grades are much lower than "large-scale grade inflation" would have indicated. Chemistry 20a's first semester median grade was a C+. In Natural Sciences 3, the lowest-level chemistry course at Harvard, students were promised "a substantial percentage of grades above B+," What many failed to anticipate was the equally substantial percentage of grades below B+.

As Jonathan Williams '78, who plans to concentrate in Psychology, puts it, "I don't think we have any grade inflation at all. If anything, we have deflation--I haven't seen anything close to an A yet."

In fact, Yale recorded a reversal of sorts in its grade inflation this fall--only 36 per cent of grades were "A"s, down 4.5 per cent from last spring's all-time high of 40.5 per cent.

And Whitla optimistically adds, "A Harvard "B+" is just as good as it ever was."