Regardless of the cause, grade inflation does pose certain challenges to faculty and students.

"Grade inflation is immoral," says Robinson Professor of Music Robert Levine. "It has a pretentious effect on students, for the outside world now devalues transcripts."

In fact, many faculty members say grade inflation has arisen because the faculty is falling short of its responsibility to offer students the feedback they deserve.

"The problem arises not from grade inflation but from not enough consideration being given in distinguishing the very good from the bad Jones says.

"It does seem to me that Harvard has a duty by its students [to give them] the advice toward improvement they deserve," he adds.

The CUE committee has also considered, more subtle aspects of grade inflation.

The committee reports that humanities and social sciences on the whole have experienced more inflation than the natural sciences, making it easier to get good grades in some concentrations than in others.

"If a student does equally good work in math and in fine arts, and gets a B+ in the former and an A- in the latter and therefore concludes that she is a better fine artist than mathematician--when all she is observing is the different evaluative conventions between fields--that is a matter of considerable concern to me," Lewis says.

Years of Research

The report that the CUE will send to the faculty early this week is the result of more than a year of research and debate.

The issue first came before the CUE where three professors suggested that Harvard consider transcript amplification.

But Buell says, "The CUE was uncomfortable with transcript amplification and wanted to give the wider issue of grading policy full hearing."

Last spring and this fall, the CUE surveyed department chairs on their opinion on grade inflation. A number of possible solutions to grade inflation were suggested to the chairs, including restricting the number of grades given in a course, doing nothing and increasing the number of grades available to instructors.

"We...considered specifying what normal grades should be--allocating or restricting, for instance, the number of A's," Feldman says.

"The general view from the survey was yes [grade-inflation is a problem] but that was not an unanimous view," Buell says.