The rating for last year dropped to 3.7 overall, with only 65 percent offering an unconditional recommendation, and 18 percent claiming that “unfair grading policies” were a weakness of the course, something not mentioned in the previous CUE evaluation.
Students went so far as to create a Geocities website entitled “IHateB29,” in which students could post complaints about unfair grading.
But according to the B-29 teaching staff, nothing special was done last year to combat grade inflation.
“If you look at B-29 grades, they haven’t changed in 10 years,” said head teaching fellow Martin N. Muller.
Grades in the course may have been lower than those in other science Cores, but he said it has always been that way.
“We have just never been guilty of grade inflation,” he said.
Professor of Psychology Marc D. Hauser, one of the course’s two instructors, called student claims that grading had become harsher “utter rumors” and said the only changes in the course were minor structural adjustments.
He also denied that grading changed because he was on the Faculty committee that oversaw a review of grading policies.
“At the beginning of the year speculation brewed in the freshman dorms that, because I’m on the Faculty Council, I was going to [lower grades],” Hauser said.
He said the brouhaha over grade inflation influenced student perceptions of the course and its grading policy.
“People really got into this mentality of griping,” he said. “I’m not out to get them. It’s a really fun course.”
Hauser and Wolcowitz said that the initial signs that grades fell last year need to be examined more closely before any conclusions can be drawn.
“I have seen only a first pass summary statistic on grades from last year,” Wolcowitz wrote in an e-mail. “We are in the process of gathering a more complete analysis of grades for last year so that we can look at the pattern over time and across fields.”
Hauser said the dip in undergraduate grades is a blip, and that the Faculty needs to “see if it’s a meaningful blip or in fact irrelevant.”
—Staff writer Margaretta E. Homsey can be reached at homsey@fas.harvard.edu.