“The administration suggests that a student who does not receive accurate (but inflated) grades cannot grow intellectually,” Margolin writes. “Lower grading without better discussion of a student’s work will not achieve the aforementioned goal of better education.”

DEFLATING HOPES

As the first class to experience all the effects of the grading controversy graduates, the debate surrounding grade inflation has all but died down, and Faculty discussion of methods to rein in escalating percentages of ‘A’ grades has been repeatedly postponed.

And even at the height of the controversy four years ago, no formal measures were instituted.

During an Adams House study break last fall, Summers jokingly suggested instituting A-pluses and A-plus-pluses as a way to ameliorate a system where two grades—‘A’ and ‘A-minus’—measure the top half of students and seven grades measure the bottom half.

But though Summers still holds to his view that grade inflation needs to be addressed, he also acknowledges that a fair capping or curving scheme may not exist.

“I do think the compression is a problem, and the fact that we have so many more levels of distinction within the lowest quarter of students than we do within the top half of students is something that is problematic,” says Summers. “On the other hand, since courses differ in their degree of difficulty, in what they expect of students, in the quality of students who take them—I think it’s very difficult.”

But there is one undisputed difference between two realms of academia. The mean grade for humanities courses is higher than that in the natural sciences, according to O’Keefe. And with the new honors GPA cutoff applying across the board, science concentrators may be at a disadvantage when Latin honors are handed out.

“I guess that’s something that we haven’t really discussed,” says Robert A. Lue, executive director of undergraduate education in Molecular and Cellular Biology. “If we pursue the matter of a strict GPA cap, there may have to be some sort of normalization across the different fields or concentrations in terms of fairness. We’re going to have to look at that—science concentrators can be at a disadvantage if it’s strictly numerical and nothing else.”

Whether humanities concentrators have the upper hand, only the numbers for this year’s graduating class will tell.

“[It] is a completely legitimate concern if, A, the humanities concentrators have higher grades and B, have higher grades but aren’t doing as much quality work,” former Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 says. But he questions whether fighting grade inflation is even a worthy cause. After all, the issue is nothing new.

“It took exactly eight years between when letter grades were [first] used at Harvard and the first time the Faculty bemoaned that the standards had slipped,” Lewis says. “Every decade between the 1890s and the current decade, I have found reports of the Faculty or the president in which one or the other has said, either that it is a terrible thing that grades were rising or that it was wonderful thing that grades were rising because it proved that the students were getting smarter.”

And some suggest that discussion of evaluation practices is a distraction from the crucial questions concerning the quality of the Harvard undergraduate education.

At the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), a pre-collegiate organization that keeps tabs on issues that affect top-tier schools to which many prep schools send their students, grade inflation at the university level is not a primary concern.

“If the purpose is to create winners and losers—isn’t it possible that Harvard undergrads do exceptional work?” says NAIS President Patrick F. Bassett. “It’s hard to measure: are the students smarter? The entire controversy begs a larger question, is the quality of teaching excellent? Is the quality of student scholarship [better]? What’s frankly important is, ‘What’s the purpose of the education itself?’”

And Faculty dissenters, such as Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies Diana L. Eck, may prove to be roadblocks in any campus-wide move to keep ‘A’ grades in check. Eck told The Crimson last spring that she gave nearly half of her fall religion tutorial students ‘A’s because they deserved them.

In 2003, Baird Professor of History Mark A. Kishlansky told The Crimson that professors aren’t used to a framework where grades are much lower. “I don’t see how they could much go down,” he said. “We are not in the business of giving ‘C’s.”

­—Staff writer Robin M. Peguero can be reached at peguero@fas.harvard.edu.