Harvard may have a softer grading system designed to inflate grades and some officials may have acknowledged it, but they are still allowed to do so if they want, the Crimson reported.
Grade inflation most often occurs when a professor gives less work to his/her class and grants higher grades. At Tuesday's Faculty of Arts and Sciences meeting, one administrator confirmed the most common letter grade at Harvard is an A and the median is an A-.
Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris confirmed what many believed to be true about the Ivy League school in answering a question from a meeting attendee.
"A little bird has told me that the most frequently given grade at Harvard College right now is an A-," Harvey C. Mansfield said during the meeting's question period. "If this is true or nearly true, it represents a failure on the part of this faculty and its leadership to maintain our academic standards."
Mansfield is implicating that Harvard administrators know grade inflation takes place and allow it to happen.
In an interview two years ago with the Washington Post, Harvard president Larry Summers said the vast majority of students who graduate from the school do so with honors.
"Ninety percent of Harvard graduates graduated with honors when I started," Summers said at the time. "The most unique honor you could graduate with was none."
Grade inflation has seemingly correlated with a declining rate in how much time students devote to studying. Inflation would give students better grades, but require them to do less work and also produces positive evaluations for the professor. Summers said it was a troubling trend because, especially in smaller classes, professors have a hard time giving bad grades to a student they have gotten to know.
"Nobody in a seminar ever gets a C," Summers said. "It's very much the mood these days that we need to teach people ethics... I think of grade inflation as a kind of ethical issue."
According to the Boston Globe, some students at Harvard disagreed with Mansfield's comments. Their reactions seem to suggest that the high volume of A-letter grades are more related to hard work than inflation.
"I just find that hard to believe, because it's pretty hard to get an A in any class," said Connor Mangan, 20, a junior neurobiology major.
Dhruv Goyal, 19, an economics major, said Harvard only accepts the kind of students who, in high school, are used to getting the highest grades.
"Professors have the ability and right to grade their classes in any way," Goyal said. "If you talk about the grades at Harvard, the first thing that comes to mind is its implications on mental health. Harvard students come in as overachievers in high school and want to replicate that success."