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 early
half of all grades at Harvard University last year were A's and
A-minuses, we learned last week. America's most venerable institution
of higher education is also the national capital of grade inflation.
If you attend small humanities classes at Harvard, your chances
of coming away with an A or A-minus are nearly two in three. Ninety-one
percent of Harvard students graduated with honors (summa, magna
or cum laude) this June. At Yale it was only 51 percent, and at
Princeton only 44. All this, according to a report issued last week
by the university itself. (Herself? I've never been clear about
the gender of the noun "university" — though I am
clear that if I say "gender" instead of "sex"
when speaking of human beings, I shall be carpet-bombed with e-mails
from angry conservatives accusing me of selling out to the language
police.)
Whenever this
topic comes to my attention, I find myself thinking of wooden mushrooms.
By way of explaining this, permit me to take you on a wee trip down
Derb Memory Lane.
I attended
University College, London, the oldest-established, and in several
major disciplines the most prestigious, of London University's 50-odd
colleges. U.C.L. was founded in 1826, at a time when the Anglican
church was felt to have too much of a stranglehold on higher education
in England — which is to say, on Oxford and Cambridge, the
only English universities then existing. The anti-Anglican spirit
of the founding was captured in a phrase of the time: U.C.L., it
was said, was an establishment for "Jews and Welshmen".
Its most notable founder was in fact the great eccentric and Utilitarian
philosopher Jeremy Bentham, whose preserved head was, and still
is, in accordance with the terms of his will, kept in a box over
one of the interior doors.
I went to U.C.L.
to study mathematics, with which I have been having a sort of unrequited
love affair on and off since childhood. I mean, I love math, but
it doesn't love me — I am not actually much good at it. U.C.L.
had a stiff math program. There was no nonsense about majors or
minors: We did three years of undiluted math. "Elective"
meant that in the third year you were permitted to choose whether
you wanted to take extra courses in Functional Analysis, Celestial
Mechanics, Mathematical Logic, or Algebraic Topology. The only other
thing we were permitted, in fact required, to study was German,
the second language of math. (Though Germans will tell you it's
the first. At enrollment a few of us smugly announced that we had
already learned German at school, and had exam passes to prove it.
Unimpressed, the department said it would be unfair if our classmates
had to study for a language requirement but we didn't, and shipped
us off to a Friday-afternoon Russian-for-dummies class, Russian
being the third language of math. The class was held at the nearby
School of Slavonic and East European Studies, where I briefly dated
the entire third-year Hungarian department. Nice girl.)
So there we
were, 40-odd students, thinning out to 30-odd by course end, being
flogged through higher mathematics by some quite-distinguished personalities
— and, of course, some much less-distinguished research assistants
on starvation pay. The grading system was mathematically elegant
in its simplicity. At the end of the second year you took an exam.
At the end of the third year you took another exam. Based on these
two exams, you were awarded a degree. The classes of degree awarded
were as follows: first, upper second, lower second, third and "general."
(The "general" meant that you had survived the three years
without dropping out, shown up at the examination hall, and written
your name on the exam paper.) In my graduating class of 30-odd,
there were only three firsts, every one an outstanding mathematician.
One of them was well known for never taking notes. I used to watch
him in lectures. Most of the time he seemed to be looking out the
window. At other times, I thought he was sleeping. One of the others
was close to being mad. He used to eat raw onions — just bite
into one, as if it were an apple. He had some bizarre theory about
the nutritive powers of onions.
I myself got
a third. Partly this was just not being very good at math, but I
can't pretend that was the whole story. I know, looking back, that
if I had truly busted my hump, I could have got a second for sure,
perhaps an upper second. The main thing that got in the way was
those wooden mushrooms. See, the student-union lounge at U.C.L.
had games tables. One of them was a pool-type game in which, instead
of having pockets in the corners of the table, there were ball-sized
holes actually in the surface of the table itself. Each of the high-scoring
holes was guarded by a wooden mushroom that stood in front of it.
The only way to get a ball into one of these holes was to play it
off the back and side cushions. If you did this, you got the big
points. If you knocked down a mushroom you got no points, and lost
your break score. If you knocked down the red mushroom —
which, of course, guarded the highest-value hole — you lost
your entire game score.
For some reason
this stupid game took a grip on me in my third year. With a classmate,
another ne'er-do-well character like myself, I played the mushroom
game all day and every day. I had done quite well in my second-year
exam, the equivalent of a borderline upper-second, but my third
year was wiped out by that damn game. When, that June, I sat down
in the exam hall and opened the final paper, I was dismayed to find
that it contained no questions at all about wooden mushrooms, only
a lot of incomprehensible stuff about Banach spaces, homology functors,
and stress-energy tensors. (Huckleberry Finn, my playing companion,
did even worse than me, and ended up with a "general"
degree. Shrugging it off with fine aplomb, he became a folk singer.)
Apart from
the three guys who got firsts and a couple who were awarded the
despised "general," the class was pretty evenly divided
between seconds and thirds, with half a dozen upper seconds. There
were no surprises. We'd all been going to class together for three
years and knew each other's abilities pretty well. The guys who
got firsts deserved them. I deserved my third, and my pal deserved
his "general." I didn't hear anyone complaining.
I realize,
of course, that this experience can't be translated to Harvard.
Too many things are different. Our system — 40 of us all together
in nearly all our classes for three years — is not followed
at American colleges (nor at U.C.L. either, nowadays, I'm told).
My education was state-funded, while the parents of Harvard students
are paying truckloads of money for their kids to attend the place,
and will be angry if there is no visible return on their investment.
Mathematics is a subject in which it is easy to discern who is,
and who isn't, much good. You set a problem; Freddy First solves
it by an elegant and brilliant method even you yourself hadn't thought
of; Suzie Second, after a couple of false starts, solves it just
as you intended it to be solved; Theodore Third gets halfway to
a solution after five pages of floundering, then gives up. Excellence
is much harder to judge in less crunchy disciplines, I understand
that.
And there are
all those other pressures, of course. Note that I have been referring
to our firsts as "guys." We did have a sprinkling of girls,
about five as I recall, but none got a first. There have
been some fine women mathematicians — we had one on the faculty
— but they are awfully rare. To say this, or even just to declare
it implicitly by the way you give grades, is of course rank heresy
in the politically correct world of today's academy, and is a sure
path to a major lawsuit and a world of hurt. Better just to give
the whole top half of the class an A grade. A fortiori with
race: Our class had two Chinese, an Indian and a Burmese, but no
blacks at all. If a situation like that occurred at Harvard in 2001,
it would force the resignation of the school's entire administration,
a clamorous national scandal, and cases before the Supreme Court.*
There is another
factor, though. Last week's report from Harvard notes that the higher
grades may also be deserved, as students work harder and
are better prepared. When I read that I laughed — talk about
excuses! On reflection, though, I think I see their point. My occasional
contacts with people out of good American schools the past few years
suggest to me that they do indeed work very hard, much harder than
I and my classmates were expected to. Even allowing for the distortions
of "affirmative action," the ethos of American higher
education is now firmly, in fact intensively, meritocratic. The
old idea of a university was that it should be, as well as a center
of scholarship, an agreeable place for well-heeled young men to
fritter away three or four years under modest supervision, emerging
with the famous "gentleman's C." This notion survived
into the 1970s, with enough potency to infect even working-class
kids like myself and my pal, who should have had more sense. It
seems to me that notion is now perfectly dead. I can well imagine
that older faculty members, impressed with the diligence of their
students by comparison with what they remember of their own time
at college (supposing my impressions are correct), might be inclined
to award up.
You could argue
that, even if this is true, it doesn't justify giving A grades to
half your students — that grading should give students some
idea of how they rank among their peers, not how they compare with
their fathers' generation. That sounds right to me. Attempts to
measure educational attainment, or any other kind of mental ability,
across generations turn up some very knotty conundrums, like the
famous
Flynn Effect. On a scholarly e-mail list I belong to there is
a discussion in full flow right now about whether people learn more
at school today than they did in the past. Accredited experts —
people who are paid a salary to make intensive studies of these
things — disagree quite bitterly about the answer.
The Derbyshire
system for college grading, which I believe would deliver as much
as can reasonably be expected of a grading system, would be:
 Rank
a student among his classmates, not according to some abstract or
historic standard.
If
it can be fairly done (in higher education, I don't think it very
often can), give a supplementary rank showing how the student places
among students of the same subject nationwide.
Identify
the five percent or so of truly brilliant students.
Identify
the five percent or so of slackers and no-hopers.
Find
some fair and sensible way to put the other 90 percent into three
or four categories by ability and effort: upper second, lower second,
third; or A minus, B plus, B, B minus.
Such a straightforward
system would, of course, be revolutionary, and very dangerous, in
the modern academy.
* The American Mathematical Society
reported in February that "U.S. new doctoral recipients
1999-2000" in the mathematical sciences break down as: 14 black
males, 803 other males, 6 black females, 296 other females. Just
under half — 537 out of 1,119 — of these math Ph.D.s were
U.S. citizens. (Footnote to the footnote: I originally wrote that
sentence as "Just over half…" and only noticed my
mistake a nanosecond before hitting the "send" button
to dispatch this piece to the noble webmaster. No wonder I got a
third.)
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