This term I decided to try an experiment in the grading of my course at Harvard. I am giving each student two grades: one for the Registrar and the other in private from the course assistants and me. The official grades will track Harvard's inflated distribution, in which one-fourth of the grades are now straight As, and another fourth A-. Our private grades will be more realistic and less flattering. They will give useful information to students as to how well they did and where they stand in relation to others.

A long-time critic of grade inflation, I have seen my grades over the years gradually dragged higher, while still trailing the rising average. I could not ignore the pressure of student expectations created and maintained by other faculty, but I did not want to succumb to it. The two-grade device is a way to show my contempt for the present system while not punishing students who take my course. 

If this is surrender to grade inflation, it is an ironic surrender. My intent was to get attention (a success) and to provoke some new thinking (who knows?). The grades now given at Harvard and at many other universities deserve to elicit rebuke. The rest of American education-in elementary and high schools-is concerned about undemanding standards. In the past presidential race, both candidates spoke frequently of the need to raise such standards. But at Harvard, the supposed pinnacle of American education, we are quite satisfied with the praise we bestow with our outlandish grades. We even think they reflect well on us-they show how popular we are with bright students-and so we are quite satisfied with ourselves, too.

In a healthy university it would not be necessary to say what is wrong with grade inflation. But once the evil becomes routine, it is no longer seen for what it is. So the sense that should be instinctive has to be made explicit.

Grade inflation compresses all grades at the top, thus making it difficult to discriminate the few best from the very good, the very good from the good, the good from the mediocre. Surely a teacher wants to mark the few best students with a grade that distinguishes them from all the rest in the top quarter, but at Harvard that's not possible. Some say that all you have to do to interpret inflated grades is to recalibrate them in your mind so that a B+ equals a C, and so forth. But compression at the top does not permit the gradation that you need to grade accurately.

Moreover, a C is an average grade, whereas a B+ is next to the top. Mere recalibration does not address the problem, which is the inflation of grades beyond what students deserve. We are flattering our students as if we were eager to get their good opinion. There is something inappropriate-almost sick-in the spectacle of mature adults showering young people with unbelievable praise. That our students are promising makes it worse, for promise made complacent is easily spoilt.