Harvard still doesn't get it. According to The New York Times, Harvard faculty voted to change its grading system so that fewer students will get A's and graduate with honors.
 At a closed meeting, the faculty voted in favor of two sweeping changes. First, Harvard will switch from an idiosyncratic 15-point grading scale to the more conventional scale in which a 4.0 is an A and a zero is an F. The change will narrow the difference between an A-minus and a B-plus, which the faculty hopes will make a B more palatable. Second, Harvard will limit the number of students allowed to graduate with honors to 60 percent of a class. Nearly 90 percent of the students in Harvard's class of 2001 graduated with some form of honors. 
Great. They're trying to make a B more "palatable." Not more meaningful, but more palatable. The trouble with grades is that they don't mean anything. What does a B mean? It means something different to every single faculty member at Harvard, and it means something different to every single student at Harvard, and it will mean something different to every single person who ever looks at a student's transcript. What Harvard doesn't get (or at least doesn't acknowledge), is that grades have simply become the easiest way to reduce people to a numerical scale which can then be used to divide them into their appropriate work track. This sick reduction of people to numbers (changing them from ends to means, if you want to get Kantian) serves no one but owners of businesses who are trying to increase profits by hiring "good" workers. Of course, that's something Harvard probably doesn't care about, since the vast majority of it's enormous endowment comes directly from those business owners. It's sad. There's this idea that once institutions of higher education once attempted to increase knowledge in the world, to enlighten people, to push humanity to greater achievement. Whether that was ever true I don't know. But what's undeniable now is that institutions of higher learning have been themselves reduced to worker factories for big business. Welcome to McHarvard. What kind of McDegree do you want today?
9:28:48 AM 
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