Yes, schools need to stop connecting reviews and those consequences. Maybe a poor review or Rate My Professor grade concerning difficulty should be a plus!
I’d imagine that negative evaluations can impact whether or not a course gets enough students to run or gets cancelled for low enrollment. If departments are afraid of being cut, maybe there is pressure on the professors to be more popular (=easier graders).
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It’s not just easy grading. Many of the comments students make are about content: too much reading, too much writing etc. Rate My Professor has a rating for difficulty.
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At the university where I work, course evaluations are due before final exams are held, and instructors can see the evaluations only after they submit the final letter grades. This reduces the likelihood of retaliation by either party – instructors don’t get to give impossible final exams and underservedly poor final grades because they received poor student evaluations, and students don’t get to give horrible evaluations because they received bad final grades.
Students, of course, can go to RateMyProfessor at any time to rant about their professors after the semester ended. While the ratings there (and the word of mouth among students) do have an impact on future enrollment, they normally don’t affect the tenure and promotion of professors. People understand that anyone can say anything on RateMyProfessor. They only look at official course evaluations.
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My daughter just finished her 2nd year at Berkeley, as an Architecture major. There are a set number of As awarded in each section of the studio. Final projects are ranked and grades are assigned. The max number of As they award is like 20. 8 can get A+, 10 A, etc… This is out of about 90 students. It’s a way of weeding out people who consistently can’t perform, in studios, semester after semester.
I’m not sure how this applies to Harvard–but it seems like some schools/departments have always actively pushed back against grade inflation. My daughter would argue that those students getting Cs absolutely shouldn’t be in the major. They don’t understand design iteration, modeling, presentation, integrating feedback, etc.
Obviously, nearly every student at these highly competitive schools are used to getting all As. Most high school teachers bend over backwards to be as generous with grades as they can AND they are encouraged to do so by administrators. (I’m a teacher!) It’s getting harder to give lower grades to students who do the work, but don’t have a sophisticated understanding of the material, or who can’t communicate effectively. Students are used to doing the work and getting points. They are also used to test retakes, unlimited time, extra credit, etc… The elementary, middle, and HS system is the US has changed a LOT in the last 10 years–especially related to grading.
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I am curious whether course difficulty affects the course evaluations requested by the colleges.
It may just be my old-school/generation thinking but kids who “don’t understand” shouldn’t be getting C’s. C’s are “average” - and while kids in hyper competitive schools and/or programs are not used to being average, those kids that “don’t understand” should be failing out. C’s are not failing and to me represent grade inflation by that definition.
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The problem is not the grade inflation per se, in my view. It is the dumbing down of classes as a result of evaluations and ratings. Which would result in more A’s, yes, but also in less challenging (and fulfilling) education.
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I can’t speak to Harvard but I didn’t see any dumbing down in my D’s courses in college. But Purdue also isn’t know for having grade inflation. Most of the intro classes are graded on a traditional curve or at most a C+. Plenty of exams had means well below 50% with questions with no answers but profs wanted to see the thinking process. Senior design was to create a process for a chemical production that doesn’t exist.
Maybe a function of major?
Also the rate my professors reviews would note if a course was tough but if the prof was good, the reviews were high. Lots of “tough but great class” type comments. I think it matters if there isn’t an expectation that everyone gets As.
C grades are supposed to mean passing (not necessarily average) to the point that the student is ready for the next course afterward (D is supposed to mean barely passing, and not ready for the next course afterward). If C means what D used to mean, that itself may be a (different) form of grade inflation.
However, limited enrollment majors with secondary admission may effectively set thresholds higher than C as “passing” if the student wants to get through secondary admission to the major. Of course, post-graduation destinations (employment or graduate / professional school) may also have higher “passing” thresholds, just as college admission may have higher “passing” thresholds for high school grades than high school graduation does.
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- My college (and HS for that matter) had each course’s median grade on my transcript. I liked that. If someone cares to know, they can see the context of the course. (median was omitted if class was tiny).
- I think grade inflation is a real problem, and somehow this seems a rather one-size-fits-all solution….
- Seems like this could/should be course level? I see no reason why in Calc 2 or Bio 101 everyone can’t theoretically get an A. Everyone should be able to master that, who cares?
. I think it is quite different for upper-level seminars where kids can really demonstrate depth of thought, unique thinking, and thorough research, etc. etc. Are they going to add lots of extra (not needed) projects to Calc 2 so kids can be differentiated? This is a pre-req to get to other things, not an end-to-itself course at Harvard. That said, I do NOT think the profs should make it so easy that you can do nothing and get an A. There can and should be some challenging questions on tests, etc. Dumbing down of classes is an issue! If kids don’t do the work to master the material, they shouldn’t get an A, full stop.
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When was this? 60 years ago?
Nobody really got many Cs (w/o trying) when I was in college We were saying that was “old thinking” then..like my parents thought that way. And as I mentioned my courses had median on them - none had a median C.
Average GPA for my college graduating was about a 3.2.
Where S24 goes to school a “C” in a class in your major means you need to re-take the class. It’s considered “failing”- had never heard of that one before.
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I recently learned that D26’s university (UBC) does this too. For each course, the transcript shows a percentage grade, letter grade, class size, and class average. It is a school that is not known for grade inflation.
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Here are two good points from two Econ professors at Harvard. I’m sorry I am out of gift links.
“Easy A’s are a problem for a whole lot of reasons. They reduce the incentive to learn, which means that students leave college with less knowledge and fewer skills. They make it hard for truly exceptional students to stand out from their merely successful peers. And though inflated grades might seem to lower pressure on students, the opposite is also true; grade-point averages got so high at Harvard that just two A-minuses were recently enough to disqualify students from graduating summa cum laude.”
“When a school’s transcript stops distinguishing students from one another, employers and graduate schools fall back on what they can: connections, internship pedigrees, the polish of a personal essay (increasingly written with artificial intelligence). Grade inflation doesn’t just devalue an A; it also quietly hands more weight to factors other than what a student actually learned. That is true at Harvard and every other school that has let its grades drift upward. Bringing inflation down is hard. The alternative is worse.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/opinion/harvard-easy-a-grades.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
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Any undergraduate major, or just specific majors?
For my 25, in certain instances, you do need a C to move to the next level (math, classes primarily, I believe), but you have technically passed the class with a D for university purposes, and you get the course credits.
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These kids don’t last in architecture. After a couple of semesters of Cs, they change majors. Some absolutely get Ds. She can look at the grade distribution in Canvas.
Not sure. He is an Econ major.
I don’t mean they “don’t understand” how to design–they have trouble with the iteration on the design, integrating feedback, etc…all of this will lead to a final project that just isn’t as good as those who can integrate ideas and improve their work. The As as earned by those students who are either just SUPREMELY talented, or those who have the drive to continually improve their work–because their designs continually get better. The C students may be very successful in other aspect of environmental design, such as urban planning, management, etc…they just likely aren’t going to become architects.
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