00:00Harvard wants to limit the number of A's awarded to students in order to beat back
00:04grade inflation and kids are completely losing their minds over it. In the 2024 to 2025 school
00:09year 66% of grades awarded to Harvard students were A's which has made grades essentially
00:15meaningless. Here's the distribution over time starting in 2012 when it was just 35% of students
00:20getting an A all the way until 2025. A committee of faculty at Harvard have concluded that this
00:26means that effectively everyone is walking away with an A and nobody is really distinguishing
00:32themselves as especially excellent on campus. As a solution this committee is recommending
00:37instituting a 20% cap on A's. You'd think that students would welcome the opportunity to
00:42distinguish themselves but this is not the case. One student said you accept a bunch of top three
00:48percent students in the country and then get surprised that we're all getting A's as though
00:52Harvard should not be harder than high school. They also had a really consumerist view of what
00:57it means to go to college and said we pay to go here to get the product which is to have a better
01:02signal of performance. If you're just lowering that for everyone then you're just lowering the value
01:07you provide as a business for the same cost. The second student was even more dramatic saying it
01:12misses the point of college which is to go out there and have fun and it would create so much pressure
01:16where life wouldn't be worth that much to live. Students may not like it but there's really no
01:21point in having grades if everyone has the same ones and they're all excellent and also how do the
01:26students that are totally blowing away professors demonstrate to an employer or to a grad school
01:31that they were at the tip top of the class when the majority of the class is getting an A.
01:34The faculty will vote on this resolution this year and hopefully they make the right decision to
01:39instate this cap.
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