Michael Horn critiques Harvard's plan to cap A grades, arguing it treats education as zero-sum. Instead, he proposes separating teaching from assessment and measuring how many students master required competencies, like Western Governors University does.
A lot of people are asking me right now, what do I think about Harvard's proposal to cap the number of A grades that it gives its undergrads. And I get it. I'm of two minds. On one hand, I get it, grade inflation is a problem. Grades increasingly don't mean much and so forth. But I think the bigger challenge is artificially capping the number of A grades just furthers the zero sum education system that we've created, where for every winner, there has to, quote, unquote, be a loser, as opposed to asking the question, how many students have mastered the competencies, the content, the standards that are at the heart of any given course? And to get to that, I think you actually have to say, you know what? The faculty aren't actually going to grade their own students. Their job is to teach it as best as they can and get every student to the finish line. But much like Western Governor's University, we're going to have a separate faculty who's there measuring mastery of those competencies in each course. If you made it, you show mastery. And if you didn't, well, ideally in Western Governors University, you get to keep working toward it at Harvard because it's time bound. You'll get a grade that's not an A, and that's okay.
