According to the Grade Report of 2022-2023, authored by economics Yale professor Ray C. Fair, first published by The Yale Daily News, then reported by The New York Times, a whopping 80% of grades assigned at that institution were either A’s or A-‘ s during last academic year, keeping up with a trend started with the COVID-19 pandemic.
After 2020, the share of ‘excellent’ was nearly 82 percent and 80 percent, respectively. Consequently, the Grade point average has been rising too, hitting 3.7 out of 4.0–the record of 3.74 was in the 2020-2021 academic year. The report notes that the highest percentages are at the faculty of Philosophy and Psychology.
At this point, where excellence is the new standard and B (as in ‘good’) is a distant memory, so many professors and students started to question the real meaning of grades. Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis, who authorized the release of the report “in order to promote transparency”, told The Yale Daily News that he encouraged faculty “to make use of the full range of grades where appropriate, to help students understand areas of strength and others that need attention.” The discrepancy between what truly is excellence and deserves to be judged as such and what is mediocrity and is judged as excellence is a vicious cycle that can damage students’ mental health.
In the last decade, Yale has witnessed a steady increase in A’s and A minuses. Before the pandemic, it rose from 67 percent to 73 percent from the 2010-2011 to the 2018-2019 academic year. Then, this trend experienced a significant surge in the last few years. And Yale is not the only one.
This ‘excellent’ spike also hit Harvard, as well as the majority of colleges nationwide. The last Harvard report, published in October, shows that “the percentage of A-range grades given to college students in the 2020-21 academic year was 79 percent, compared to 60 percent a decade earlier”.
