Steven Pinker: commitment

Transcript context

…Doesn’t everyone at Harvard deserve an A- or an A? They made it into Harvard, right? Same with Stanford. Yes. I actually have data on this because that’s what our dean told us, not with a whole lot of conviction, when we had a meeting about grade inflation. She said, “Well, we like to think of it as grade compression. Maybe students are just getting better and better and better. ” I just know that that’s not true because I have records from performance on my multiple-choice test in my intro psych course, which I’ve taught for more than 20 years. It’s pretty constant year to year, there’s no subjective sliding grade, and the performance has gone down. Students are not doing as well as they used to. I’ve been forced, just so as not to drive away all my students, to inflate my grades. I give way more A’s than I used to, just so I don’t have an empty lecture hall. It’s not because the students are getting better and better. We know that a lot of Harvard students are admitted on nonmeritocratic criteria. Forget about the whole hot button of racial preferences, but legacies, athletics, social action, they sorted clothes for the homeless, they circulated a petition, they hung out with artists in an artist’s colony. Harvard does not admit students on meritocratic grounds. If you’re the boss, what would the median grade at Harvard be?…

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