On Letter-Graded Courses at Harvard
David J. Malan ’99
Per the Harvard College Student Handbook, students at Harvard “must complete four General Education courses, one from each of the following four General Education categories: Aesthetics & Culture; Ethics & Civics; Histories, Societies, Individuals; and Science & Technology in Society. Three of these courses must be letter-graded. One may be taken pass/fail, with the permission of the instructor.”
On Tuesday, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences met and voted to amend that language as follows: “Beginning with the Class of 2029, all four courses must be letter-graded.” The faculty additionally voted that the Quantitative Reasoning with Data (QRD) requirement, which has long satisfied, even if taken SAT/UNS, now also “must be completed with a letter grade.” My remarks at Tuesday’s meeting, in opposition, below.
My sense is that this proposal and the next will sail through, but I’d like to offer some remarks on why they should not. In 2016, I happened to be on Faculty Council when it was decided to allow students to take one of their Gen Ed courses Pass/Fail or SAT/UNS. The overarching motivation then, and since, has been to empower students to explore academic areas beyond their own comfort zone, without fear of “failure,” whether failure means, literally, an E or, as many students might think, a B. It is meant to encourage them to explore unfamiliar waters, without a sense of “competition” from classmates with prior experience. And it works, if implemented well.
Indeed, in 2021, CS50 itself published a peer-reviewed study that examined a decade’s worth of the course’s experience with Pass/Fail and, in turn, SAT/UNS. For those unfamiliar, Pass/Fail is a grading basis that students can elect with an instructor’s permission; a PA is a D- or higher. SAT/UNS, meanwhile, is generally a course-wide grading basis. Students don’t have to opt into it; it’s simply a norm. A Satisfactory grade (or SAT) is a C- or higher. Tutorials and first-year seminars tend to be graded SAT/UNS. CS50, too, is SAT/UNS by default, but we do allow students to opt out of it and into a letter grade if required by their concentration. CS, though, does not require such: we allow students to take their first concentration course SAT/UNS. But not all concentrations do. Indeed, voting yay on today’s proposals would only further drive students away from a system that can be made to work. And, daresay, toward courses in General Education that students find more familiar and less challenging. That said, I’m here today not to advocate for CS50 but against, in our student handbook, even more letter grades. But I’d like to share how, within CS50, we’ve made it work.
In 2010, when we began to encourage students to take CS50 without a letter grade, the number of students electing to do so jumped from 2% to 10%. In 2017, when we made SAT/UNS the course’s default, that number rose further to 30%. We found that more women than men favored that basis. Moreover, the percentage of women in the course itself rose that year to 44%, a 29-year high. Among students who took the course SAT/UNS, 19% subsequently reported that their concentration would be or might now be CS. And among all students that year, 66% described themselves as among those “less comfortable” with computing, a 10-year high. These are successful educational outcomes, for General Education courses like CS50 and beyond.
Contrary to what one might think, too, students who took the course SAT/UNS did not spend less time on the course. In fact, SAT/UNS students spent slightly more time on the course. And by term’s end, their performance was only 6pp lower than that of their letter-graded classmates. And that delta practically disappears when you consider that the SAT/UNS students had less prior experience coming in.
Key to all of this is a course’s policy on grades. In CS50’s case, “Whether taking the course SAT/UNS or for a letter grade, you must still meet all expectations in order to be eligible for a satisfactory grade.” And those expectations include attending or watching all lectures, attending all sections, solving all problem sets, and submitting a final project. Allowing a student to take a course SAT/UNS, then, does not mean having to lower a bar.
That said, I personally think the bar for Pass in a Pass/Fail course is too low: it is, by definition in our own handbook, “unsatisfactory.” The definition of SAT, meanwhile, is “adequate and satisfactory comprehension of the course material and the skills needed to work with the course material,” which is already our bar for concentration credit. And, empirically, SAT/UNS students, in our own experience, are performing well above that bar anyway.
I would propose, then, that we narrow the scope of today’s changes so that, “Beginning with the Class of 2029, all four courses must be letter-graded or taken SAT/UNSAT, when available.” That small change in wording would preserve for all of us a framework, via SAT/UNS, within which faculty could still, in fact, encourage students to explore unfamiliar waters without lowering bars.
