State of Tuesday: THE LEAST SURPRISING NEWS EVER
Harvard University’s Dean of Undergraduate Admissions should be praised for her bravery.
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Breaking News! Diversity is not a strength.
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THE LEAST SURPRISING NEWS EVER
Harvard University’s Dean of Undergraduate Admissions should be praised for her bravery.
She’s not fully brave. She’s not saying the quiet part. But she got the conversation started, and it’s just the first major crack in a facade built over the last two decades.
Have you met a Harvard grad in the last few years and wondered why they’re so … mediocre? The answer to the question comes in a sprawling report that is bound to trigger (hehe) some serious changes at one of America’s most revered universities.
In it, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Amanda Claybaugh says flatly that the university is “failing to perform key functions of grading.”
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Professors are “damaging the academic culture of the College.”
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New faculty “are surprised at how leniently our courses are graded.”
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Harvard’s own students think the university’s education is “fake.”
OH LORDY!!!!
More than 60% of grades awarded at Harvard are A’s. Professors feel pressure for a number of reasons, but the one that jumps out at me most (and to most savvy onlookers) is this one: “[T]he College has been exhorting faculty to remember that some students arrive less prepared for college …”
The why here is obvious. The push to bring in a more “diverse” student body has led to admissions scoring metrics that give race an equal or even greater weighting than test scores and transcripts.
Once admitted, students who cannot hack such a normally rigorous academic environment must be catered to, or, as professors worry, they’ll complain. They might even organize and *gasp* call us racist!
One faculty member told Claybaugh there’s been “a radical shift from providing critical feedback to providing emotional support.”
Sounds a lot like Toxic Empathy has polluted yet another institution, replacing tangible, measurable outcomes with irrational emotional appeal.
The result has been a comprehensive increase in institutional dysfunction. Harvard used to have a unifying culture. It used to demand excellence. Anyone who was admitted to the university and graduated from it could immediately identify one of their own.
Their shared experience, to borrow a term from the insufferable left, had nothing to do with race, creed or socioeconomic background. It was that regardless of all those factors, they came together and achieved something truly profound and horrendously difficult in a span of four short years, for most.
Now the university’s own faculty is struggling to define not just what it means to have a Harvard education, but which students are actually performing well in the classes they themselves instruct.
They don’t even know who is passing their own classes.
From the report:
Many of us shifted from high-stakes exams to more frequent lower-stakes assignments, believing that this would help students retain the material. A number have found, however, that lower-stakes assignments are more effective at rewarding effort than at evaluating performance, giving students the false sense that they’d mastered material that still eludes them. Similarly, faculty shifted from exams and papers to alternate modes of assessment, such as creative assignments and group projects, in the hopes of increasing student engagement with their courses. A number struggled, however, to assess these assignments in a sufficiently differentiated way. Finally, some faculty have eschewed conventional grading, turning instead to ‘ungrading’ or ‘contract-based learning’ or other systems in which students earn As for completing all assigned work. There is a pedagogical case to be made for these alternate approaches, but they’re fundamentally at odds with our current grading system, which relies on grades to differentiate.
Let me interpret this for you: Harvard University routinely graduates students without the slightest sense they’ve actually been educated.
My, how the mighty have fallen, and, to be frank, I’m not entirely sure we can place the whole blame at the feet of “diversity is our strength.”
I think “diversity” is a byproduct of a pernicious ideology that has infected our institutions, using race and immutable traits as a cudgel to install notions like “equity” into systems that used to have “merit” baked into their very nature.
What you get on the other end is a bunch of uneducated kids of all stripes graduating with straight A’s.
They might be diverse, but they’re stupid, poorly read, civically illiterate and incompetent in their area of study. In short, a Harvard degree has about as much purchase as a Venezuelan bolivar.
The upshot here, as a struggling alcoholic would recognize, is that the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.
Claybaugh took the first step. Let’s see what Harvard does next.
WHAT I’M READING
This would be a start. I’d like to send Bondi a literal bouquet of hammers to drop.
EXCLUSIVE: Dozen Senators Urge Bondi To Drop Hammer On ‘Illegal’ Industry Targeting America’s Youth
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Who actually didn’t mind watching NYC spiral into a socialist hellscape? Raise your hands.
Socialist Zohran Mamdani’s Once Massive Lead Evaporates With Just One Week To Go, Poll Shows
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Good. Get the delusional people away from all the children.
WHAT I’M WATCHING
Debunking Mehdi Hasan’s Mind-Numbing Response to Matt Walsh
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The loss of rigor and high expectations of all students damaged the university, all students, and - more importantly - the country that’s deprived of better graduates and future leaders.