Actual grade meaning would require criterion-referenced assessment: define what mastery looks like, grade against that standard, and let the distribution fall where it may across years and cohorts. That's hard and unsexy, so instead we get an administrative quota that launders the appearance of rigor while the underlying problem, that Harvard's admissions process selects heavily for wealth and legacy, goes untouched.
Harvard A's will now tell employers that a learner beat ~80% of a nepotism-filtered, endowment-curated cohort in a single semester. That's a relative rank, not a measure of exceptional work.
An employer is looking to screen two recent harvard grads by GPA, not really between a new grad and a 5/10 year ago grad. GPA may not actually be a predictive metric within a cohort, but it's measurable and capping the A grades likely offers more precision in comparison; even if that precision is not an indicator of anything useful.
I do agree that an absolute standard of mastery would also be nice... But the diploma is supposed to indicate acceptable mastery.
What if less that 20% of the class do "exceptional" work? What if more do?
Those pushing this either haven't thought it through, or simply want to be seen to be doing something to address grade inflation, and this is something (just not something useful).
It's a bit alien to me. Where I went to school, you used get scores from 1(lowest)- to 10 (highest) where 6 is "Acceptable". You could curve the questions, but not the students. So theoretically the whole class could all score 1s, or all could score 10s. This makes more sense to me, if everyone works hard, they should all succeed, and if they're all lazy they should fail.
You couldn't arbitrarily decide that exactly 20% gets -say- an 8. I've always wondered what the steelman is for curve grading.
assuming that by "steelman" here you mean "the justification", i believe the point is that a curved grade shows how you compare to others. the idea is that "getting 40% of the answers right" is meaningless if you don't know how hard the test is, so you'd rather have a grade that says "top 5% of the class".
this what i see as the justification, at least. not an endorsement of the idea
But why would this automatically cause the teacher to be the one to retire?
Are there documents or books on this? This system seems so alien to me. And yet it does seem to produce some amount of competent graduates who can -eg- launch a spacecraft into lunar orbit.
it's crazy to see that mentioned so non-chalantly. my expectation is that the teacher, when they grade, is meant to be impartial, as if they were doing nothing more than taking a measurement of the student's work, you could say (this is why, i believe, we value standardized tests in some settings, even though they are worse in other aspects). it's the student who is responsible for the grade. a teacher not being allowed to give F's to everyone suggests a corruption of the system to me.
can you share more? what pressures teachers not to do this, for example?
Looks like its best not to enroll in classes with more than 5 students.
Cynicism aside, seems like a good step.