Harvard faculty report that many students skip class, don’t do the reading, and avoid speaking—yet still get high grades. The report also notes a sharp drop in seniors feeling free to voice controversial views after Oct. 7. Together this suggests grades no longer reflect engagement while fear and disengagement harden ideological bubbles.
— If elite universities’ grading hides disengagement and suppresses debate, it undermines trust in credentials and signals a governance problem for higher education.
Neetu Arnold
2026.04.17
90% relevant
The article documents how districts and states are celebrating high graduation rates while standardized exam proficiency and college‑readiness metrics fall (Minnesota’s 84.9% rate vs. 17% Native American math proficiency; Michigan’s high graduation rate but falling NAEP and SAT benchmarks). It names concrete mechanisms—standards‑based/grading changes, credit‑recovery, rollback of retention policies—that parallel the existing idea that inflated credentials hide real learning declines.
Alex Tabarrok
2026.03.30
78% relevant
The article engages the same surface phenomenon—widespread grade inflation at elite colleges (Harvard’s two‑thirds A’s)—but argues that simple supply fixes (caps) miss underlying informational distortions that mask true differences in course difficulty and student ability; it therefore complements the existing idea by moving from diagnosis to mechanism‑design solutions.
Dominic Cummings
2026.03.25
75% relevant
The article repeats Eliot’s claim that mass education lowers standards and abandons core cultural curricula ('in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards... destroying our ancient edifices'), directly linking the cultural critique to contemporary debates about falling academic rigor and curriculum narrowing.
Neetu Arnold
2026.03.19
90% relevant
The article documents rising graduation rates (81.3% in 2025 vs. 59.1% in 2006) while SAT and MCAS proficiency remain flat or decline, and links this gap to grading/credit policies (ban on 'No Credit', expanded credit recovery)—a concrete instance of grade inflation hiding falling classroom outcomes.
Tyler Cowen
2026.03.17
65% relevant
The article reports a paper showing that higher teacher‑level average grade inflation is associated with worse long‑run academic and earnings outcomes, which supports and sharpens the existing idea that rising grades can obscure declines in educational quality and student learning by hiding classroom failures.
Steve Sailer
2025.10.09
100% relevant
Harvard Classroom Social Compact Committee (NYT: 'Harvard Students Skip Class and Still Get High Grades'); seniors feeling 'completely free' to express views fell from 46% (2023) to about one‑third (spring 2024).