Lately, I have been reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 science fiction novel The Dispossessed, in which Shevek, a renowned physicist from an anarchist culture, comes to live in what is essentially a late capitalist society. Upon taking a university teaching position, Shevek finds his students stuck in a “pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.” Appalled by how this assessment structure degrades students’ intrinsic motivation to learn, Shevek initially refuses to give tests or grade students, but he finally agrees (under bureaucratic pressure) to let students pursue any physics problem they want while assuring them they will all receive the highest mark.
Shevek’s response prefigures the efforts of ungraders to rescue intrinsic learning from what we might call “grade capture.” However, rather than lighting fires of curiosity and exploration, Shevek’s ungrading approach provokes angry reactions from his students: “How could the diligent students be distinguished from the dull ones? What was the good in working hard? If no competitive distinctions were to be made, one might as well do nothing.” Poor Shevek is left even more befuddled.
The students’ objections are echoed by faculty in the 2025 Harvard grade report, which I unpacked in my previous post: “Students know that an ‘A’ can be awarded … for anything from outstanding work to reasonably satisfactory work. It’s a farce.” Now, I believe the real farce is the doublespeak found throughout the grade report, which repeatedly claims that Harvard’s “mission … is to educate our students, not to grade them,” while making abundantly clear that the real mission is to differentiate students. To what extent educating students—who no doubt endure patterns of cramming and disgorging information not unlike Shevek’s students—occurs during this differentiation process is a secondary concern.
By contrast, teachers who seek to cultivate learning for all students (Team Support) often convey the perspective that it is not their job to sort students; this stance is especially pronounced among ungraders. I empathize with this view, but I also recognize that the institutions we work for operate from different imperatives and values. This institutional entanglement means we don’t entirely choose the obligations associated with our jobs; whether we like it or not, we must all at some point wrestle with Shevek’s conundrum.
I argue that Team Support’s complicity with sorting is nowhere more pronounced than the issue of grade compression—i.e., the narrowing of grade distributions often misleadingly referred to as grade inflation. While grade compression might seem a positive development to those who disavow sorting, it is no more a friend and ally of Team Support than it is of Team Sort.
I want to focus on two specific goals frequently emphasized by Team Support: 1. Removing distractions (primarily as caused by grades) from the learning process, and 2. Leveling the educational playing field between more and less privileged students. Widescale compression, I believe, threatens both aspirations. Let’s first examine the issue of distracted learning.
The Distraction from Learning Problem
Alternative graders, who I think of as Team Support’s “frontline,” concede that grades will tend to go up in their classes, but they take pains to emphasize that higher grades reflect better scaffolding for students to meet high standards rather than the relaxing of standards. I have complete confidence that this is often true within individual courses. But as higher grades begin to scale up across an institution, the forces propelling them higher can build inertial momentum. The danger is that a culture of high grades can emerge with very different implications than what alternative graders had in mind. This is what seems to have happened at Harvard, where undergraduates increasingly expect to receive an A in every course and/or believe that if they do not receive an A, something must be very wrong with them (or their teacher, or both).
To be clear, I am by no means claiming that the alternative grading movement is solely responsible for grade compression at Harvard or other highly selective institutions. In fact, alternative grading is but one of various explanations offered in the Harvard report for what led to this cultural shift in grading. My point is, whatever its cause(s), the culture of high grades at Harvard has not helped students focus on learning.
As Rose Horowitch reports, students at elite universities like Harvard “report being more stressed about school than ever,” not so much despite, but to a large extent because grades have risen so much in recent decades. Her language parrots Shevek’s students: “Without meaningful grades, the most ambitious students have no straightforward way to stand out.” Horowitch adds, “And when straight A’s are the norm, the prospect of getting even a single B can become terrifying.” Grade compression, then, has made students more “anxious, distracted, and hyper-focused on using extracurriculars to distinguish themselves in the eyes of future employers.”
The emphasis on extracurriculars has been especially impactful. Horowitch cites Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard Dean of Undergraduate Education (and author of the grade report), on the “shadow system of distinction” that has emerged. This system includes a “network of finance and consulting clubs that are almost indistinguishable from full-time jobs… At this point, the odds of getting into some clubs within Harvard are similar to the odds of being accepted to the college in the first place.”
I recognize that Claybaugh, whose chief prerogative here is to rein in grade compression, is not an objective observer. I recognize further that exclusive clubs are hardly a new thing at places like Harvard. Nevertheless, Claybaugh is far from alone in noting the increased emphasis on extracurriculars and its role in, for instance, course absenteeism at Harvard and downplaying academics at highly selective universities in general.
As compression has taken hold at Harvard, it does not appear to have activated some kind of release valve in the pressure cooker of sorting. Instead, compression appears to have displaced sorting to other spheres of activity. And aside from adding more work and stress to students’ already overfilled plates, this shadow sorting system has further exacerbated the structural inequities that Team Support also stands against.
The Exacerbating Inequity Problem
Alternative graders argue that the same practices meant to help students focus on learning—e.g., providing effective scaffolding to meet clear standards, alleviating peer-to-peer competition—can also promote educational equity. Because, the students who struggle most in traditional assessment regimes disproportionately come from underprivileged and marginalized backgrounds. But, as Horowitch explains, the “hypercompetitive club culture advantages students who come from fancy high schools.” So, even as institutions like Harvard have devoted “considerable resources to helping less-privileged students succeed academically,” that “kind of assistance is useless to the extent that extracurricular clubs, which prioritize students who already have experience, are the coin of the realm.”
The hard truth is that a sorting mechanism’s vulnerability to bias and manipulation is of little concern to the sorting function itself; what matters is whetherthe mechanism sorts students, not how it sorts them. Any time one mechanism (such as grades) becomes ineffective, the sorting function will—like a hermit crab that has outgrown its shell—simply find another mechanism in which to fit itself. Crucially, this new sorting mechanism will likely be (at least for a time) both competition-intense and transparency-resistant; in turn, students of privilege will exploit these conditions first and most effectively even as they make themselves (and everyone left behind) more stressed, more anxious, and more miserable in the process.
A paradigmatic example of this phenomenon occurred when upper-class families started using college sports as a backdoor ticket to get their kids admitted to elite universities—what journalist Saahil Desai calls “affirmative action for rich white students.” These families targeted sports that are both prohibitively expensive and largely ignored by the general public—think fencing, rowing, sailing, and water polo. This shadow sorting system, of course, also fueled the infamous Varsity Blues scandal.
Precarious Meritocracy, and Why Team Support Cannot “Opt Out” of It
Readers might note that Harvard, with its sky-high expectations for launching students into prestigious and high-paying jobs, is an extreme case. This is a fair point, and I do not claim that widescale grade compression will have equally dramatic consequences everywhere. However, as I have previously written (and bring up embarrassingly frequently in this blog), students at less selective institutions are also very much entangled with our contemporary system of precarious meritocracy.
(Here’s a quick gloss on what I mean by this term: Meritocracy in the United States has long favored the privileged, but the perceived consequences of being sorted out of high-status career tracks weren’t always so stark for less privileged people. Then deindustrialization, offshoring, deregulation, and welfare defunding—in a nutshell, the story of neoliberalism—combined to intensify the impact of, and fears about, falling off the meritocracy ladder.
I have worked at public universities my whole teaching career; the students I teach have minimal access to elite career development networks, but they are no less busy with obligations beyond academics—working full-time jobs, (often) supporting families, etc.—and I have witnessed their challenges focusing on coursework grow alongside their daily to-do lists and mental health struggles.
So, while I am pointing the finger at grade compression, I want to make clear that compression threatens Team Support’s goals not because of compression itself but because of the underlying political and socioeconomic conditions that make precarious meritocracy so corrosive. And believe me: I understand and share the desire many Team Support members have to opt out of this devilish societal game in which some people get to be ostensible winners but almost everyone feels like they are losing.
But while we are justified in making salient and critiquing the fallout of this system, we do not get to opt out. Team Support lives and works in institutions defined by the logic of precarious meritocracy, and we should be more concerned that practices we adopt to cultivate better and more equitable learning environments could in the long run contribute to greater distraction, anguish, and structural inequity. When we disavow complicity with the sorting function, our rhetoric sounds uncomfortably similar to Harvard doublespeak about how its mission is to educate and not grade.
Given these ominous prospects, where do we go from here? By “we,” I chiefly mean Team Support, but to be fair, this “we” also encompasses Team Sort. I noted earlier that the sorting function is like a crab who will occupy any shell that fits, but the human beings who champion sorting have consciences that can be pricked when the game feels too rigged. As the Harvard grade report indicates, Team Sort wants the sorting function to be relatively fair, or rather, Team Sort wants all of us to continue believing in the delusion that sorting can be made fair.
Before exploring what Team Support might do about the bedeviling and destructive impacts of precarious meritocracy, then, I will next survey Team Sort’s plans to bring the sorting function back out of the shadows. Once again, the Harvard grade report will prove useful, offering various proposals for how grades can reclaim their rightful place as sorting’s Top Crab Shell. Here’s a quick preview: Do these proposed solutions take the realities of precarious meritocracy seriously? Nope. Will these proposed solutions alleviate stress, help students focus on learning, and foster equity? Come on, man.
Teaching Inquiry 