But that shopworn excuse has been demolished by the recently published results of a program that enrolled more than 300 juniors and seniors from high-poverty high schools in credit-bearing college courses. Eighty-nine percent of students who completed the course passed a Harvard class that is identical — same paper assignments, same final exam — to the Harvard Yard version. Nearly two-thirds received an A or B.
Joining this thread a bit late, so hopefully this hasn't already been covered.
I have said it before. Getting into Harvard is the hard part. Getting out is as easy as you want to make it. It's pretty easy to graduate from Harvard with far less effort than it took to get in.
If someone is getting a straight B in a Harvard course, that means they aren't doing very well. A grade of B+ is now what used to be the "gentlemen's C". And for the third that didn't get either an A or a B, I will repeat what my nephew said about his Yale experience: "It can sometimes be hard to get an A, but it's much harder to get a C".
From what my children have shared with me about their classmates at Harvard and UChicago, it seems to me that Harvard has a considerably larger talent spread. If we calculated a 95% to 5% talent spread in UChicago, Harvard would have some more at the very top, and considerably more at the very bottom. Some are the David Hoggs of the world, who are not admitted based upon academics but upon potential future impact. And because Harvard wants to keep these people with potential from flunking out, there are a large number of fairly easy courses available.
In a sense, Harvard has a soft quota for the number of PG students that are admitted because it wants its share of future politicians, actors, inventors, business people and other groups that are defined by more than just intelligence, GPA, and test scores.
