Harvard Club, --and Grading on a Curve

I have been past the Harvard Club in Midtown (above) many times and I wonder how I got this shot below labeled as the place in my files...( real Harvard Club: 27 W 44th St  New York, NY 10036

(212) 827-1200)

Well, this place above is near the Harvard Club as I remember and I suppose that's how I got confused...

As for  the interior,  I guess this one shot of a banquet there will do...

My alma mater, New York University also had a club as I remember...I visited it once, it was pretty nice but I could not see the sense of joining it...

I know several pals of mine from high school who went to Harvard. One of them, a brilliant young intellectual always spoke disparagingly to me to me about it as "training apparatchiks for the system, essentially a factory school"--this is the guy whom other people complained about at  high school because in his classes "he spoiled the curve for everyone else" --this was back when they were doing this "grading on a curve"--maybe I can find some reference to that, it may be so out of date ... 

Apparently some places still use it...I like this explanation so much I will just interject it here...(by the way, I don't believe Harvard ever used the curve system...

Grading on a curve: The pros and cons of the curved grading system

Posted on January 3, 2013 by Questia Staff

Probability curve of student grades

Professors who grade on a curve can be a blessing and a curse for college students. Depending on how well you perform in a class, a curve can mean passing a course you otherwise would have failed. However, if you did particularly well in a course, you may feel cheated if the instructor decided to grade on a curve and pass students who failed to study or do the work. If you’re a little confused about what grading on curve could mean for your grades, read on and see how to prepare yourself!

What’s a grading curve?

Grading on a curve means that the teacher or professor is distributing grades on a relative basis instead of on an absolute scale. Basically, when instructors grade on curves, they assign average grades (usually Cs) to a set number of students.
Then, they assign above and below averages grades to a smaller number of students. Each grade, then, has a certain percentage of students, forming a bell curve. This method can help account for potential shortcomings on the instructor’s behalf. For a more detailed description of a strict bell curve, see K12academics.
Some instructors intend to grade absolutely but end up adjusting by a curve if, say, an entire class does poorly on an exam. This is a more common approach, especially by professors who are hesitant to implement an absolute grading system.

The pros of grading on a curve

Grading on a curve automatically factors in the difficulty of the tests and/or assignments, and because instructors assign grades according to relative performance, you can still earn a good grade in a class you find extremely difficult—probably because your peers also find it very challenging.
When a professor curves a test or an assignment, he or she looks at the percentile scores in relation to the highest score in the class, and this ends up leveling the playing field for most students. Curved scores are higher than their actual numerical scores, and this can be tremendously beneficial for college GPAs.

The cons of grading on a curve

One of the drawbacks to this grading system is that students who perform slightly above or below the average can often miss out on a better grade. So, it is possible for a student who earned a straight B to end up with a C as a final curved score. Students may also feel less in control of how well they do in class, which can cause anxiety and stress levels to spike before tests and exams.
For professors, curved grading might make it more difficult to compare groups of students with each other in terms of performance. For instance, if all students perform poorly, even the highest-scoring students may fail to meet class standards.

I don't think there is that much more to be said about Harvard that you have not already read or heard about... but here is the link to the Wikipedia article on it--

well, wait a second, I brought you this far, it would be unfair not to give you some background on the place anyway....just through the 19th Century, though, which is more interesting than I thought it would be...especially the part about religion at the school...


Harvard University is an American private Ivy League research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature, being the oldest institution of higher learning^[6] and the first corporation (officially The President and Fellows of Harvard College) chartered in the country. Its history, quality of education, academic influence, and wealth have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world.^{[7][8][9][10]}
Harvard was named after its first benefactor, John Harvard. Although never formally affiliated with a church, the college primarily trained Congregationalist and Unitarian clergy. Harvard's curriculum and students became secular throughout the 18th century and by the 19th century had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites.^[11][12] Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Eliot's forty-year tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a centralized research university, and Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.^[13] James Bryant Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II and began to reform the curriculum and liberalize admissions after the war. The undergraduate college became coeducational after its 1977 merger with Radcliffe College. Drew Gilpin Faust was elected the 28th president in 2007 and is the first woman to lead the university. Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world, standing at $30.4 billion as of September 2012.^[3]
The university comprises eleven separate academic units—ten faculties and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study—with campuses throughout the Boston metropolitan area.^[14] Harvard's 209-acre (85 ha) main campus is centered on Harvard Yard in Cambridge, approximately 3.4 miles (5.5 km) northwest of downtown Boston. The business school and athletics facilities, including Harvard Stadium, are located across the Charles River in the Allston neighborhood of Boston and the medical, dental, and public health schools are located in the Longwood Medical Area.^[5]
Eight U.S. presidents have been graduates, and 139 Nobel Laureates have been student, faculty, or staff affiliates. Harvard is also the alma mater of sixty-two living billionaires, the most in the country.^[15] The Harvard University Library is the largest academic library in the United States, and one of the largest in the world.^[16]
The Harvard Crimson competes in 41 intercollegiate sports in the NCAA Division I Ivy League. Harvard has an intense athletic rivalry with Yale University culminating in The Game, although the Harvard–Yale Regatta predates the football game. This rivalry, though, is put aside every two years when the Harvard and Yale Track and Field teams come together to compete against a combined Oxford University and Cambridge University team, a competition that is the oldest continuous international amateur competition in the world.^[17]

History

Main article: History of Harvard University

Colonial

Engraving of Harvard College by Paul Revere, 1767

Harvard was founded in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, making it the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Initially called "New College" or "the college at New Towne", the institution was renamed Harvard College on March 13, 1639. It was named after John Harvard, a young English clergyman from Southwark, London, an alumnus of the University of Cambridge (after which Cambridge, Massachusetts is named), who bequeathed the College his library of four hundred books and £779 pounds sterling, which was half of his estate.^[18] The charter creating the corporation of Harvard College came in 1650. In the early years, the College trained many Puritan ministers.^[19] The college offered a classic academic course based on the English university model—many leaders in the colony had attended the University of Cambridge—but one consistent with the prevailing Puritan philosophy. The college was never affiliated with any particular denomination, but many of its earliest graduates went on to become clergymen in Congregational and Unitarian churches throughout New England.^[20] An early brochure, published in 1643, described the founding of the college as a response to the desire "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches".^[21]
The leading Boston divine Increase Mather served as president from 1685 to 1701. In 1708, John Leverett became the first president who was not also a clergyman, which marked a turning of the college toward intellectual independence from Puritanism.

19th century

John Harvard statue, Harvard Yard

Religion and philosophy

The takeover of Harvard by the Unitarians in 1805 resulted in the secularization of the American college. By 1850 Harvard was the "Unitarian Vatican". The "liberals" (Unitarians) allied themselves with high Federalists and began to create a set of private societies and institutions meant to shore up their cultural and political authority, a movement that prefigured the emergence of the Boston Brahmin class. On the other hand, the theological conservatives used print media to argue for the maintenance of open debate and democratic governance through a diverse public sphere, seeing the liberals' movement as an attempt to create a cultural oligarchy in opposition to Congregationalist tradition and republican political principles.^[22]

In 1846, the natural history lectures of Louis Agassiz were acclaimed both in New York and on the campus at Harvard College. Agassiz's approach was distinctly idealist and posited Americans' "participation in the Divine Nature" and the possibility of understanding "intellectual existences".' Agassiz's perspective on science combined observation with intuition and the assumption that a person can grasp the "divine plan" in all phenomena. When it came to explaining life-forms, Agassiz resorted to matters of shape based on a presumed archetype for his evidence. This dual view of knowledge was in concert with the teachings of Common Sense Realism derived from Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, whose works were part of the Harvard curriculum at the time. The popularity of Agassiz's efforts to "soar with Plato" probably also derived from other writings to which Harvard students were exposed, including Platonic treatises by Ralph Cudworth, John Norrisand, in a Romantic vein, Samuel Coleridge. The library records at Harvard reveal that the writings of Plato and his early modern and Romantic followers were almost as regularly read during the 19th century as those of the "official philosophy" of the more empirical and more deistic Scottish school.^[23]

Charles W. Eliot, president 1869–1909, eliminated the favored position of Christianity from the curriculum while opening it to student self-direction. While Eliot was the most crucial figure in the secularization of American higher education, he was motivated not by a desire to secularize education, but by Transcendentalist Unitarian convictions. Derived from William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson, these convictions were focused on the dignity and worth of human nature, the right and ability of each person to perceive truth, and the indwelling God in each person.^[24]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University