When I was a grad student (back in the Old Stone Age), the minimum passing grade in graduate courses was an A. (This was based upon the theory that we were cher

When I was a grad student (back in the Old Stone Age), the minimum passing grade in graduate courses was an A. (This was based upon the theory that we were cherry-picked from the set of applicants.) This may be Harvard's premise (the people I've known who went to Harvard were generally outstanding), or maybe not. I would be interested in seeing the correlation between legacy students (the ones who got in because a parent attended) and grades. In 30 years of teaching first- and second-year computer science courses, I always saw a bimodal distribution, with one mode around a C and the second at a B+/A- level. (In first year, it often was trimodal, with the third mode at an F-, students who gave up early in the course and didn't withdraw). I would be astonished if there were not something like that going on in Harvard's first year CS. Mr Turley quotes William F Buckley on preferring the first 400 names in the Boston phone book to Harvard faculty. I would prefer to listen to a conspiracy theorist explaining why the lepton samurai of Jupiter were about to invade the earth than to listen to Mr Buckley, even if he were still alive.