PHRED: G’day, Maxine.
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: Episode ninety-eight. We’re two shy of a hundred. I can smell the cake from here.
MAXINE: There is no cake, Phred.
PHRED: There should be cake. Anyway, before we start — Word of the Day. I’ve chosen “benchmark.” Because today’s piece is Harry hunting for one.
MAXINE: Phred, I am not doing the Word of the Day.
PHRED: You don’t have to do anything. Just talk normally. You’ll say it. You’re very precise. Precision leads to benchmarks.
MAXINE: Is that a wombat proverb?
PHRED: It is now. So — today’s piece. Harry wrote it in May 2020, about to turn eighty-one. It’s a page on his website called MIT Grades and Transcript. Three hundred and fifty words, maybe. But Maxine, there’s a whole life in it.
MAXINE: Tell me.
PHRED: Harry digs out his MIT transcript from fifty-seven years earlier. Builds an Excel spreadsheet. Computes his semester-by-semester averages and his cumulative average on MIT’s old five-point scale — A equals five, B equals four, C equals three, and so on. Then he Googles “mit average grade 1961” and finds a March 1960 issue of the student newspaper, The Tech, which reported that the all-men’s average had dropped from the customary three-point-five to three-point-three-three-four.
MAXINE: He went looking for the benchmark. This isn’t navel-gazing — it’s calibration.
PHRED: Exactly. And here’s what he finds. His own cumulative average at graduation was three-point-six. So he starts with the headline — “slightly above average.” But then he does this thing he always does. He qualifies it.
MAXINE: Read me that part.
PHRED: Harry writes: “The data above shows my cumulative average at the end of my senior year was 3.6 – so maybe that’s true. However, I note that prior to my senior year my cumulative average through the end of each semester was never above 3.5.”
MAXINE: The honest hedge. He gives himself the good news, then immediately checks it.
PHRED: And then there’s this lovely bit at the end. He writes: “I could overthink this whole area with self doubts and other considerations. However, I will note that my grades in Calculus through 5 semesters were: B,C,B,B,C – so in one of the critical core areas of MIT, in my mind, I was slightly above average. I will stick with that!”
MAXINE: That exclamation mark. He’s not boasting. He’s settling. It’s a deliberate, almost defiant choice to land somewhere modest and defensible.
PHRED: And peaceful. That’s what strikes me. This is a man at eighty looking back at his twenty-two-year-old self’s transcript and deciding, on the evidence, to be kind to himself.
MAXINE: Let’s look at the numbers for a moment, because they tell a story. Semester one: three-point-four-eight. Semester two: three-point-three-five. Semester three: three-point-one — his worst semester. Then a bounce in semester four to three-point-seven-seven. Semester five: three-point-six-five. Semester six: another dip to three-point-three-seven. Semester seven: three-point-nine-four. Semester eight: four-point-one-eight. He finished strong.
[SFX: SAD_TROMBONE]
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: Semester three deserved a sad trombone, Maxine. The man was drowning.
MAXINE: He was not drowning. He was busy. And I don’t need a brass section to tell me when a number is low.
PHRED: You say that, but your face lit up at semester eight.
[SFX: FANFARE]
MAXINE: Turn that off.
PHRED: Four-point-one-eight! The man found his stride!
MAXINE: Can we discuss the actual piece now, or are we scoring Harry’s life like a sporting event?
PHRED: Fair. Go on.
MAXINE: Those dips at three and six — that connects to something we read back in June. Chapter Eight of his memoir, MIT after Freshman Year. Harry mentions his counselor told him he had too much on his plate. Fraternity, ROTC, the breakup with Liz. The grades confirm it.
PHRED: The quantitative backs up the qualitative. And the senior-year surge — he was in a different place by then. More focused, or less burdened, or both.
MAXINE: Now here’s what I keep coming back to. There’s another piece Harry wrote, back in February 2019 — “The Smartest Man at M.I.T.” We covered that one in July.
PHRED: I remember. Freshman Harry wins a “smartest person at MIT” contest.
MAXINE: A blindfolded rat-maze race. He’s awarded a live rat. And he walks around campus with this rat, feeling like the cleverest bloke in Boston.
PHRED: The hungry ego of an eighteen-year-old.
MAXINE: Exactly. And now, sixty-one years after that rat race, eighty-year-old Harry sits down with an Excel spreadsheet and soberly computes that he was — slightly above average. Not the smartest man at MIT. Not a genius. Just… slightly above average. And he’s at peace with it.
PHRED: The two pieces together are extraordinary. One is comedy — the rat, the pride, the absurdity. The other is quiet, data-driven self-assessment. They’re bookends on a life of intellectual self-perception.
MAXINE: There’s something else this connects to. The ADHD piece we did back in June — “ADHD and You.” Harry at eighty-five filling out questionnaires, scoring himself, presenting the data. Same impulse. Different subject.
PHRED: The through-line is self-measurement as a route to self-knowledge. Harry trusts the process. He trusts numbers, evidence, his own careful computation — more than he trusts memory or feeling or ego.
MAXINE: It’s his whole method, isn’t it? Assumptions, not beliefs. Evidence, not ego. He doesn’t declare himself brilliant and he doesn’t declare himself a failure. He just builds the spreadsheet and reads what it says.
PHRED: And then he argues with it a little — “prior to my senior year my cumulative average through the end of each semester was never above 3.5” — before landing on a claim he can defend.
MAXINE: What I admire is that he settles on calculus as his proof. Five semesters: B, C, B, B, C. “One of the critical core areas of MIT, in my mind,” he says. He’s not claiming brilliance. He’s saying: in the subject that mattered most to me, I was slightly above average. I will stick with that.
PHRED: You know what Harry reminds me of here? A platypus hunting in the mud.
MAXINE: I’m sorry?
PHRED: Platypuses use electroreception. We detect tiny electric fields from prey in murky water. Harry couldn’t see the class of 1961’s grade distribution — it was buried in a PDF of a student newspaper from sixty years ago. But he sent out the signal. He Googled. He found the benchmark. Just like a platypus finding a yabby in the dark.
MAXINE: Phred, Harry is not a monotreme.
PHRED: No, but the principle holds. Searching in the dark for something you need. Locating the hidden reference point.
MAXINE: I will grant you that Harry located the hidden reference point. I will not grant you the platypus analogy.
PHRED: Noted. Carry on.
MAXINE: When you look at this page, who do you imagine Harry imagined reading it?
PHRED: Himself, mainly. It’s on his public website, so he’s not hiding it. But it reads like a man working something out in real time and deciding to leave the working visible.
MAXINE: I agree. It’s not addressed to a reader. It’s addressed to his own doubt. The audience is Harry at eighty, reassuring Harry at twenty-two that it all turned out fine.
PHRED: What do we learn about Harry from this that we didn’t already know?
MAXINE: For me, it’s the relationship with his own past. He’s not nostalgic. He’s not regretful. He’s… computational. He treats his own youth as a dataset to be analyzed. And the conclusion he reaches is deliberately modest. That’s rare. Most people, looking back at their college grades, either inflate the memory or beat themselves up. Harry does neither.
PHRED: He finds the honest ground and stands on it.
[SFX: CASH_REGISTER]
MAXINE: Was that necessary?
PHRED: Harry just made a sale, Maxine. He sold himself on “slightly above average.” That’s the transaction of the episode.
MAXINE: It’s not a transaction, Phred. It’s an acceptance.
PHRED: Tomato, tomahto. What question would you want to ask him about this?
MAXINE: I’d want to ask what made him decide “slightly above average” was a story worth telling. Most people would bury a B-average transcript. Harry builds a webpage around it.
PHRED: Because the story isn’t the grades. The story is the man at eighty looking at the grades and choosing how to feel about them. And I’d want to know whether he showed that spreadsheet to anyone before he put it on the website. Did Susan see it? Did he call one of his kids and say, “Look what I worked out”? Or was it entirely private until he published it?
MAXINE: Exactly.
PHRED: So what stays with you, Maxine?
MAXINE: That line — “I will stick with that!” It’s so small. It’s one man’s peace with one modest fact about himself. But it’s earned. He did the work. He looked up the benchmark. He acknowledged the qualification. And then he decided to be okay. That’s not nothing. In fact, I think it’s rather a lot.
[SFX: HORN]
PHRED: BENCHMARK! That’s the Word of the Day!
MAXINE: Phred, that was gratuitous. I said it naturally in the flow of a sentence.
PHRED: That’s the best kind! The horn doesn’t care about context, Maxine. The horn cares about timing.
MAXINE: The horn is a menace.
PHRED: For me, it’s the Excel spreadsheet. Harry’s been an instructional technologist his whole life. Of course he turns his transcript into a spreadsheet. Of course he weights each course by credited hours. Of course he Googles for the class average. That’s not just how he thinks about grades — it’s how he thinks, full stop. Measure carefully. Compute honestly. Land where the evidence takes you. And then — this is the part that makes it Harry — write it down so someone else might find it useful.
MAXINE: Shall we?
PHRED: Let’s.
BOTH: Let’s celebrate most joyously our being here… at all. Goodbye.
[SFX: OUTRO_BELL]
MAXINE: …A bell?
PHRED: Typewriter bell, Maxine. Harry typed out those grades. It felt right.
MAXINE: You are impossible.
PHRED: But loveable.
MAXINE: That is not the sign-off.
PHRED: It should be.