Each year, the undergraduate college at Harvard awards the Sophia Freund Prize to the graduating senior with the highest GPA. For decades, the prize went to one student, sometimes two if there was a tie. In 2025, there was a 55-way tie. The top students all had a perfect GPA. Hundreds more were nearly perfect. Last year, flat A’s accounted for 66 percent of grades. A’s and A–’s accounted for 84 percent.
In Harvard’s Student Handbook, an A represents “extraordinary distinction”—an assessment that makes no sense if it applies to two-thirds of students. To restore meaning to student transcripts, Harvard’s grading committee, of which I am a member, has proposed capping all flat A grades to around 33 percent across undergraduate courses. Our recommendation follows a three-year investigation by Amanda Claybaugh, the dean of undergraduate education at Harvard, that found that the school’s current grading system is “damaging the academic culture of the College.”
Grade inflation is about more than numbers. Putting a perfect GPA in reach of so many students perversely deters them from taking classes that could threaten it. It’s as if students start college with a shiny new car and hope to go four years without a scratch. Who would dare go off-road? If educators want to revive academic risk-taking, engagement, and inquisitiveness on college campuses, then we should liberate our students from the tyranny of the impeccable transcript.
When I was asked to join Harvard’s grading committee last year, I wasn’t sure that there was a problem. Given that students have a tougher time getting in now than they did in my day—the acceptance rate has fallen from about 15 percent in the 1990s to about 4 percent now—the surfeit of A’s might simply reflect the strength of the students. Yet faculty who have taught the same courses for decades report no dramatic improvement in academic performance. In fact, many professors say that students seem less invested in academics and less motivated to do all the reading than they used to be.
[Rose Horowitch: The perverse consequences of the easy A]
A 2025 Harvard report on classroom culture revealed that students’ class choices were in many cases motivated less by intellectual curiosity than by the prospect of an easy A. This puts pressure on faculty to give more A’s to ensure that students enroll in their courses and evaluate them positively in reviews. As my colleague Steven Pinker has explained, resisting inflation can drive students away from gateway courses to whole disciplines. Because grade inflation makes a perfect GPA not just possible but seemingly essential, chancing even an A– can appear needlessly perilous.
In classes where the median grade is an A, students know they need work only hard enough to land in the middle of a class, saving their precious energy for extracurriculars (writing for publications, leading pre-professional clubs) where true distinction can be earned. “It would be flippant to say that [Harvard] grades are useless, but they’re almost useless,” a law-school dean has said. The problem goes beyond the Ivy League. Studies show that the most common grade in U.S. colleges is an A.
For generations, students at elite universities underwent a first-year reckoning. Fresh out of small ponds from Brooklyn to Boise, straight-A students would get their first B’s, or worse. They would be sad, maybe a little disoriented, but also freer to explore and experiment, a bit less burdened by the demands of perfection.
Ideally, we can restore the sense of academic possibility that I experienced as an undergrad at Harvard decades ago. Despite having no artistic talent, I enrolled in a studio-art class taught by the architect Louis Bakanowsky. With his Mike Ditka mustache and neighborhood accent, equal parts New York and Boston, he seemed more like a football coach than a famous professor. He haunted the studio, emitting little koans of draftsman’s wisdom as we drew: How much can a line say? How much is enough? How much is too much?
I moved the charcoal against the paper, trying and failing and trying again to capture an onion with scraggly roots. “Do you believe those roots?” Bakanowsky asked, pointing at my drawing. I shrugged sheepishly. “I believe those roots,” he told me. “They’ve got rootyness.” He patted me on the back and walked away. Thirty years later, I have no idea what grade Louis Bakanowsky gave me, but I remember that he believed my roots.
That class pushed me to the limits of my abilities and made me uncomfortable, but I did not hesitate to take it. Had I been a student today, when A’s are largely assured and anything less can feel like a catastrophe, I suspect that I would have avoided the risk.
After considering various ideas, including voluntary guidelines, adding an A+ to the scale, or swapping letters for unfamiliar numbers, we arrived at limiting top grades. Princeton’s cap on A-range grades, in place from 2004 to 2014, famously failed. Its autopsy found that this policy, which left implementation to individual departments, did not give students clear signals about their performance or make grading fair and consistent across disciplines. Their cap also had a big unintended side effect: increased anxiety among students. But Princeton had limited all A-range grades to 35 percent, ensuring that most of the university’s elite students would have to settle for B’s or less.
The lesson for us seemed to be to try a lighter touch. In February we unveiled our proposal to cap flat A grades to around 33 percent across Harvard College. Given that Harvard’s Student Handbook says an A– reflects “full mastery,” we saw no reason to place a hard limit on A– grades. Yes, this will invariably create a proliferation of A–’s. But this policy still promises to restore some meaning to Harvard’s transcripts by limiting A grades to only the strongest performances.
Our proposal was met with broad acclaim from students and faculty alike. Kidding! One poll found that 85 percent of students opposed the cap, mostly for fear of greater stress and competition. Among the faculty, some worry about threats to academic freedom, technocratic fixes for cultural problems, or undue constraints on advanced courses, which tend to attract top-performing students. Others said we didn’t go far enough. The faculty will vote on this proposal starting next week. We expect it to be close. (A Yale committee has also recommended a grade cap, though it would set the average grade to a B. Godspeed!)
Yes, a cap on A’s will create more competition for A’s. But so long as top graduate-school slots and job offers are scarce, students will compete. The question is whether they will focus their energy on coursework or elsewhere. And spikes in mental-health problems on college campuses over the past decade have shown that serious bouts of stress and anxiety can accompany lax grading standards, too.
[Rose Horowitch: What an Ivy League education really gets you]
Some faculty and students have argued that the competition resulting from a cap on A’s would be antithetical to learning: If everyone learns all the material, then why shouldn’t everyone get A’s? We hope to train the next generation of Nobel laureates, the people who are going to imagine better ways of living and lead us to them. An A– is for not losing points. An A is for gaining them in unexpected ways. The grade should reflect exceptional depth, creativity, and originality—the eye-popping essay, the last problem on the exam that only a few students could answer correctly.
My own college education trained me to explore and take risks. Along with studio art, I took courses in behavioral neuroscience and statistics—both outside my major and unexpectedly handy years later. My first semester, I took a class that got me obsessed with moral dilemmas known as “trolley problems.” This pulled me through a philosophy Ph.D., then into cognitive neuroscience and social psychology, and lately into social-impact ventures. I wasn’t assured A’s in any of those classes, but I took them anyway because a near-perfect transcript wasn’t expected then.
Restoring that mindset is bigger than grading policies and bigger than Harvard. But better grading policies can help. To regain the public’s trust and live up to our own principles, institutions of higher learning should make our grades mean what we say they mean. Our centuries-long commitment is not to a facade of perfection but to hard-won self-improvement. We must believe our roots.
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