Harvard faculty voted to cap the number of A grades given to undergraduates, hoping to reverse years of grade inflation with a mandated change.
The vote, reported Wednesday, is the most prominent symbol of a reckoning at some elite schools concerned by the increasing number of A’s — a widespread issue that some faculty members warn is fundamentally damaging the integrity of education.
“This is a consequential vote,” said Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education. “It will, I believe, strengthen the academic culture of Harvard; it will also, I hope, encourage other institutions to confront similar questions with the same level of rigor and courage.”
Universities have long been worried about grades creeping up, but have found it difficult to change. Some schools have tried various measures, then backtracked. Discussions about grading are happening at Yale University as well, with a presidential committee on trust at Yale recently recommending a B average, or some other collegewide standard.
Princeton University capped A’s more than 20 years ago but lifted the policy in 2014, after finding it added a lot of stress to students.
At Harvard, the trend is stark: In the 2012-13 academic year, about a third of the grades were A’s — a grade intended to indicate not just full mastery of the subject, according to the student handbook, but work of “extraordinary distinction.” In the 2024-25 academic year, two-thirds were A’s.
Almost 85 percent of grades were either a straight A or an A-minus.
A prize for graduating seniors with the highest grade-point averages that had just one or two awardees for years shot up to 55 last year, according to a committee’s proposal to update grading policies. And to determine summa cum laude honors, officials need to carry grade-point averages out to five decimal places.
Admissions deans at top graduate schools expressed concern about grade inflation at Harvard, according to the college’s Office of Undergraduate Education, and a law school dean said, “It would be flippant to say that [Harvard] grades are useless, but they’re almost useless.”
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted on three questions: One, approved by faculty, will limit A’s to at most 20 percent, plus four, of the students in undergraduate classes that grant letter grades. The option of an additional four A’s on top of the 20 percent was intended to allow a higher proportion of A’s in small classes, reflecting the belief that students often do their best work there. No other grades — including A-minuses — will be capped.
Faculty also endorsed another question: The committee recommended including another metric for internal purposes, such as determining prize winners, by calculating an average percentile rank for each student.
But they voted down a question that would have allowed professors to opt out of the limit by using a satisfactory/unsatisfactory grading system; an additional category called SAT+ would be added to recognize students who go well beyond the requirements for satisfactory work.
The changes will begin in the fall 2027 term and be reviewed after three academic years.
Students hated the idea of capping A’s.
Most are used to getting A’s — that’s part of how they got into Harvard in the first place. Almost three-quarters of first-year students had a high school GPA of 4.0, according to the university’s common dataset. Another 22 percent had between a 3.75 and a 3.99.
Student government leaders reported that in a survey of students, more than 90 percent said they were definitely or likely opposed to the 20 percent cap. They encouraged their classmates to lobby professors against it.
Many classes are designed to encourage students to work collaboratively on difficult problem sets, said Hyunsoo Lee, a sophomore from Oregon who was academic officer for the Harvard Undergraduate Association. The cap could disincentivize collaboration, Lee said. He also thinks it could be bad for students’ mental health at such a competitive place where so many are planning to apply to medical, law and graduate schools. And Lee, who is concentrating in economics and neuroscience, thinks students would be less likely to explore unfamiliar classes, as he did, under the new system.
“There have been a lot of attacks recently on Harvard,” Lee said. From the outside, it might look like it’s easy to get all A’s, he said. “But I can say with full confidence that Harvard is hard.”
Matthew Tobin, a junior at Harvard, said he has been worried about this issue for a while. Anyone who has read the report, he said, would see there is a real problem here.
Two professors writing in the Daily Princetonian suggested, “maybe grade inflation is the thing actually stressing you out. Because over time, grade inflation defines failure as anything less than the best possible outcome. And even in the best case scenario, you’re still left with the same result as everyone else.”
One of the professors, Sarath Sanga, who teaches at Yale Law School, said in an interview that grade inflation can drive student demand, enrollment and the size of departments.
“This is a house on fire,” Sanga said. “We’re discussing how to put it out. We just need to put it out.”
With intense scrutiny on higher education, from the Trump administration in particular, some faculty said restoring grading standards is a change that they can make internally and voluntarily.
How did this happen at Harvard? The reasons, the dean of undergraduate education wrote in a recent report, were many. As median grades rose, it incentivized students to choose courses perceived as easier A’s that would not harm their GPAs. And faculty, while concerned that grading had gotten out of hand, had incentives not to evaluate more harshly; student course evaluations and low enrollments might affect their job prospects and tenure chances.
Claybaugh, the undergraduate education dean, recently told faculty that she hopes that next year faculty can lead a thorough review of the course evaluation system — although a better course evaluation system won’t single-handedly solve the problems with grading.
Some faculty also worried, as students did, that changing grading would harm students’ chances at competitive schools, jobs and other opportunities. The committee proposing the change argued that students would be able to more effectively distinguish themselves through academics, rather than having to rely on extracurriculars; that the new policy would be highlighted on transcripts; and that the cap on A’s — and not A-minus grades — should limit the effect on grade-point averages.
Examining grading is part of a broader effort to recenter academics at Harvard after the pandemic disruptions. Allowing a year before implementation — a revision to the proposals added earlier this spring — gives faculty time to adjust and plan for the change.
The proposal suggested courses should be appropriately challenging, so that an A-minus reflects mastery of the material and an A signifies exceptional work.
“I have a great and wonderfully simple way of handling grading,” Robert P. George, the legal scholar and political philosopher, wrote in an email. “It has worked brilliantly for me in my 41 years at Princeton and in academic life (including a few stints as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School).
“Here it is. I give each student the grade he or she deserves. That’s it.”
The lowest passing grade according to his grading standards for two of his classes, a D, he defines as, “A deeply flawed paper.” The standard for an A: “A brilliant and flawless paper that also has some element of originality in it, which makes the person grading the paper think.”
He rarely gives a D. And he rarely gives an A.
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