Harvard faculty have approved a plan to curb grade inflation by limiting the number of A grades professors can issue, capping years of debate over whether having top grades from the nation’s oldest university accurately reflected truly exceptional work.
Supporters say the new policy will restore meaning to grades and better distinguish high-performing students in an environment where top marks became both common and widely expected. Critics argued the plan undermines faculty autonomy and imposes an arbitrary quota on academic achievement.
Under the newly adopted policy, which takes effect in fall 2027, instructors can award A’s to no more than 20% of enrolled students, plus four additional students. In a class of 20, for example, a professor could give no more than eight A’s. In a class of 80, the limit would be 20. No limit applies to other grades, including A-minus grades.
The proposal to cap A grades passed overwhelmingly, with 458 professors voting 'yes’ and 201 voting 'no.’
“This is a consequential vote,” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s Dean of Undergraduate Education, said in a statement. “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.”
Claybaugh added the vote is a key step toward ensuring that Harvard’s grading system better serves its central purpose of giving students meaningful feedback and sustaining the academic mission of its undergraduate college.
“It’s a radical departure in the sense that faculty are accustomed to having pretty complete autonomy in giving out grades,” said Harvard government professor Steven Levitsky. “But I support it.”
“The status quo is a disaster,” Levitsky said. “We’ve completely obliterated the difference between A’s and A minuses, meaning students who do really good work— who work their tails off and really do outstanding work — get the same grade as students who are smart and know how to BS their way through an essay and do good, but not great, work.”
In addition to limiting A grades, faculty were asked to vote on two additional proposals. They also voted in favor of using average percentile rank, instead of average GPA, for internal consideration of prizes and awards. But faculty rejected a third proposal allowing instructors to potentially opt out of letter grades altogether for a specific course and instead evaluate student work as “unsatisfactory,” “satisfactory” or “satisfactory-plus” for exceptional performance.
The debate at Harvard reflects a broader discussion over grade inflation, and growing skepticism over how accurately college transcripts reflect a student’s academic achievement.
At Harvard today, more than half of all grades awarded to undergraduates in the 2024-25 academic year were A’s, according to a university report, up from just a quarter two decades before.
To supporters of widespread reform, those figures reflect a grading practice that no longer communicates meaningful differences in student performance. Grades exist to evaluate and then signal what students have learned, and when top grades become the norm, they contended, transcripts lose much of their value as academic records.
Several other selective colleges, including Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, Amherst and Wellesley have also experimented with policies aimed at controlling grade inflation with mixed results.
A recent faculty report at Yale University found that grade inflation there and at peer institutions rendered grading “almost meaningless as an academic measure.”
“It’s essentially only identifying the bottom end of the class and not enabling the higher end to distinguish themselves,” said Sarath Sanga, a Yale law professor who served on the committee that issued the report.
The committee recommended capping average course grades at B and adding more context to transcripts to help explain student performance. To date, Yale has not made any formal changes to its grading system.
“Grade inflation is one small piece of [declining trust in higher education],” said Yale sociology professor Julia Adams, who co-chaired the committee. “But it’s an important piece, particularly for the faculty whose ability to chart the performance of students in the faculty’s area of expertise is really one of the foundational aspects of faculty academic life.”
Not all faculty members at Harvard are persuaded by the intended goal of the new policy.
History professor Alison Frank Johnson, who has taught at Harvard for more than two decades, said she “hates” the plan, in part, because it assumes only a fixed share of students can produce outstanding work.
“For me, grades are an incentive to get students to do their very best work and to reflect on the work that they’ve done, not a way of ranking them against one another,” she said.
Johnson acknowledged that the number of students earning top grades in her courses has risen. But she said grade inflation ranks low among her current concerns in the classroom.
“I’m worried about AI. I’m worried about figuring out how to determine if my students are doing the work themselves,” she said. “There’s 1,000 things that I worry about in teaching.”
In an era of widespread generative artificial intelligence, she said, she increasingly emphasizes skills such as evidence evaluation, rhetoric, debate and effective writing.
“For historians specifically, being able to express yourself orally and in writing. To make an argument, to defend it with evidence, but also to know when what you’re reading is reliable,” Johnson said. “Why should somebody else tell me that the percentage of students who are going to excel at doing those things is going to be exactly 20?”
Students at Harvard largely acknowledge that grade inflation exists, but many expressed reservations about limiting A grades.
“I think my peers work extremely hard for their grades, so it makes sense that that would be the outcome,” said Michelle Balderrama, a Harvard senior from Virginia.
Balderrama said many students already balance demanding academics with internships, extracurricular activities and career pressures, particularly toward finding jobs in finance and consulting.
“Students are trying to distinguish themselves even beyond academics,” she said, adding that she worries the new system will discourage academic risk-taking.
Balderrama recalled taking a tough statistics class in which she earned a “B,” the only one on her transcript.
“It’s fine,” she said, laughing. “I’m glad that I took that course.”
But if Harvard limits the number of As available to earn in each class, she said, students may become even more strategic about protecting their GPAs.
Administrators say the new grading policy will be reviewed after three years.
This story is part of GBH’s podcast “College Uncovered”
