Harvard Cuts A Grades by Nearly 7% This Fall

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NOTE: This story is in response to the report detailed here: The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A (re: Grade Inflation at Harvard and Beyond)

Harvard faculty awarded significantly fewer A grades in the fall, cutting the share of top marks by nearly seven percentage points after the College urged instructors to combat grade inflation, according to a Monday afternoon email obtained by The Crimson.

The email, which was addressed to Faculty of Arts and Sciences instructors and sent by Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh, reported that the share of flat As fell from 60.2 percent in the 2024-2025 academic year to 53.4 percent in the fall.

The decline follows a 25-page report Claybaugh released in October 2025 arguing that grade inflation had rendered the College’s grading system unable to “perform the key functions of grading” and encouraging stricter academic measures, including standardized grading across sections and in-person final exams.

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Good for them!

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Over 50% still seems pretty high ?

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For sure but it’s a start!

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If you bring in an overwhelming number of those who are among the very best students in the country, why shouldn’t there be a high proportion of A’s. That’s what those students would be getting if they were attending a very goid but not elite college. Are they supposed to be penalized for going to a top college?

If they’ve done the work and have excelled, that should be reflected in their grade.

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You could argue the same for Oxbridge, who even with acknowledged grade inflation are “only” seeing around a third of the classes graduating with first class degrees. (Not sure about the number of actual firsts across all courses each year but that should be a good approximation).

*in fact you could argue it more for Oxbridge as they don’t have hooked applicants

In any case refer to Harvard’s report itself acknowledging a problem with the grading system.

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If Harvard is supposedly the place where “the best students in the country” attend, the level of the courses should be higher.

That is where you are mistaken. Nobody should get an A just for “having done the work”, even if they did the work well. If you are going to claim that Harvard had THE BEST STUDENTS, they need to do more than just “Do The Work”. They need to wow the instructor. They need to go above and beyond what is required by the syllabus.

If Harvard students are supposedly So Much Better than the plebians who attend public universities, shouldn’t their classes be more challenging too? Shouldn’t their performance be much better too? If these students are supposedly the top percentage of students by academics, shouldn’t the basic requirement for them be that they perform like the top students at other universities?

Shouldn’t a written assignment by a Harvard Student have an average quality that is at the level of the top students at another university? Why should an assignment that is only average for the class get an A, instead of a B or a C?

Grade inflation usually means that just doing the basic requirements of the syllabus will result in an A grade. I have seen the syllabi of Harvard classes and they are no more challenging than classes that are given in any other research university. The readings are not more extensive, they don’t go any deeper, and the assignments don’t require any more depth than those of most other research universities.

Are you also going to claim that Harvard students are better than MIT students? MIT doesn’t have the entire class of students who are accepted based on wealth, power, or fame (their own or their family’s). Yet they have far lower grade inflation.

The students at Michigan are as good as the students at Harvard, yet they also have MUCH lower grade inflation.

Grade inflation is correlated with the wealth and power of the families whose kids attend a college, as well as with how much the colleges depends on the families of their students and on alumni (when colleges have admission advantages for legacies).

That is why grade inflation is far worse at private colleges than at public colleges, and worse at colleges that are more dependent on their alumni and on student’s families for things like endowment.

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Whew! I’m exhausted after reading all that. I guess that you feel strongly about the matter. :wink:

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53% is pretty low considering how much harder their classes are. I’m at a Big Ten public flagship and most classes have a B+ average with anywhere from 40-70% of the class getting A’s (lower for freshmen-level weedouts, higher for 300/400-level electives)

Some classes like study abroad, research credit, PE, or even music/art classes are 100% As

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Their classes aren’t really that much harder, if they are harder at all, than equivalent classes at most flagships.

Even 53% is far too many A’s. Grade distribution for large classes should have more B grades than A grades. If a B is the grade that a student can get from successfully fulfilling all the requirements of the course, than, in a class filled with driven students, the most common grade should be a B. If As are the most common grade, that means that a student can earn an A by successfully fulfilling all the requirements of the course. That means that there is absolutely no place for actual excellence.

If Harvard classes were truly more challenging, grade inflation in Harvard (and in other private colleges) would not be faster and more extreme than at public universities.

BTW, while the academic achievements of matriculating students that Harvard is presenting on their CDSs (class rank and test scores) haven’t changed at all since 2008, the percent of A grades went up from a bit over 50% (in 2007) to 60%. In the 1990s is was far lower.

What has happened is not that there has been an increase the academic abilities of Harvard students. What has happened is that there has been pressure by parents to give their kid’s As for doing average work.

This is actually a case that is often justified, especially in the smaller classes. There is a lot of self-selection for these classes, and most students taking these classes are passionate about the topics, and work pretty hard. When I have taught these courses, almost all of the students went above and beyond the requirements of the Syllabus, and I have had classes where each of the teams has produced a final project that has wowed me.

Most large classes should a lower percent of As than a “weeding” class.

You can expect so-called “weeding” classes to have a higher percent of As than other classes because those are the classes in which students work the hardest. When I was a grad student, I was the TA for the basic intro bio for the pre-med sequence (at one of the higher ranked flagships). In my third year TAing, they raised the cutoff for an A from 85% to 90%. The percent of A and B grades did not change, even though the classes were identical.

However, the proportion of As was lower than 40%, because this was the late 1990s.

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Maybe Harvard College should consider revamping their grading system from “A to F” to something like “Superior-High Honors-Honors-Pass”.

Or, even better, sell sponserships and grade accordingly by major: For example: MBB, Deloitte, PwC, Other”.

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Upper level courses having higher grade distributions is not surprising, since they are populated by students in those majors (i.e. students who have the greatest interest and academic strength in the subject). Frosh level courses are more likely to have students who are less interested in the subject but need to fulfill a requirement. Also, students who flunk out are present as frosh but less likely to reach junior or senior level.

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I find some of the points you made very interesting and I’m happy to hear the opinions of others on them as well

As a current student, I find that an A- (3.7 or 3.67 depending on the school) is the new B. And getting a B (3.0) is the new C. Most if not all companies and grad schools now heavily prefer a 3.7+ GPA during recruitment season (exception being MBAs which focus more on work experience). And it’s not just post-grad: getting into competitive clubs, extracurriculars, honors programs, scholarships, study abroad opportunities also hinges on a 3.7+. In fact I think that a sub-3.0 automatically disqualifies you from many of these programs, as compared to 20 years ago where the bar was a 2.0 (hence Cs get degrees).

In regards to the difficulty of classes, having taken Introduction to Microeconomics in college, it was around 75% of the content of AP Econ and was also very generous with extra credit and exam curves amounting to 5-7% of your total grade. When I compare it to an Intro Econ class posted by MIT, they cover the same content in 8 weeks.

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The most recent NACE survey of employers that I could find mentioning the subject (2023) said that the most common GPA cutoff in recruiting new college graduates was 3.0 generally.

However, this may not be reflective of the elite jobs in management consulting and investment banking that Harvard students aim for.

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The referenced report says "Where the Class of 2015 had a median grade point average of 3.64 at graduation, the Class of 2025 clocked in at 3.83. " The maximum GPA at Harvard is 4.0 since there is no A+ grade, so the number of non-A grades appears to have been cut in ~half over the past 10 years (or B/B+ replaced with A-).

Do you think there is a corresponding increase in the quality of students, with the portion of students who do non-A work cutting in half over the past 10 years?

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I will agree that MIT classes (and Caltech) are indeed a level or two up from all but the other top engineering programs. MIT is also known for having very little grade inflation. Their average GPA is 4.1-4.2 on a 5 point scale. However, except for the F still being 0, everything else is shifted up, so 5=A, 4=B, etc. So that 4.2 is pretty much equivalent to a 3.2 average GPA, compared to Harvard’s average GPA of around 3.8.

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I never did attend nor take any classes at Harvard. I did attend a couple of universities that are similarly difficult for admissions. In my experience students at these highly ranked universities are all very smart. However, at least in any one particular class, they do not all perform at the same level. Even when every student is “Harvard smart”, there will be some students who stand out.

If everyone gets an A, then how does the professor note the difference (other than perhaps in a letter of reference)?

Some universities, Stanford comes to mind as an example, give out at least the possibility of an A+ grade. I can attest that getting an A+ in a graduate class at Stanford was not easy when I was there. I suppose that this is one way to distinguish the strongest students. However, Harvard does not give A+ grades. Maybe they should.

Given how strong the incoming students are at Harvard (and MIT and Stanford and 
), if 53% of students get an A in any particular class, then this would suggest that grading at Harvard is tougher than high school. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.

And I suspect that in most cases an employer will not care (a Harvard graduate is still a Harvard graduate), and graduate school admissions are likely to adjust to whatever grade scales Harvard uses.

However, I think that cutting down the number of A’s is perfectly reasonable.

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The “A-rate” that’s being reported is inclusive of A-minus grades (which are 3.7/4.0 usually) so the actual A (4.0/4.0) rate is less than half of that

I agree with what many of the posters have said - the minimum requirements for many jobs has been raised from ‘have a degree’ to ‘have a 3.0’, but this is a minimum standard for jobs like ‘speak English’ or ‘have no criminal record’. Even for non-elite jobs many firms are looking for a higher GPA (3.5+)

A- and B+ are the new Bs. B has become the new C.

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I have no idea if there was an increase in the quality of the students. What I do know is that Harvard accepted 6.2% of its applicants in 20011, the year that the class of 2015 entered, and accepted only 3.4% in 2021, the year that the class of 2025 entered. So, they became almost twice as selective over that intervening decade. I also know that a change of 3.6 to 3.8 gpa is very small.

Discussing this in the abstract without the benefit of a comprehensive study is absurd. Labeling it “grade inflation” is nonsense. The only thing that can come of that is an arbitrary cap on the number if A’s or a mandatory curve, which makes absolutely no sense.

Harvard is among a small group of colleges who are entrusted with the task of developing the potential of America’s “best and brightest”. If they are successful in getting them to excel, we should see a lot of A caliber work because these are students who are capable of producing at that level.

You seem to be assuming that they were doing it the right way in 2015 and that any change from that is the wrong way.

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But you’re ignoring that Harvard itself sees a problem here.

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