“Harvard faculty vote to limit A grades for undergraduates In a closely watched vote, the faculty took strong action to combat grade inflation “
”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.”
From The Harvard Crimson, without any subscription or email address wall, and a link to a page with the actual proposal that was voted on:
It passed with 69.5% of the faculty votes cast.
Note that the 20% + 4 limitation on A grades does not include A- grades (which are 3.67 in calculating GPA for Harvard purposes, although professional schools like medical and law schools have their own grade point values for them).
Not surprising: “Students overwhelmingly disapproved of the proposal. Nearly 85 percent of respondents to a February survey administered by the Harvard Undergraduate Association said they disapproved of the proposal.”
And I agree with this: “An A will once again be what Harvard’s guidelines have long said it is: a mark of extraordinary distinction.”
It would be nice if other universities followed suit so there was some consistency in GPAs for grad programs (and also employment).
On the one hand, in a class full of very strong students, even at the level of Harvard, in some cases there are going to be a few students who stand out as being particularly strong and particularly good at whatever that particular class is teaching. If the entire class gets an A, then there is no way to distinguish these students.Limiting the A’s to 20% of the class while allowing a lot of A- grades seems like a way to do this. Just as one example, a graduate program might prefer to accept a few students who are particularly strong in their major, rather than a few students who were able to get A’s in everything including their worst subjects (such as art history for students majoring in math or engineering or medicine/premed). If every math major gets an A in every math class, how do you know who are the students who deserve to get into a graduate program?
There are a lot of students at Harvard who come in familiar with getting a lot of A’s and pretty much nothing else. If you are in a class where pretty nearly everyone had at most one or two B’s in their life before arriving at Harvard, then it is going to be very tough to get A’s and a lot of students, maybe almost everyone, are going to get grades that are disappointing compared to what they are used to.
There are a few other highly ranked schools which allow A+ grades, but give them out very frugally. Personally I would prefer this approach. However, I do think that there should be some way to give a higher grade to someone who is in the top 10% or top 20% of the class.
I think that it is appropriate that the A restriction does not apply to A- grades. It would seem highly likely that at many classes at Harvard there are a lot of students who deserve to get at least an A-.
Fundamentally I struggle to grasp the idea that Harvard needs to “limit” how many A grades they award. Are the classes that easy where everyone gets an A? I get that if a class has 100 students and they all score above 95%, then you can’t “limit” because everyone did well. On the other hand, if the test was harder, and the class score follows a nice bell-shaped curve, the it would be very easy to assign the top 15% to get the A.
Why can’t the professors make tests harder to separate out the truely talented from everyone else? I can’t imagine in STEM it would be difficult to make tests harder. I get in Arts/Humanity/Social science, it’s more difficult due to the arbitray nature of the subject matter, but in Hard Sciences? What am I missing?
Traditional curves that distributed the grades across the letters seemed unfair to me as it was possible that everyone had mastered the material, so why should some fail? If I understand, that’s not what this is. It can put the bottom of the curve at a B. Or even an A-.
I find it perplexing that excellent students lack the resilience to endure a B or C – to recognize that their work is satisfactory but not exceptional - or to recognize that very good work could be better still. And to be fair, this is hardly a problem unique to Harvard. Harvard is in a position to influence this troubling trend in higher ed. If they can do it, so can everyone else. While students may object at the outset, a wider grade distribution can be both liberating (it’s only a problem not to get an A when everyone else has them) and great feedback all in one.
It may be less liberating when grades or GPA can be compared across colleges. For example, employers and professional schools may have first pass GPA cutoffs that apply regardless of college.
Something similar can apply to high schools withe respect to grade inflation and college admission.
In my experience- and speaking only for the employers I’ve worked for (including a few of the allegedly “prestige obsessed” companies) there is a sliding scale, no matter what the “policy” might be.
Cornell engineering? We really didn’t care what the GPA was. You’d have to be a magician to make it out with an engineering degree by not taking some of the hardest and crazy curved courses. And employers know it. So whenever we’d interview a kid who’d say “I thought with a 2.9 my life was over” we’d have to reassure them- this is what holistic means. If there were other things on the resume that indicated work ethic, ability to apply oneself, extreme analytical smarts, high degree of intellectual curiosity and technical capability, leadership- the GPA is the least important part of the background, all things being equal. Other departments at less rigorous colleges/programs? Sure. Nobody at the “prestige obsessed employers” is falling over themselves to interview the 2.9 GPA in “International Business” from Eastern Genovia State where the Business Honors Society includes anyone with a 3.0 or better.
It’s specifically 20% +4 for all classes, but the +4 has increasingly large impact as class size decreases. Example maximum percent “A” grades is below. As noted this is maximum "A"s, not including A-.
Class size – Maximum % A’s
5 Students – Max = 100% A’s
10 Students – Max = 60% A’s
20 Students – Max = 40% A’s
50 Students – Max = 28% A’s
100 Students – Max = 24% A’s
In my opinion, grade inflation has clearly become a problem. In 2024-25, 66% of grades were A’s and 85% of grades were A/A-. In the Harvard senior survey, the median cumulative GPA was 3.9/4.0, with ~95% of class having an A/A- range GPA of >= 3.5. The portion of class receiving non-A grades have been rapidly dwindling and is on pace to drop to ~0 over next decade if trend continued in a linear manner.
However, I don’t think placing hard limits that apply the same way to all courses is the solution. One needs to consider portion of students doing A quality work, which is going to vary by class. For example, a remedial-type math class is likely to have a much smaller portion of class doing A quality work than a course on the rigorous/accelerated math track. It’s a similar idea for broad major underclass courses vs in major upperclass courses.
This type of hard limit approach has also been tried at Princeton a little over a decade ago and failed badly. Many/most professors didn’t follow the grading recommendations. It also contributed to some Princeton students having less success in post graduate activities, such as attending professional schools that closely look at GPA. Some example quotes from the linked report are below. I don’t see what Harvard changed to prevent a similar result.
A friend of mine whose kid (at another Ivy) wants med school is thinking of taking one of the more difficult pre-reqs at Harvard since it is well known that it isn’t as difficult. I’m sure that isn’t universal, of course, but that’s the reputation.
So in order words, you take a bunch of super intellegent and high achieiving kids, placed them in an environment where they are not being challanged enough, and complain they are all “mastering” the material but blame the grading system, instead of upping the ante and provide a true intellectually challenging experience?
I have seen or heard about some tests that made this point very solidly. I recall one homework assignment when I was an undergraduate student taking an introduction to probability theory that was an unsolved research problem. There was no one in the entire world (including the professor) who knew how to solve it. I tried and drew a complete blank. I also remember a couple of questions on exams that seemed to be of the “let’s see if anyone at all can answer this” range of difficulty. Later the professor who had put together one of these exams told me that only 2 students (out of more than 100) had even tried to solve the problem. I have heard of exams in premed classes that appeared to be designed again to separate the strongest students from the merely excellent students. All of these were in STEM fields.
If the professor is not allowed to give out more than 20% A grades, it would seem that they almost have to put something on an exam that only 20% of the class can handle. Otherwise, what do they do if 30% of the class have 100’s on every exam and every homework problem?
I don’t know what the normal grade breaks in that class are, since it’s traditionally heavily curved. Maybe only 10% deserve the curved A. Maybe 70% do. But I would expect a lot of whining over point deductions
I suppose that grade inflation has been affected by student evaluations. Evaluations done after a class is finished as well as sites like Rate My Professor. Access to jobs, tenure and even salary can be tied to these evaluations. What is going to happen now when the students (customers) are unhappy with an A-?
Sometimes with all the competition in our culture, people forget the reason for grades. So do they reflect mastery of material, or extraordinary distinction. Personally I prefer the former. Better for everyone’s mental health.
One of my kids had a math teacher in high school who announced at the beginning of class that everyone would be getting an A if they tried to do the work. Tests were taken together so students helped each other. My kid loved it and learned a lot helping others (and being helped). Of course some parents went crazy because they wanted their kids to stand out.
What is actuallly wrong wtih most students getting A’s? Is the real issue that faculty need to stop dumbing down classes to get reviews, or are all the students actually mastering the material and doing well?
That’s what I thought about when I saw the news. Perhaps the professors have been feeling pressured into giving many more A grades than they actually feel are deserved, due to these external factors. Establishing a university-wide policy is one way for professors to avoid being targeted individually as harsh graders.