Harvard Votes to Impose 20% Cap on A Grades in an Effort to Reduce Grade Inflation

[ucbalumnus]

@ECCA2026

I’m not questioning that employers do it, just saying it does not make sense to me. And, to the extent it happens (unless the cutoff is incredibly low), it is an strong argument in favor of grade inflation so that students don’t get weeded out due to arbitrary hiring practices.

Skills-Based Hiring Grows, but College Students Don’t Fully Understand It indicates that a still substantial percentage of employers (42%) use a GPA cut-off, although this is down from 2019 (when it was 73%). It also mentions 3.0 being the typical GPA cut-off.

This older thread at Confessions of a Med School App Reader indicates that GPA and MCAT were used to prioritize the order in which applications were read at the medical school that the poster was at, in addition to auto-rejecting those below a threshold.