In a decision a long time in the making, nearly 70 percent of Harvard’s faculty has just voted to limit A grades in every course to roughly the top 20 percent of students.
The slow, devastating creep of grade inflation has lately swept its way across every tier of American education, including echelons of Ivy-league higher education like Harvard. Grade inflation at the K-12 level, enabled in some part by test-optional, no-zeroes policies established during the pandemic, leads to a dearth of real student learning as grades lose their meaning. That impacts both the student (who now knows less than they should) and the school (whose graduates will not succeed as they should). At this systemic scale, grade inflation resets social expectations about acceptable GPAs for collegiate acceptance, competitive job applications, or further graduate study. When the majority of students receive an A, a B conveys a disastrous understanding of academic material.
Harvard has been no exception to the structural pressure to hand out As. Last spring, a full two thirds of grades were A grades. Within the last 15 years, the median cumulative GPA at graduation had risen to 3.83 from 3.56. An undergraduate prize awarded to the graduating student with the highest GPA had a 55-way tie last year — split between a group of students who had only received A grades.
(Many secondary schools at all levels of academic rigor similarly struggle with grade inflation. Recently, about two thirds of all grades given at the U’s Twin Cities campus were A grades.)
A Harvard Office of Undergraduate Education report released last October ignited controversy over the report’s steely-eyed tone in diagnosing the grade inflation problem. In the report, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh argued that the rising share of A grades necessitated reforms to “restore the integrity of our grading and return the academic culture of the College to what it was in the recent past.” She also warned that Harvard’s current grading system is “damaging the academic culture of the College.”
Undergraduates overwhelmingly despised the proposal to cap A grades, with almost 85 percent opposing the move. Student writers complained that Harvard’s culture valued extracurriculars and networking opportunities highly, leaving little time for classes. They also noted (correctly) that other top universities in the nation also suffer from grade inflation, meaning that Harvard students with lower GPAs (but the same amount of actual course understanding) would be at a disadvantage for further opportunities.
It’s a fair concern. But what the undergraduates are missing (and will hopefully come to see) is that Harvard is uniquely well positioned to lead the nation’s academic institutions towards real, rigorous academic achievement. The temporary discomfort of undergraduates at one university today is a regrettable side effect of a meaningful course correction, if the reset can signal a new, strong course for many other schools.
For better or for worse, Harvard is widely perceived as the pinnacle of American higher education. The signals that it distributes matter. Should an Ivy League education consist of four years of lush networking, or a rigorous academic formation? Harvard’s faculty just voted to re-center actual learning, and their choice will be echoed in other universities’ discussions.
Undergraduate frustration is understandable, but not a legitimate reason to dismiss a much-needed reform impulse. Plus, the resume-seeking Harvard students themselves aren’t actually served by a glut of A grades. When high GPAs are ubiquitous, students must turn to extracurriculars to distinguish themselves, exhausting themselves in the process as they lose focus on their desired course of study. The short term squeeze of cutting a few extracurriculars to study more will lead to more actual learning. Healthy progress takes time, and Harvard leadership like Dean Claybaugh have wisely taken the long view. She has previously written,
We owe our students a functioning grading system. Specifically, we owe them grades that send clear signals, that give them a good sense of their strengths and weaknesses and that communicate their areas of distinction to employers and admissions committees…We owe our students much more than that. We owe them an education that is meaningful as well as rigorous.
All other Harvard grades (including an A minus) remain uncapped. Most Harvard students will still be able to enjoy their extracurricular pursuits while still graduating with a strong GPA.
To be clear, the new cap is an imperfect solution to a runaway problem. Harvard students are not known to be Philistine slackers, after all. What if a course contains many students who deserve an A?
One part of the new policy aims to give some wiggle room, especially to small, collaborative upper level seminars. The actual rule is a “twenty percent plus four” approach, meaning that an additional four students can receive an A grade in addition to twenty percent of students in the class. In a NYT op-ed, Jason Furman and David Laibson write:
Every proposal that was floated, including this one, has downsides and unfair cases. The 20-plus-four approach, for example, would penalize a class that had unusually many talented and hard-working students. But it provides an easy-to-understand, workable solution to the grade inflation that plagued the old status quo. So we chose it.
Other elite institutions have also created artificial approaches to motivate students towards academic success. It is standard practice, for instance, for all law schools to grade their students on a curve. If students want to be recognized as the best in the class through an A grade, that designation should mean something.
Now, Harvard’s experiment in grade reform takes flight — and may face significant challenges. As Harvard professor emeritus Harvey Mansfield has long pointed out, the decades of grading inflation at Harvard has been fostered by a collective action problem among the faculty. Their recent vote signifies that they’re ready for a change. But the social pressures for high grades and worried undergraduates will remain, meaning that Harvard faculty will have to stay the course and refuse to back down on the new policy.
There are challenges, but the news should bring optimism. Strong leadership at Harvard can signal systems-wide change, refocusing the classroom on academics and devaluing a perfect, stress-inducing GPA. Let’s hope that will be the case.
