At a packed town hall at the Barker Center this week, Harvard faculty and students confronted a question that has hovered over the College for years: has grade inflation eroded the meaning of a Harvard transcript?
About 30 students and faculty members attended the event, sponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), to share their thoughts about a subcommittee proposal on grade inflation released on February 6. The proposal, still subject to a faculty vote, would make two significant changes to the College’s grading policy: instituting a 20 percent cap on A’s in every course (with four additional A’s permitted for every class, regardless of size) and calculating internal honors using average percentile rank instead of grade-point average.
At the town hall, students expressed overwhelmingly negative reactions to the proposal, citing concerns ranging from increased competition among peers to the arbitrary nature of the proposed cap number itself.
Some warned that a cap on A’s could reduce collaboration among students—making classes all about competition. Several first-year students voiced worries about unfairly bearing the brunt of the new policy or serving as guinea pigs for an experiment whose long-term consequences remain uncertain.
Some students argued that the policy would unfairly impact students who have to take large lecture-style courses in the sciences and would make students less inclined to take the University’s most notoriously challenging courses.
Several professors at the town hall also voiced anxiety about the proposal, saying it would be difficult to select among students close to the cutoff required for an A mark—and that a fixed cap on A’s could make student’s grades dependent on factors outside their control, such as the performance of peer classmates in any given semester.
Some argued that a better alternative would be to make courses harder, raising standards so that grades shift naturally, in proportion to individual effort and performance.
But committee members said the cap would not necessarily produce zero-sum competition. They said faculty already judge students’ work against benchmarks from previous years rather than strictly against their current classmates.
The goal of the proposal, they said, would be to establish a shared commitment that “extraordinary distinction”—the standard that the College handbook currently imposes for earning an A—is not effectively the average. The cap, proponents said, would reset expectations. An A-minus would signal “total mastery” while an A would represent something more: original or creative application and synthesis, including “new knowledge.”
Faculty who favored the grade inflation proposal also argued students have rarely been deterred by the challenge of the University’s most mythically difficult courses; rather, they took hard courses because of their rigor.
The conversation touched on how other universities are handling a pervasive issue of grade inflation. If Harvard acts alone, some students asked, will its students be disadvantaged in graduate admissions or in job markets that continue to compare raw GPAs across Ivy League institutions?
Some noted that Yale University is considering similar grade inflation reforms, while Princeton University adopted a grade deflation policy in 2004 before later rescinding it. Some suggested that if Harvard makes explicit changes to its grading policy, peer institutions may follow.
Several faculty noted that Harvard has already made national news on the issue, with stories in major publications such as The New York Times recounting the fact that the majority of grades at the College are currently solid A’s. A formal move to increase the value of an A mark at Harvard would only make students’ diplomas more attractive to graduate schools and employees, one professor argued, because it would signal the push toward rigor and originality of work generally being produced across the new grading landscape.
Some faculty described a generation conditioned to view a 4.0 as the necessary ticket to future success. They insisted, however, that few pathways truly demand perfection. Doctoral programs in physics, for instance, weigh research experience and letters of recommendation heavily. Medical schools do not reject applicants for a single A-minus in an introductory course. A reset, they argued, could free students to pursue genuine intellectual challenge without fear that a single grade will derail their futures.
The grade inflation proposal is subject to a vote of the full faculty, likely this spring—and could undergo changes from its current form. Faculty are expected to discuss it at the next FAS meeting on March 3.
