On Tuesday, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) delayed a much-anticipated vote on whether to approve a proposal to reduce grade inflation, postponing the decision until the group’s next meeting in early May. More than 200 faculty members attended this week’s gathering, held for the second time in a Science Center auditorium to make room for the larger-than-normal crowd. Attendees continued a lively discussion that began last month and approved a series of amendments to the original proposal.
Edgerley Family Dean of the FAS Hopi Hoekstra noted that the vote will be carried out by email, which means that all voting members, not just those who attend the meeting in person, will have the chance to cast a ballot on whether to approve the proposed changes to the grading system.
Developed over a period of months by a FAS subcommittee and unveiled on February 6, the proposal is intended to curb Harvard’s overabundance of A’s—an increasingly acute issue in recent years, and a subject of formal (and intense) faculty discussion since 2023. A FAS report released last October found that solid A’s comprised 60 percent of all undergraduate letter grades in 2025, up from just 24 percent in 2005.
In her introductory remarks on Tuesday, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh underscored the urgency and knottiness of the problem. Last September, she recalled, she had urged faculty members one last time to voluntarily reduce the number of A’s they awarded, in an effort to stave off the need for a mandatory cap. In response, the percentage of A’s dropped seven points last semester, to 53 percent. But course evaluation scores for instructors who’d given harder grades “plummeted,” Claybaugh said, and those faculty members worried their course enrollments (and job security for untenured faculty) would suffer, too. “A collective action problem,” she said, “can only be solved collectively.”
To fix the situation, the proposal recommends two major changes: placing a 20 percent cap on A’s in every course (with four additional A’s permitted for each class, regardless of size) and calculating internal College honors and prizes using students’ average percentile rank instead of grade-point average. If the proposal is adopted, instructors would be able to opt out of the grading cap, but work produced in their courses would instead be scored as satisfactory/unsatisfactory (essentially, pass/fail), rather than given letter grades.
The proposed reforms have been a hot topic of conversation on campus and beyond, including at a pair of College town hall meetings where students expressed overwhelming disapproval. During an extended back-and-forth at last month’s FAS meeting, faculty members voiced mostly measured support.
Although the faculty delayed a final vote on whether to implement the reforms, they did approve several amendments to the original proposal, including a plan to push back the start date for the grading reforms by one year, to the fall semester of 2027. Gates professor of developing societies Alisha Holland, who served on the FAS subcommittee that developed the grading proposal, said the extra time would allow faculty members to adjust their course design and rethink their methods for assessing student performance. (It would also give the registrar’s office time to accomodate the transition.)
Another amendment approved by the faculty clarified that all undergraduates enrolled in a course, not just those opting for a letter grade, would be counted toward the 20 percent cap. Holland explained that this change would help simplify implementation, in part because students sometimes wait until late in the semester to choose pass/fail instead of a letter grade. (Currently, students can elect to take any letter-graded courses pass/fail, though they need a minimum number of letter-graded credits to graduate.)
And finally, faculty approved a decision to split the proposal into three component parts, each to be voted on separately: the cap on A’s; the average percentile rank for calculating internal honors; and an extra grading tier of “satisfactory-plus” for students who perform exceptionally well in courses that are scored as satisfactory/unsatisfactory.
In the subcommittee’s original proposal, the grading cap and the ranking system were designed to complement each other, but Holland emphasized that the cap is the most crucial element. She explained that the subcommittee decided to break up the proposal to give faculty members more flexibility in their vote, allowing them to judge each component on its merits.
During the discussion, some faculty reactions echoed the debate at their previous meeting—there were complaints that the 20 percent quota seemed arbitrary and artificial, questions about fairness and instructors’ moral obligations to students, and worries that the reforms might undermine language courses by incentivizing students to enroll in classes below their skill level. Other faculty members debated the wisdom of the “satisfactory-plus” designation—one argued that it would simply recreate the problem of grade inflation, and another described it as a necessary antidote to the “free-rider problem” in group projects.
Annabel Kim, a professor in Romance languages and literatures, disputed the basic rationale for reforming the grading system. Instead, she said, FAS should jettison quantitative course evaluations, which factor into faculty members’ promotion, reappointment, and job market prospects—and which tend to rise and fall with students’ grades. Rather than computing a score, Kim said, FAS should ask students for written feedback on courses, which wouldn’t translate into a number. “I completely agree collective action is required. … Get rid of the Q scores,” she said, “and I think that liberates everyone to grade as strictly as they wish.” After she spoke, a round of applause erupted.
More than 10 faculty members were still waiting to speak when Hoekstra called an end to the discussion after an hour of comments. She said the conversation—and perhaps a vote—would resume in May. At the end of the meeting, faculty members entered a closed-door session with President Alan M. Garber.
