When I was teaching Harvard undergraduates a decade or so ago, a student shared a prophecy her mother delivered while dropping her off at campus for the first time. Pointing to one of the many placards emblazoned with “Harvard” near the Yard, the mother looked at her daughter and said: “Those are the last two A’s you’re ever going to need.”
That mother clearly understood something important, not just about the golden ticket a Harvard degree is thought to represent, but also about her daughter and about Harvard culture. She likely knew she had an overachiever on her hands and that a tireless pursuit of top marks could easily spoil her daughter’s time in Cambridge. What she did not anticipate was how her daughter’s experience of college would change when the A’s started raining down.
On February 6, a Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) subcommitee released recommendations for major changes in the College’s grading policy, aimed at curbing the grade inflation that has come to define Harvard’s academic enterprise. The suggestions will likely dominate conversations on campus this spring, following months of concern over Harvard’s grading excesses. A’s were commonplace by 2014, when I started teaching in Harvard’s mandatory first-year expository writing program, informally known as “Expos.” They were even more abundant when I left the program for a magazine job in 2021. Last October, the FAS released a report that quantified the change: solid A’s made up 24 percent of final grades in the College in 2005, 40.3 percent in 2015, and 60.2 percent by the spring of 2025. (Eliminating non-letter grades like pass-fail from the calculation makes the problem even more stark: nearly two-thirds of all letter grades are currently A’s.)
After the October report, a bevy of think pieces on grade inflation at Harvard emerged. Most invoke an archetypal Harvard student: blithely skating her way across campus toward permanently elite status, a tear forming at the corner of her eye at the mere mention of an A-minus. In this sketch, there’s a kernel of truth. Most of us who’ve taught here in the past 10 years have hosted at least a few students in our offices crying over their grades. After I gave one student a B as her final grade, she sent me a blunt email detailing all the reasons she deserved an A instead—a fit of pique that came across as entitled.
But I also suspect this portrait of the arrogant, A-bedecked Harvard student grows more out of preconceived notions of the College than from any understanding of how students experience grade inflation. Take my angry emailer, for example. What was she thinking her missive would accomplish? Did she imagine I would throw up my hands and say, “By God, you do deserve an A!” Beneath her Hail Mary note ran a strong undercurrent of desperation.
This brings us to how grade inflation generates a counterintuitive effect: instead of producing self-satisfied, complacent students, it supercharges their anxious striving. As Amanda Claybaugh, the dean of undergraduate education who authored the October grade inflation report, told me, “One might expect that a world where everyone got A’s would be a very relaxed world, but actually, it’s the most stressed-out world of all.”
Claybaugh, a professor of English, is driving the effort to reconsider academic evaluation at Harvard. Runaway grade inflation, she notes, may undermine the educational mission, since it’s unclear, when grades are this high, if adequate correction of student work is taking place, or if course material is genuinely challenging. Part of the broader FAS goal of “re-centering academics,” the grade inflation initiative is meant to preserve the value of a Harvard degree, which could be diluted as A’s proliferate and an impression of lax academic standards spreads beyond campus.
WHEN I SPOKE to Claybaugh last fall, she confirmed that my frustrated Expos students were part of a larger phenomenon in the College. Faculty teaching large introductory courses routinely field about 200 grade change requests for every exam, “which is an enormous amount of pressure and labor. And they grade very carefully in the first place,” she explained. “They also say that they feel students can’t take in the feedback they’re getting because they’re so fixed on arguing for why they need an A.”
The psychology driving this grade-frenzied atmosphere stems from the way A’s flooding the marketplace changes their value as a currency, rendering them both essential and trash at the same time. When you feel that everybody’s got an A, then you must get one, too—every time—or you have failed to keep up with the mainstream. Yet all the A’s in the world will still do zilch to get you ahead.
Several current undergraduates I spoke to described the stress this situation has produced among a student body determined to excel. “Grade inflation means there’s no way to tell a great student apart from a good student,” math concentrator Gil’i Zaid ’26 told me. “People who want to differentiate themselves can’t do it by taking a reasonable number of classes and doing well in them. You can only do it if you take six classes and get overwhelmed by work. Or through taking the regular four, then adding in four extracurriculars and pouring yourself into them.”
In turn, the swelling fear of not keeping up with the perfectly graded masses discourages students from taking academic risks. On campus, stories abound of introductory classes populated by enrollees who don’t need them—many have already taken a version of the same class in high school—but who are willing to repeat the material to have their A outcome in the bag. In those classes, if there’s a curve set by the highest or median score, students taking the class to actually learn the material are often left to claim the lower grades.
And instead of picking courses that might prove challenging or just exploratory, many students aggressively seek out “gems,” the new Harvard slang for “guts”: easy classes without rigorous grading schemes. Meanwhile, the number of students taking classes pass-fail drifts upward, as students cower before intimidating subjects and elect the route that obviates grading altogether.
In my Expos classes, the students’ risk aversion showed itself first during individual conferences, when I met with every person to discuss their drafts. One of the most common problems with first-year essays is that they often argue a fairly superficial thesis. One goal of the conferences, then, was to demonstrate to students how to engage more deeply with the course material so they could go home and craft an argument that was more complex and based on rigorous observation.
I was stymied when students fixated on leaving our talk with a fully articulated thesis statement that had been green-lighted by me. I would repeatedly steer them back to their assigned reading, suggesting strategies for finding patterns of evidence, only to have the students wildly pepper me with new thesis statements they came up with off the tops of their heads. Their urge to quickly receive a guarantee of an A was so strong it muffled my actual advice.
After the conference, terrified students would often email me their revised drafts repeatedly to get me to say they were “okay” before I graded them. On occasion, someone emailed me every couple of hours when I didn’t respond immediately. With one abject soul, I was able to track her miserable night by looking at the string of messages she dispatched through the wee hours, while I was sleeping. She had sent me her thesis statement over and over—with each successive iteration showing an almost imperceptible tweak—pleading with me to tell her if it sounded like an A thesis.
One enterprising freshman, seeking assurance that his A was nigh, looked me up online and realized I was a resident tutor living in one of the Quad houses—a good distance from the freshman housing in the Yard. On the night before the final version of his paper was due, he knocked on my bedroom door well after midnight, covered in sweat. He had hoofed it all the way from the Square, draft in hand, hoping to convince me to check it for remaining deficiencies before he turned it in for real nine hours later.
When students become this obsessed with grades, the student-teacher interaction is framed in transactional terms.
THESE ARE, as you can imagine, miserable situations for everyone involved. In fact, the part of grade inflation that possibly strikes closest to the heart of the educational mission is the way it has compromised the relationship between faculty and students.
When students become this obsessed with grades, the student-teacher interaction is reframed in crudely transactional terms. And in my experience, students often react to their grades in a way that suggests that they conceive of the grades’ significance very differently than their instructors do.
To me, the grades I awarded had an extremely localized meaning that reflected student performance on specific assignments. In my way of thinking, it would have been reasonable if students’ grades improved during the semester as they showed greater mastery of the course material.
But many students obviously believed their grades came closer to denoting their whole worth. I, as the instructor, acted merely as a giver of A’s, and my willingness (or lack thereof) to grant them in turn defined the value of the student, who would go out into the world and make money or attain status in proportion to her graded value. With this mindset, my students mostly received solid A’s with an attitude of relief rather than joy. Any grade below that, on the other hand, landed as deflating or even ruinous, depending on how GPA-dependent that student’s future plans were.
When students fear that any non-A grade might eliminate them from consideration in the next competition, they increasingly see faculty as a threat. Willa Fogelson ’26, a math concentrator, told me this can be a particular problem in departments where most students’ post-graduation plans require high GPAs. “Math majors are…sometimes the most afraid that they won’t get [an A],” she said. “That’s the crux of the issue from where I’m sitting. I would like to think there was a time when there was this inherent trust between students and professors, and I don’t think that exists anymore.”
According to Gurney professor of English literature and professor of comparative literature emeritus James Engell, a longtime thinker on the purpose of higher education, the disconnect emerges when students’ rising fixation on grades combines with increased time pressures on students and faculty, leading to fewer opportunities for face-to-face conferences where the discussion roams beyond grading. “You need to treat the student as a whole human being, not just a person trying to do well in a particular class,” he explained. “You get to sit down and get to know the student and understand where they’re coming from, what their background is, what their hopes are…When we completely separate evaluation and this broader advising, we’re going down a bad path.”
The Agatha Christie-worthy mystery that now haunts the campus is what level of work the students are actually doing amidst the torrent of A’s. This gets at the question of how much grade compression (the narrowing of the grade range) is reflecting grade inflation (the extent to which those grades are granted for lesser work than they used to be). Depending on whom you’re talking to, today’s students might either be megawatt stars—the best of all time, deserving of their higher grades—or faded shadows of previous generations.
Both viewpoints rest on at least a few shaky assumptions, including vague guesses about what Harvard students “used to be like.” At one Expos faculty lunch I attended, a chorus bemoaning the current state of literacy in the College dominated the clacking of forks against plates, until one instructor revealed she’d excavated a quote from one of the original Expos instructors in the 1880s (Expos was founded in 1872). It almost exactly matched the substance and tone of the complaining we had just been doing: the quality of student writing was shoddy, by Jove.
In truth, it’s hard to say how current Harvard students stack up compared to generations past. While modern students fought their way to the top of a much larger heap than in the days when the mob simply migrated from Exeter every year, they’re also a generation whose attentional resources have suffered from exposure to social media and other addictive technologies. Many experienced a style of “concerted cultivation” parenting—loaded up with activities to prepare them for the college admissions process—that taught them to instrumentalize every moment but wasn’t so hot for encouraging them to lounge around a full day with a novel.
So it makes more sense to think about what our students do well versus what they struggle with, and whether our grades reflect those realities. In my own classes, I frequently encountered reading comprehension issues serious enough to hamper the putative goal of a writing class—and even seemed to witness students’ reading skills degrading in real time. In my early Expos days, I liked to bring an old Lampoon parody of a Harvard student essay into class to read aloud together—with each person taking the next sentence round robin at the seminar table—as a lighthearted way to kick off a discussion of my students’ own papers. After several years, though, I noticed more and more students seemed unfamiliar with the vocabulary in the parody, with many now stumbling over words like “penchant,” “motif,” and “preponderance.” I finally stopped bringing the Lampoon piece to class, since by then the laughs had turned scarce and the faces had turned red with embarrassment.
These students were not puffed up with unjustified praise, like the entitled Harvardian of the grade inflation think pieces. They showed awareness that they were not performing as well as they should. In fact, I suspect many Harvard students recognize that they’ve occasionally received high grades for mediocre work in the College. Claybaugh told me she recently encountered a senior looking back on his time at Harvard who told her that he’d earned a lot of A’s he didn’t deserve. But every grade he got that wasn’t an A, he knew he did deserve.
Teaching Expos in the College, I came to recognize this mindset. Many students feel the inflated grades they’ve received compose a smooth edifice that surrounds them and could crumble at any moment to reveal the pockmarked reality of their performance. For some, this can become a source of shame, because their inflated A’s suggest their faults are unspeakable and must be hidden, whereas, for all they know, other students’ A’s are entirely deserved. Grade inflation then becomes a dimension of imposter syndrome that reflects other aspects of this generation’s coming-of-age experience. It is similar to looking repeatedly at a friend’s social media posts portraying her life as perfect, while knowing that your own posts were curated to obscure a multitude of flaws.
Grade inflation can be just as poisonous for students who believe absolutely in the legitimacy of their grades. I talked to one crying student who confessed that her plan at Harvard had always been to be one of the smartest in her cohort, before she earned a few subpar marks one semester. Now she believed she had to figure out a new identity, less founded on her intelligence. Her self-image was so premised on getting only A’s—a psychology imprinted by her grade-inflated environment—that a couple of minor breaches in her parade of perfect grades extending back through childhood was enough to limit her sense of her own intellectual potential.
AMID THE HAND-WRINGING over Harvard’s grade inflation report, some have suggested making every course pass-fail or eliminating grading completely. But letter grading won’t easily be replaced with other means of communicating how well students are doing. I can tell a student she’s improved, sure, but that concept sounds squishy and abstract, whereas saying her grade has risen from a B to a B-plus sounds like quantifiable progress. A more stringent grading system helps students believe that education is real because it creates friction. Without pushback, who is to say we are doing anything at all?
Engell told me this feeling of discomfort is central to his idea of what education is. “Education should be uncomfortable for students and faculty alike, meaning you’re challenged, you’re frustrated, you’re presented with ideas or points of view that you don’t accept when you initially hear them,” he said. “Education is not a comfortable business, nor should it be.”
Harvard Magazine Questionnaire: The True Cost of Grade Inflation
A faculty committee is recommending changes to grading at Harvard College to limit an overabundance of A's. Add your voice to the conversation. Responses may be published online and in print.
The next challenge for educators will be figuring out how to help students feel they’re working hard within a system that has meaning. The only time grade inflation became an explicit topic of conversation in one of my Expos classes, my students told me that the problem was not that many professors were giving high grades while a few were giving low ones—it was that the students had no idea when this was going to be the case. They described times when they had poured effort into a course, only to realize that students turning in a slapdash product had received the same grade. And they described other times, in other classes, when they were lulled into a sense of security and let their attention wander to an extracurricular or a personal issue, and then were given a much harsher grade than they were used to receiving for that level of effort. On that day, my students—beneficiaries and victims of grade inflation both—did not seem like anyone’s idea of an entitled Harvard student. They just seemed unmoored.
The February 6 recommendations propose two major changes to the College’s grading policy. One is to impose a 20 percent cap on the A grades in every class—with four additional A’s permitted per class to give more flexibility in small seminars that often attract advanced and highly motivated students. (There would be no caps on A-minuses, B’s, or lower grades.) The second is to calculate honors granted inside Harvard (such as Phi Beta Kappa) using students’ average percentile rank rather than grade-point average. Enacting these changes would require a full vote of Harvard’s faculty, likely to take place this spring.
Ultimately, curbing grade inflation will require cooperation from faculty and students—both of whom have reasons to resist reform. Claybaugh told me that a 2011 paper by Diker-Tishman professor of sociology emeritus Christopher Winship on the impossibility of eliminating grade inflation still haunts her. Winship coined the concept of the “low-low contract,” where faculty and students learn to ask very little of each other. As one of Claybaugh’s faculty colleagues put it to her, referring to the one-to-five range on student evaluations of teachers, “We give them all A’s, and they give us all fives.”
The October report also offered a glimpse of the hard road ahead, mentioning failed attempts to mitigate grade inflation at Princeton, Wellesley, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Yale. Even if Harvard’s effort succeeds, many students understandably fear it will only put Harvard students at a disadvantage when pitted against students from schools where grades remain inflated.
Most of the students I talked to about the grade inflation report, even while admitting grades are too high, took a defensive stance. They were already being worked to the point of exhaustion—and now Harvard was talking about making things harder yet? These conversations confirmed how entrenched grade inflation is in the modern educational landscape. To reinstate strict academic standards, Harvard will need to help students see how a world with fewer A’s could be a better one for all involved.
IN MY FINAL days teaching at the College, I sometimes thought of a famous Harvardian who was rumored to have gotten an (uninflated!) B in Expos: T.S. Eliot, A.B. 1910, A.M. ’11, Litt.D. ’47. I like to imagine it was his time in Expos that inspired him to write the lines from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” penned while he was still a student: “There will be time, there will be time…Time for you and time for me,/And time yet for a hundred indecisions,/And for a hundred visions and revisions.”
I can’t say why Eliot was mulling over the arc of time when he was 22. But it could help some modern-day College students to remember that they're young and have so many things yet to experience beyond Harvard. Since I was older than my students, I tended to have a different idea of what disaster looked like, and what it was possible to recover from.
Maybe even more than showing them how to write a bang-up essay, that’s the perspective I would have wished to share with my Harvard first-years as they embarked on four years here: You may find you don’t have time for a hundred visions and revisions. But it’s probably still true that you can settle for a B, and it won’t be the thing that sinks you.
Because if there’s a lesson to be learned from Eliot, who went on from Harvard to become one of the great American poets—and who in fact got D’s in his other classes that first year—it’s that your college grades are hardly the end of the story.
