As most people involved or interested in the workings of elite higher education have presumably heard by now, in May 2026 the Harvard faculty voted to impose a cap on the number of A grades given to undergraduate students.
I took the time to read through the report, penned by undergraduate dean Amanda Claybaugh, and unsurprisingly I have a few thoughts on matter.
First, the resolution, which caps the number of A’s at 30% plus four additional students in a given class, applies only to straight A’s—the number of A-minuses is unaffected. So, to be clear, in a five-person seminar or tutorial, every student could still receive an A. Thus, the smallest upper-level classes will be largely unaffected.
Second, based on the discussions I’ve read, a common misconception seems to be that the decision was made solely in response to the fact that too many A grades were being given, even though that those grades were deserved.
As the report makes clear, however, that is not the case at all. Rather, the problem is that A’s are being broadly awarded in cases where they are clearly not justified, and often in ways that make a mockery of the grading system. As Claybaugh writes:
In the view of faculty, grades currently distinguish between work that meets expectations or fails to meet expectations, but beyond that grades don’t distinguish much at all. “Students know that an ‘A’ can be awarded,” one faculty member observed, “for anything from outstanding work to reasonably satisfactory work. It’s a farce.” Or, as another faculty member put it more delicately: “There’s not much resolving power at the top.” As a result, students don’t always have an accurate sense of how they are performing or where their strengths truly lie.
So much as the general public may have the impression of Harvard as a place populated exclusively by geniuses who must therefore be capable of churning out A-level work in any subject they might pursue, the report gives lie to that idea.
Moreover, the report makes clear that the subpar work in question is often being done on assignments less challenging than those given in the past. Like most institutions, Harvard has had to grapple with a post-Covid cohort of students who arrive on campus less prepared to do the kind of lengthy, substantive humanities/social science reading and writing assignments that were standard even a decade ago.
A concurrent problem, of course, is the massive incidence of grade inflation in high schools. Not only are freshmen now more likely than ever to enter Harvard having never received anything below an A, but—particularly since the pandemic and the introduction of LLMs, with secondary-school administrators willfully turning a blind eye to wide-scale cheating—those A’s also mean less than ever.
This is turn means, as Claybaugh states, that students have a less realistic assessment of where they actually stand academically, and as a result they have less experience grappling with even the smallest perceived failure. Given the pressure on instructors of all levels to earn strong reviews as well as to avoid the hassle from students, parents, and advisors, the pressure to inflate grades must be unbearable. While not every undergraduate at Harvard comes from a privileged background, the percentage of students who are used to getting what they want—and who are accustomed to having pressure applied to the requisite people until they get it—is undoubtedly higher than it is elsewhere.
In this regard, the resolution represents an attempt, albeit a very modest one, to re-introduce an element of reality back into the grading process.
Is it the best solution? Almost certainly not. It is even a good solution? At least from an optics perspective, it doesn’t strike me as particularly strong. Regardless of how routinely students are being given top marks for subpar work, the theoretical possibility that they might, in some circumstances, be deprived of a grade they deserved is enough to make most people reject it on principle.
Americans are increasingly suspicious of elite institutions of higher education, and this policy will undoubtedly give them even more reason to be mistrustful.
Why, people wonder, can’t faculty members just adopt tougher grading policies or, alternately, make their coursework more demanding so that fewer students end up with top grades.
That is an entirely reasonable question, but realistically, grade inflation is a large-scale problem that is too big for individual faculty members to combat on their own. For a solution to have any teeth, a coordinated, university-wide policy is the only practicable response.
And in regard to why faculty cannot just make coursework more rigorous, a 2023 Crimson editorial suggested that faculty could “support students’ mental” health by, for example, “implementing more lenient policies, such as excused mental health days, flexible deadlines, and extension banks” (although, as the author slyly concedes, it’s “ultimately their decision”).
So good luck with that.
To people who argue that that letter grades are of limited value and that Harvard should adopt a Pass/Fail system (as is already done in some professional schools), I would respond that In a sense, Harvard is already functioning on this model, with A’s on one side and everything from A- to F on the other. Given that A-range grades, comprising both A and A-, make up around 80% of total undergraduate grades, the resolution will do absolutely nothing to guarantee a change in this binary distribution; it will merely shift the balance to a somewhat higher proportion of A-minuses. Furthermore, given that many Harvard undergraduates are clearly comfortable coasting academically, there is nothing to suggest that replacing A and A- with P and F would somehow cause them to apply themselves enthusiastically merely for the love of learning.
In that light, the resolution’s obvious shortcomings speak to the level of desperation among the faculty, and to the sense that matters have gotten so far out of control that it is necessary to do something, no matter how unpopular, to reign them back in. This sense is particularly acute because we are, by and large, talking about a very astute, very savvy group of individuals who are generally quite good at thinking through the results of their actions. (NB: I worked administrative job in a humanities department at Harvard for several years post-college, and I also grew up a few miles from the university; it’s an institution I am deeply familiar with.)
For me, though, the most worrisome moment of the report comes when Claybaugh points out that of the students surveyed regarding the cap, only one was able to identify grades as an assessment of how well course material had been learned rather than the amount of effort involved in learning it.
There is, of course, no objective way to assess effort. What a student perceives as impossibly arduous may in fact be, from a professor’s standpoint, the bare minimum. And on the contrary, it is entirely possible that some students will absorb very challenging material with ease: their competence may in fact be disproportionate to the amount of work they put in.
To be fair, students cannot be blamed here: it’s clearly a message they’ve absorbed from teachers and parents and all the other adults who told that them that their perfect report cards were the result of their efforts rather than what they knew. University admissions offices themselves play a role, too: how many of them tell applicants directly that their transcript “tells us how hard you’ve worked”? You can’t exactly fault students for internalizing that belief!
But even beyond the grades issue, the problem is that this viewpoint serves to delay recognition of—or perhaps to deny entirely—the reality that it is sometimes possible to work incredibly, phenomenally hard and still fall short of your goals. That is an unpleasant, often painful life lesson, but accepting it is an important part of growing up and of reconciling oneself to the world. Eventually, you get up, you dust yourself off, you figure out what you need to do to be successful next time, and you try again. To prevent young adults from learning this is to keep them in an extended state of childhood (which for some adults is, consciously or not, perhaps the point).
One more thought, regarding the argument that the grading cap will hinder collaboration among students. To be sure, Harvard can be an exceedingly competitive place, and there is certainly a case to be made for encouraging cooperation. At the same time, however, there is also a case to be made for competition as a driver of excellence—if the current situation has revealed anything it’s that when students come to expect maximum rewards for mediocre work, they have no incentive to strive for anything higher. Indeed, they have no motivation to learn what truly excellent work even looks like.
Incidentally, I would point out that despite periodic grumblings about the selectiveness of certain Harvard extracurricular groups, no one would seriously suggest that, say, anyone who shows a moderate interest in journalism deserves a spot on the Crimson editorial board, or that any hard-working high school violinist could occupy the first chair in the HSO. Why? Because those achievements actually mean something. The fact that this logic cannot be extended to grades reveals just how un-seriously academics are viewed. But universities reap what they sow: students who are admitted to the Ivy League primarily on extracurricular grounds—again, as is necessary when inflated grades and test scores make it all but impossible to distinguish between applicants academically—will continue to ascribe primary importance to those activities.
In any case, it will be interesting to see how this experiment pans out. In the early aughts Princeton and Wellesley attempted to impose caps, ultimately without success: Princeton’s quietly ended in 2014, Wellesley’s five years later. Will Harvard have more success in reigning things in? Without a doubt, much of the higher ed world will be watching.