Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences will vote next month on whether to cap the number of A grades that instructors can assign in each course, effectively cutting in half the percentage of students who earn A’s.
Under the proposal, developed over the past year and a half, instructors would be allowed to dole out A’s to as many as 20 percent of the students in their class, plus an additional four students. That means in a class with 10 students, for example, up to six could receive A’s. In a class with 100 students, up to 24 could receive A’s. A’s would become an indicator of extraordinary work, and A-minus grades would not be limited.
The proposal was developed in direct response to rampant grade inflation at the university, where 66 percent of Harvard undergraduates earned A’s and 84 percent earned an A or A-minus in 2024–25. “It’s kind of nutty,” said Steven Levitsky, a Latin American studies professor at Harvard. “We’ve completely erased the distinction between an A and A-minus.” He called the proposal to cap the top grade the “least bad solution.”
“Churchill once described democracy as the worst system of government except for all of the other alternatives that have been tried, and that’s how I view this reform,” Levitsky said. “It’s clumsy, arbitrary and represents some degree of invasion into faculty autonomy. It is not ideal. But the alternative is the status quo, and the status quo is awful.”
Grade inflation at Harvard, and many other selective universities, has been a topic of discussion for decades. Princeton University overhauled its grading system in 2004, capping the number of A-pluses, A’s and A-minuses in each department, but repealed the policy a decade later. Since then, the number of A and A-minus grades has exploded: During the 2024–25 academic year, A-pluses and A’s made up 45 percent of all Princeton grades, up from 15 to 20 percent between 1985 and 2014.
Despite ongoing conversations at Harvard, and Yale University’s plans to begin similar discussions, Princeton is not considering a change to its grading policies.
“The fact that there is interest in Cambridge and New Haven to change their grading policies in light of their own data is a matter for those institutions to consider,” Dean Michael Gordin told Inside Higher Ed in a statement. “We have no plans to do so here.”
A-range grades weren’t always so abundant at Harvard. During the 2014–15 academic year, 43 percent of all grades issued to Harvard undergraduates were A’s and 26 percent were A-minuses. Two years before that, 35 percent of undergraduates earned A’s and 27 percent earned A-minuses. The proposed 20 percent cap would bring the number of A’s down to 35 percent—in line with 2012–13 numbers.
The number of A grades rose due to “a collective action problem,” said Stuart Shieber, a computer science professor and chair of the Office of Undergraduate Education’s subcommittee on grading. Students are motivated to seek A’s by any means possible, and faculty are motivated to give them, he explained.
“Any individual faculty member who decides, ‘Oh, I’ll adjust my grades to more accurately reflect the actual grading rubric that Harvard College stipulates’ will end up giving much lower grades. And the net effect will be students will vote with their feet and take other classes,” Shieber said. “The general view based on actual grading practice, by faculty and students, is that the default grade is the A.”
One of the goals of the grade cap is to refocus students on academics, said Alisha Holland, a political scientist and member of the grading subcommittee. The Office of Undergraduate Education documented a rise in the number of students dedicating more time to extracurriculars than to their studies, the grading proposal states.
“Students invest so much time and energy in their extracurriculars and in competing for offices in their extracurriculars, and I think part of that is a result of the fact that there aren’t ways that they can really stand out in the classroom,” she said.
Holland is familiar with grade caps. She was a student at Princeton when the university implemented its limit on A-range grades, and a faculty member there by the time it was repealed. But living with the cap as an undergrad ultimately helped lead her to her current discipline, she said.
“I started at Princeton thinking I wanted to be a chemistry major. Turns out I hated chemistry,” she said. “I then went to switch to political science, and I remember calling my dad, and he said, ‘Sure, you think you like political science, but you just got an A because they grade easier.’ I remember it was powerful to be able to say back to him, ‘No, we have a cap on A’s. That means that the same standards are being used in chemistry and political science,’ and that was providing me meaningful feedback about where my strengths were.”
To say that students have reacted negatively to the A-cap proposal would be an understatement. In a February article in The Harvard Crimson, one freshman said the cap would create so much pressure on students that “life wouldn’t be worth that much to live.” Others have told the student newspaper they believe the change would diminish the value of a Harvard education, discourage collaboration and increase feelings of competition among students. Several students have written op-eds lamenting the plan.
When Harvard’s initial report on grade inflation was released in November, one freshman called it “soul-crushing.”
“The whole entire day, I was crying,” she told the Crimson. “I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just sobbing in bed because I felt like I try so hard in my classes, and my grades aren’t even the best.”
What’s in an A?
One of the biggest challenges in grading reform is getting everyone—students, faculty, administrators, parents, employers—to agree on what a grade means, said Ethan Hutt, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education and co-author of Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To).
Typically, grades are interpreted one of two ways: as an indicator of a certain level of performance, which theoretically allows everyone to get an A, or as an indicator of performance relative to others, which necessarily limits the number of possible A’s. Judging by the way Harvard students have discussed the grading proposal online, most of them view A’s as an indicator of objective subject mastery—so long as they master the material, they should earn an A.
Grades are, ultimately, a messaging tool, Hutt said.
“A grade on a transcript is a message to a student about how they did in the class, and maybe whether they should persist in that field. We know that different people—especially women in STEM, for instance—are very sensitive to those kinds of signals. They respond to grades,” he said. “You’re also sending a message to a future audience. You’re telling [them]: All Harvard students are great.”
Harvard does not dole out A-pluses, Holland explained, so there is currently no way to reward students for extraordinary work beyond the level of subject mastery. If implemented, A-minus grades would be given to students’ for “work whose excellent quality indicates a full mastery of the subject,” according to the proposal. A’s, on the other hand, would indicate “extraordinary distinction.”
Without a cultural change in the way students view grades, any kind of grade cap is unlikely to soothe their stress, Hutt said. “Because everyone’s getting an A, it’s now a catastrophe to get an A-minus. You can cap things, but you’re just going to move the catastrophe down. When students are anxious about grading changes, what they’re often articulating is an anxiety about how this will be viewed by a future audience. Will someone else understand that my school capped their grades?”
In Harvard’s case, the answer is likely yes. If the A cap is implemented, each student transcript would include a “pithy” explanation of the grading change, as well as an accompanying letter so that readers understand it, said Shieber, the computer science professor.
Also included in the grading proposal is an internal percentile rank system, through which each student would be measured against other students in the course. A student’s percentile rank would not appear on their transcript or be available to fellow students, parents or other external parties, Shieber said. Instead, it would help signal to faculty which students should earn distinctions like the Sophia Freund Prize, which is currently awarded to students “graduating summa cum laude who [have] the highest grade point average.”
Like A’s, the number of Sophia Freund Prize awardees has skyrocketed in recent years. Between the 1989–99 and 2016–17 academic years, somewhere between two and eight students were awarded the prize each year. During the 2024–25 academic year, 55 students won the prize.
Levitsky said the escalation has to stop, regardless of whether students get on board with any grading change proposal.
“This will take an adjustment—a couple of years of students will suffer,” he said. “But right now we’re getting to a point where an A-minus is unbearable, but it needs to become bearable again.”
