Harvard caps – Harvard faculty have approved a plan to overhaul the college’s grading system, including a cap on how many A’s professors can award in each course. The policy—set to begin in fall 2027 and reviewed after three years—aims to make A’s “mean something again,” but
Massachusetts Avenue hums outside the Harvard Yard on June 9, 2026—the kind of day when visitors stop to rub the bronze foot of John Harvard while students move on, late for class and busy planning their next move.
Inside, the argument is about something students can’t just walk away from. Harvard has handed down a controversial grading overhaul: a cap on how many A’s professors can give, designed to restore what an “A” is supposed to mean.
The faculty plan has already been passed, and it’s not a small technical adjustment. Harvard is known for awarding A’s at a pace that makes other schools look restrained. More than half of all grades issued to undergraduates at Harvard last year were straight A’s. up from just a quarter 20 years ago.
To the people pushing for change, that steady climb has turned the grade into a blunt instrument—less a signal of learning than a default outcome. To the students who’ve built their identities, futures, and applications around high GPAs, the move feels like risk with no guarantee of payoff.
Sophomore Nayeen Das, a physics major from Lexington, Massachusetts, doesn’t sound offended by the need for rigor. He sounds alarmed by the logic of “curving down because other people also do well.” In Harvard Yard as he left class. Das argued that if students work extremely hard and reach a threshold. “I don’t think you should be curved down because other people also do well.”.
Senior Alexandria Westray, a government major from Pittsburgh, offered a similar worry. Both students said grade inflation is real—but they’re troubled that limiting A’s could harm them after graduation, when GPAs can weigh heavily in competitive job markets and grad school admissions.
In their view, the stakes aren’t theoretical. “Because you’re being compared to these students from other schools,” Das said. Westray framed it more sharply: “It’s a farce to say that there’s nothing distinguishing Harvard students just because we all have A’s.”
Harvard’s new policy takes aim at that “all have A’s” reality. Under the plan. the number of A grades in any given course will be limited to the top 20% of students. plus four additional A’s per class. The math is straightforward. In a class of 20, a professor can award no more than eight A’s. In a class of 80, the limit becomes 20.
The grading policy is set to take effect in the fall of 2027. Administrators will review it after three years.
Harvard faculty say the stated goal is to make A’s meaningful again.
The plan has also been teased by timing and culture in a way that underlines the tension students feel. When Harvard president Alan Garber congratulated the class of 2026. comedian and Harvard graduate Conan O’Brien joked that he would normally give an A plus—but “in keeping with upcoming Harvard policy. ” he adjusted the grade to a C minus. calling it “for the good of the school.”.
But for many students and professors, the “for the good of the school” line lands uneasily. They aren’t arguing against better teaching. They are asking what changes like these actually do to learning, opportunity, and fairness.
Tenured government professor Stephen Lewicki hopes the cap pushes against a campus culture where an A has become expected. He described how grading pressure can flow one way: if he gives an A minus, he expects complaints; if he gives an A, he avoids the hassle.
“All I aspire to here with this reform is getting kids used to getting A minuses,” Lewicki said. “The status quo is unacceptable, and so we’ve got to experiment. Even if there are some pitfalls, even if there are problems initially, we have to try to experiment.”
In his telling, the policy isn’t just about protecting the grade. It’s about normalizing failure—or at least normalizing that students won’t receive the top mark every time.
Still, the loudest resistance inside Harvard comes from professors who argue that the cap changes what grades are for.
Allison Frank Johnson. who has taught history at Harvard for more than two decades and chaired the German department for seven years. said she hates the new system in part because it assumes only a fixed share of students can produce outstanding work. For Johnson, grades are not a ranking mechanism that tells students how they stack up against one another.
“Grades are an incentive to get students to do their very best work and to reflect on the work that they’ve done, not a way of ranking them against one another,” she said.
She worries about what the change will do to classroom priorities. and she ties that concern directly to what her students face now. Johnson said she’s especially worried about AI and about fairness—whether she can tell if students are doing the work themselves. whether they are engaging in person with ideas she presents. and how she maintains her own boundaries in a course she teaches as openly political.
“I’m worried about AI,” Johnson said. “I’m worried about figuring out how to determine if my students are doing the work themselves. I’m worried about fairness.”
She also laid out a separate concern: the grading policy would set a ceiling on excellence even when teaching emphasizes real human skills over time—like expressing yourself orally and in writing, making arguments, defending them with evidence, and assessing whether what you read is reliable.
“So the question is,” Johnson said, “why should somebody else tell me that the percentage of students who are going to excel at doing those things is going to be exactly 20?”
If she sees teaching as improving learning, she said, she should be able to reward it. But the cap would prevent higher grades even if she gets students to perform better.
In Harvard’s internal fight over the cap, two competing stories about grades collide: one treats grades as a signal that should be protected from inflation; the other treats grades as an assessment tool that shouldn’t be constrained by a pre-set quota of “top” outcomes.
That dispute isn’t confined to Harvard. Economists and researchers have been warning for years that grade inflation doesn’t just blur transcripts—it changes students’ behavior.
Jeff Denning. an economist at the University of Texas at Austin. argued that easier grading can weaken students’ incentives to study and to truly learn the material. His argument is tied to a concept he calls grade inflation in a measurable way: teachers who give out high grades relative to the average standardized test scores of their class.
Denning’s work tracks how students later do economically. He described identifying teachers who inflate grades. then comparing students who experienced different kinds of teachers in high school and linking those experiences to earnings records. In his findings, students who experienced more grade-inflating teachers later had lower earnings.
Denning connected the broader pattern to a shift in higher education that some critics describe as increasingly transactional—tuition in exchange for jobs.
And the timing of this Harvard debate is hard to ignore. The episode connects the grading fight to changes in student behavior: students nationwide are reading less and increasingly relying on artificial intelligence for help, and cheating is “top of mind.”
At Princeton. faculty approved a policy requiring proctored in-person exams. changing a long-held honor system that relied on students to monitor themselves. Other institutions are experimenting with alternatives to traditional grades. including competency-based education—a concept first established back in the 1970s that is now returning.
At Brandeis University, administrators have shifted their focus from grades to students’ competencies, adding a second transcript designed to measure skills beyond courses and GPAs.
But Harvard’s plan remains firmly within the grade system—just with tighter boundaries.
That shift mirrors another thread in the conversation: trust.
A faculty-produced report from Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education argues that grades at elite universities often no longer measure and communicate learning. The report concludes that decades of grade inflation have rendered the college grading system almost meaningless as an academic measure.
To restore common grading norms, the trust committee recommends capping course grade averages at a B.
Sociologist Julia Adams co-chaired the committee. Sarath Sanga, a law professor at Yale Law School and an expert in grade inflation, was another author whose remarks framed the committee’s logic.
In their view, the problem isn’t just that grades inflate. It’s the compression that comes with it—more and more students receiving the very top grade. Sanga said what emerges is a system that identifies mainly the bottom end of the class and doesn’t allow higher performers to distinguish themselves.
The committee made two specific recommendations. First, it recommended normalizing the GPA to 3.0 so that an average performance essentially merits a B. Sanga described this as requiring “buy-in” and “a lot of work.”
Second, it recommended reporting more on the transcript itself to produce more contextualization: not just the letter, but information such as average grades and percentile performance within a class, because an A in one class may not mean the same thing as an A in another.
Adams tied these reforms directly to public trust. She said Yale formed the committee by President Mari McInnes to address the broad question of declining trust in higher education. and while grade compression and grade inflation are only one piece of that. it’s “an important piece. ” especially because faculty ability to chart student performance is “foundational” to academic life.
When criticism hits back—especially from donors and alumni who feel standards are falling—Sanga pushed the debate toward design rather than politics.
Historian Allison Frank Johnson had told the show that some critics blame admissions policies that bring in first-generation students and students of color. implying standards go down and A’s don’t mean anything anymore. Johnson said the complaints come from a socioeconomic explanation and that it has “nothing to do with the work that our students are doing in the classroom.” She responded with her own pointed example about a family story: a “super genius” grandparent who got a C at Harvard College contrasted with a grandson earning A’s while supposedly “mostly skipped class.”.
Sanga’s answer was blunt: he argued the conversation imports “moral and political language” into what is “fundamentally a design question.” Instead of asking what donors demand. he said. the question should be how to “do right by our students”—teaching them well. evaluating them rigorously. and giving feedback relative to peers and other courses.
He also argued that the current system produces “extraordinary anxiety” and “pervasive strategizing,” where students choose classes for expected grades rather than what they want to learn.
There’s another reason Harvard’s move has a wider echo: other schools have already tried grade deflation and then reversed course.
In Massachusetts, Wellesley College experimented more than two decades ago. Akila Wirapana, chair of the Economics Department at Wellesley, studied the policy. Beginning in 2004, Wellesley strongly encouraged—but did not require—professors to aim for an average grade of B+. Wirapana found grades dropped significantly, mostly in the humanities and social sciences. Enrollment in majors including English, History, and Philosophy declined, and student ratings of those professors fell.
Wellesley’s “grade deflation policy” also triggered an immediate backlash that Wirapana said suggested the human cost wasn’t just academic—it was familial and aspirational. Students and parents worried the lower grades would hurt graduate school chances. After years of complaints and as “sticker prices continued to soar,” the women’s college ended the practice in 2019.
Princeton, Harvard’s peer in the sorting game, followed a different arc. The show notes that Princeton tried grade deflation in the early 2000s—around 2004. A “bit of grade deflation at Princeton” led to angry student pushback because students thought it would hurt their chances in law schools. medical schools. and internships such as those at Goldman Sachs. In 2014, Princeton abolished the approach and grades went back up.
At Harvard, meanwhile, historian Allison Frank Johnson said she’s not worried about losing majors in the humanities and social sciences. She rejected the idea that students only take history classes to get easy A’s.
Alexandria Westray’s classmates offered a different explanation for Harvard’s A-heavy culture: students are pressured to do more outside the classroom. Students. she said. feel “enormous pressure to take on leadership roles outside the classroom.” She described how students create a system in extracurriculars and internships that distinguishes who can handle “a lot of pressure” and take responsibility.
Michelle Baldorama, from Virginia, said she isn’t surprised many Harvard students get A’s because her peers work hard for them. But she also warned that the new grading system could discourage academic risk-taking, pushing students away from harder courses that might hurt their GPAs.
She recalled a statistics class where she did not get the top grade. She said she earned a B, calling it “the only one,” and added, “I’m glad that I took that course.” With a cap coming, she thinks students will become even more strategic about protecting their GPAs.
That strategic pressure ties directly into what Jill Barshay argues about the “easy A” era, starting far earlier than college.
Barshay. covering education for The Hechinger Report. said in a consumer-facing segment that it’s easy to be misled by familiar letter grades. She argued that parents associate A’s with excellence and assume the A they recognize from childhood reflects the same level today—even as grade inflation in K–12 and higher education has accelerated.
Barshay pointed to other evidence: she said test scores have “gone down, down, down.” She tied that to the idea that the increase in A’s can’t be fully explained by students getting smarter.
She described a study experiment conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago and Oregon State. Researchers surveyed 2,000 parents using two fictitious students named Robert and Stacey. The scenario gave parents an imaginary $100 to spend any way they wanted. including on tutoring. after-school programs. vacations. or even bills. When both grades and test scores were low. Barshay said parents invested more in improving students’ skills and invested more of their time reading to their kids and helping with homework.
But when test scores were low and grades were high—an “A” with a failing-like test score—parents didn’t step in as much. In the reverse scenario, where test scores were high but grades were low, parents were much more likely to provide help.
The experiment’s accompanying survey found that 70% of the parents said they trust grades more than tests when making decisions about their child. Fewer than 9% trusted test scores more.
All of this feeds into the central tension of the Harvard vote: if parents and students treat A’s as straightforward proof of mastery, then capping A’s might restore clearer meaning—or it might just move pressure around, creating new ways to game outcomes.
Barshay argued that grade inflation contributes to public resentment, but not as the main driver of distrust. She said higher-education distrust cuts across the political spectrum. The far right thinks professors are too “woke” and indoctrinating students; others complain about unfair admissions policies that benefit rich donors. legacy students. and athletes.
Her bottom line was that the biggest problem is costs: people are frustrated by high tuition, by the inability to know how much college will actually cost, and by how different students pay different prices for what can feel like the same seat.
Still, Barshay said addressing grade inflation matters. She described grade inflation reform as “admirable,” and she said Harvard can be the first mover. She argued that if Harvard finds a way to succeed, other colleges and universities may follow.
For students and parents trying to navigate what comes next. she offered one blunt takeaway: an A doesn’t automatically mean a student has mastered the material. She said parents should also look at test scores—not only teacher-made tests but standardized tests. and compare them with spring assessments as well as the SAT or ACT a student has taken in high school.
“When you see a discrepancy, that’s when you need to ask questions,” Barshay said.
In the end, the Harvard decision lands on a crowded fault line. It pits the desire to make grades mean more against the risk that grades become a different kind of battlefield—one shaped by quotas, strategic course selection, and a constant background hum of competition.
Harvard faculty have approved the plan. The new grading rules are set for fall 2027, with a review after three years.
For students like Das and Westray, the question now is not whether the A has lost credibility. It’s what will replace it—and whether the next version of “meaningful” will still leave students feeling secure about the futures grades are meant to support.
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