Harvard faculty have approved a contentious proposal to revamp the college’s grading system, introducing new restrictions on the number of A’s instructors can assign. The objective: restore meaning to the A grade.
Yet the discussion extends beyond transcripts and GPAs. Amid widespread skepticism toward elite higher education, some proponents argue that stricter grading could also help rebuild confidence in institutions such as Harvard.
In this installment of *College Uncovered*, GBH’s Kirk Carapezza visits Harvard Yard, where high-achieving students anxious about their futures are resisting the change. We also hear from professors divided over a fundamental question: What is the actual purpose of grades?
Economist Jeff Denning from the University of Texas at Austin explains how lenient grading may reduce students’ motivation to study and genuinely grasp the material.
Meanwhile, a faculty report from Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education contends that grades at elite universities frequently no longer fulfill their intended role: measuring and conveying learning. We speak with two of the report’s authors, sociologist Julia Adams and law professor Sarath Sanga.
Higher ed, examined
Our biweekly newsletter delivers deeply reported higher ed stories directly to your inbox.
Δ
And finally, *The Hechinger Report*’s Jill Barshay explains why, in the era of the easy A, parents may be receiving a distorted view of their children’s actual academic performance.
TRANSCRIPT
Massachusetts Avenue at Johnston Gate, Harvard Square.
Harvard is notorious for awarding a large number of A’s—more than half of all grades given to undergraduates here. So is that an issue? Some faculty members want to revive the notion that an A signifies exceptional achievement by placing a cap on the number of A’s.
And many of the accomplished students here in Harvard Yard are not pleased.
This may sound arrogant, but I believe everyone I know here works incredibly hard.
If you perform well enough to meet a certain standard, I don’t think you should be graded down simply because others also excel.
That’s sophomore Nayeen Das, a physics major from Lexington, Massachusetts, and senior Alexandria Westwright, a government major from Pittsburgh. I met them in Harvard Yard as they left class while tourists crowded around the John Harvard statue to rub its bronze foot.
Both Das and Westwright acknowledge that grade inflation is real, but they fear limiting A’s could disadvantage students after graduation, when GPAs matter in competitive job markets and graduate school admissions.
Because you’re being compared to students from other schools.
It’s absurd to claim there’s nothing distinguishing Harvard students just because we all have A’s.
This is *College Uncovered*, a podcast from GBH News that pulls back the ivy to reveal how colleges really operate. I’m Kirk Carapezza. Today on the show: higher ed’s deflation effort.
Harvard faculty have overwhelmingly approved a controversial plan to overhaul the college’s grading system and restrict how many A’s they can assign. The stated goal? Make A’s meaningful once more.
So let’s just call it MAMA or maybe MAMA. Whatever they end up naming the new policy, comedian and Harvard graduate Conan O’Brien referenced it in his commencement speech.
Welcome trustees, deans, faculty, alumni, graduates, families, my fellow honorands, Justice Department spies, and that Uber Eats driver delivering mimosas.
Conan congratulated Harvard president Alan Garber for guiding the class of 2026.
Fantastic job, sir. Really nice. Really nice.
Normally, I’d give you an A plus, but in line with upcoming Harvard policy, I’m adjusting your grade to a C minus.
Trust me, it’s for the good of the school.
Whether it benefits the school or not, another unspoken goal may be to restore some public trust, or at least reduce public anger toward selective higher education institutions like Harvard. More on that later. Other universities have attempted similar policies, only to abandon them under pressure from students and their tuition-paying parents.
So will the Harvard plan succeed? For years, Harvard and other selective or highly rejective colleges have been known for awarding many A’s. At Harvard, more than half of all grades given to undergraduates last year were straight A’s, up from just a quarter 20 years ago.
Many faculty and administrators tell me those numbers reveal a grading system that no longer assesses and communicates meaningful differences in student performance. So how exactly would this new Harvard plan address that? Under the new policy, the number of A grades in any given course will be capped at the top 20% of students, plus four additional A’s per class.
So I wasn’t a math major, but that means in a class of 20, a professor can give no more than eight A’s. In a class of 80, the limit is 20. The new grading policy takes effect in fall 2027, and administrators will review it after three years.
Tenured government professor Stephen Lewicki says A’s have practically become the expectation on campus, and that pressure can also influence professors.
I can give an A minus and almost inevitably face a complaining, whining, entitled student in my office, or I can give an A and avoid the hassle and get back to my work.
Lewicki hopes the new policy pushes back against a culture where more and more students expect the top grade.
All I aim for with this reform is getting kids used to receiving A minuses. The status quo is unacceptable, so we have to experiment. Even if there are pitfalls or initial problems, we must try.
For Lewicki and other, shall we say, less outspoken professors, limiting A’s is also about reminding students that it’s okay to fail, or at least like me, get a B plus occasionally. Other faculty, however, strongly oppose this plan.
So the biggest issue with talking to me is that I oppose the policy for 47 reasons, and I never know which one to start with.
Allison Frank Johnson has taught history at Harvard for over two decades.
I teach modern European history. I also chaired the German department for seven years.
Johnson says she dislikes the new grading system partly because it assumes only a fixed proportion of her students can produce outstanding work.
For me, grades are an incentive to encourage students to do their best work and reflect on what they’ve done, not a way to rank them against each other.
Johnson acknowledges that the number of students in her classes earning straight A’s has indeed increased over the years. But as a teacher, that’s not her top concern in the classroom.
I’m worried about AI. I’m worried about figuring out how to determine if my students are doing the work themselves. I’m worried about fairness.
Am I grading students who do their own work? Am I getting students to actually come into the classroom and engage with the ideas I present? Am I able to keep my political views out of the classroom in a way that allows students to form their own opinions while not silencing myself?
Because I’m teaching about Nazis, right? That’s political. I think they’re bad.
I’m not neutral about it. So there are a thousand things I worry about in teaching, and oh no, it used to be that only 15 percent of my students got A’s and now 40 percent get A’s. That is not my number one worry.
And in the age of AI, she says she’s constantly thinking about what human skills she wants her students to develop over a semester.
Being able to express yourself orally and in writing, to make an argument, to defend it with evidence, but also to know when what you’re reading is reliable and when it’s not. So evidence assessment is something I emphasize more and more as our national ability to do that seems to erode. But why should someone else tell me that the percentage of students who will excel at those things is exactly 20?
If I can improve, if I can become a better teacher and convey those skills better, I still can’t give my students higher grades.
Grade inflation has been rising at American colleges for decades, and economists say that carries serious consequences. When top grades become the norm, students may have less incentive to push themselves academically.
So if you have weaker incentives to study, you’re less likely to learn the material. It turns out learning the material is helpful for you in the future.
That’s Jeff Denning, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin. While some students worry lower grades could hurt their future prospects, Denning’s research suggests grade inflation may actually harm students in the long run. Here’s how it works.
Denning identifies teachers who give out high grades relative to the average standardized test scores of their class.
We can categorize teachers into grade inflating and non-grade inflating teachers and compare students who have different experiences in high school, then link them to their earnings records. We find students who experienced more grade inflating teachers have lower earnings later in life.
The easy A phenomenon also reflects how American higher education has become increasingly transactional—tuition in exchange for jobs. And the Harvard debate comes at a time when students nationwide are reading less and increasingly relying on artificial intelligence for help. So cheating is top of mind.
Faculty at Princeton recently approved a policy requiring proctored in-person exams, changing a long-held honor system that relied on students to monitor themselves. And other institutions are increasingly experimenting with alternatives to traditional grades. So-called competency-based education, an idea first established back in the 1970s, is making a bit of a comeback.
At Brandeis University, as we’ve reported on this podcast, administrators are shifting their focus from grades to students’ competencies, adding a second transcript designed to measure skills beyond courses and GPAs.
Grades, of course, exist to evaluate and then communicate what students have learned. A faculty-produced report from Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education finds that the Ivy League university and many peer institutions no longer do that. The report concludes 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. Sociology professor Julia Adams co-chaired the trust committee, which in its widely covered report gave a harsh assessment of academia’s role in fueling distrust and resentment toward U.S. colleges and universities. And committee member Sarath Sanga teaches at Yale Law School and is an expert in grade inflation.
Sarath and Julia, thank you so much for speaking with *College Uncovered*.
Thank you for having us.
Thank you.
So, Sarath, from your perspective, what’s the problem with grade inflation?
Well, across higher ed, we’re seeing faculty even being reported as pressured by the structure to award higher grades than they might otherwise in order to maintain enrollment and student evaluations. So one of the many problems is that grade inflation itself is not the most interesting feature. It’s the compression it produces, with more and more students being awarded the very top grade.
That means the way to think about the current system is that it’s essentially only identifying the bottom end of the class and not enabling the higher end to distinguish themselves.
And what are faculty at Yale recommending?
We make two specific recommendations. The first is perhaps the big one, and that is to essentially normalize the GPA to 3.0. That is, so that an average performance essentially merits a B.
That will take some buy-in and a lot of work. But in the meantime, we also recommend simply reporting more on the transcript itself to provide more context for the grades themselves. And this is because an A in one class may not mean the same thing as an A in another class.
So reporting something like the average grade or the percentile—the specific thing we recommend—that the student achieved within the class will help parents, students, employers, and graduate admissions officers make sense of the grade.
Julia Adams, in the context of public trust in higher ed, why do you think these kinds of changes are necessary now?
Our committee was formed, of course, by President Mari McInnes at Yale to address the broad question of declining trust in higher education. Grade compression, grade inflation is one small piece of that, but it’s an important piece, particularly for the faculty whose ability to chart the performance of students in the faculty’s area of expertise is really one of the foundational aspects of faculty academic life.
How do you respond to other professors who say grading isn’t just about ranking students against themselves? Historian Allison Frank Johnson at Harvard, for example, told me Yale and other schools are capitulating to outside criticism of higher education. Here she is.
You talk to a bunch of angry donors who think universities are ruined by admitting first-generation students and students of color and that naturally standards are going down and A’s don’t mean anything anymore. And I think there’s a socioeconomic explanation for the kinds of people making these complaints. It has nothing to do with the work our students are doing in the classroom.
I’d like to see some evidence that your granddad was doing the Lord’s work at Harvard College because he was a super genius and got a C anyway. And yet the grandson is a loser who cares only about watching beach volleyball YouTube videos, and somehow he’s getting an A. I don’t think that’s what’s happening.
So, Sarath, what do you make of that argument?
Gee, I think it’s importing a lot of moral and political language into what is fundamentally a design question. So the question I would ask is not what do the donors demand or what political message will this send or what angry alum could we placate? I would ask, how can we do right by our students?
Our obligation is to teach them well and to evaluate them rigorously, to give them back information about how they did relative to other peers, and even relative to their performance in other classes. So I think the way the conversation has been framed is fundamentally wrong. The current system produces extraordinary anxiety and pervasive strategizing.
Students are choosing classes for expected grades rather than what they want to learn because there’s nothing in the system’s design that prevents it. I don’t think anyone can with a straight face actually defend the status quo, because the status quo is a very sharp trend toward all students getting A’s, which is to say toward no student being given individualized feedback.
Sarath Sanga is a law professor at Yale, and he studies how people and organizations set their own rules. Julia Adams is a sociology professor. She co-chaired the university’s trust committee.
Julia and Sarath, thank you so much for your time and your perspective. Thank you so much. Thanks, Kirk.
Harvard and Yale are not the first to wrestle with grade inflation. Several other colleges have already tried to directly address it, including Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, Amherst, and Wellesley, more than two decades ago.
Unlike Harvard, there was no quota on the number of straight A’s or any kind of letter grade.
Akila Wirapana chairs the Economics Department at Wellesley, and he studied his own college’s 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 like English, History, and Philosophy also declined, and student ratings of those professors fell, too.
It became called the grade deflation policy, which immediately suggests, I’m getting a grade lower than what I deserve. Why should my daughter come to Wellesley and get lower grades, and find it harder to go to graduate schools?
After years of complaints, and as sticker prices continued to soar, the women’s college ended the practice in 2019. At Harvard, historian Allison Frank Johnson says, looking forward, she’s not concerned fewer students will major in history or other humanities.
You know, of my 47 reasons, that’s not even one of them. If this were the right thing to do, no, if it were the right thing to do, we would have to do it, right? I’m not a person who’s going to say, oh, I know this is the right thing to do, but I don’t want fewer students to take my class because people only take my class to get easy A’s.
I mean, that would be a ridiculous ground for opposing this policy. It’s not the right thing to do. Students don’t only take my class because they’re looking for easy A’s.
I think what students are going to stop taking are classes that they think other hyper-talented students are in.
Internal Harvard reports produced by faculty and student journalists show many professors feel their hyper-talented students do not prioritize their courses because they’re spending more time on extracurriculars, sports, internships, and even filming TV shows just to stand out from the pack. A political reporter for the *New York Times*, for example, says in his bio online that he graduated from Harvard but, quote, mostly skipped class to report for the campus newspaper.
In today’s world, practically what distinguishes students at Harvard right now is not necessarily grades because everybody has A’s because they work very hard. It is actually seen in our extracurriculars and the whole thing that we are criticized for working for.
Alexandria Westwright, the government major from Pittsburgh we heard at the top of this episode, says students feel enormous pressure to take on leadership roles outside the classroom.
Students have taken upon ourselves to actually create a system in extracurriculars and internships that does distinguish who really can handle a lot of pressure, who has a lot of responsibility.
Her classmate, Michelle Baldorama, is from Virginia and says she’s not surprised so many Harvard students get A’s.
I think my peers work extremely hard for their grades. So, like, it makes sense that that would be the outcome.
Baldorama worries the new grading system will discourage academic risk-taking, pushing students away from harder courses that might hurt their GPA. She recalls taking a tough class in which she did not get the top grade.
I did take a statistics class. It was really hard. I did not get an A in it.
Can you tell me what you did get?
A B. It was the only one, but it’s fine. But it’s like I’m glad that I took that course.
Now with Harvard limiting the number of A’s available to earn in each class, she thinks students may become even more strategic about protecting their GPAs.
Students want to succeed, of course, and so do their tuition-paying parents. In elementary, middle, and high school, parents check report cards, ask about homework assignments, and even help their kids study. If all of that fails and they have the means, well, the ends justify hiring private tutors.
Jill Barshay covers education for our partner, *The Hechinger Report*. She says, in the age of the easy A, it’s easy to be misled.
I think it’s because A’s are so familiar to all of us, and we associate them with excellent, right? If you’ve gotten an A, you assume you’