POLITICS: Harvard limiting the number of A grades is a good thing — even if students are melting down over it

It’s time for Harvard students to say goodbye to their straight-A’s.

On Friday, a committee of faculty advised the school to adopt a 20% cap on A’s to beat back grade inflation — a stark reduction from the 66% of A’s that were awarded last school year.

Students are predictably having a meltdown, with one claiming the move would mean “life wouldn’t be worth that much to live.” But the proposal would restore meaning and meritocracy to the grading system of the nation’s premier university.

The 19-page report from the Subcommittee on Grading of the Undergraduate Educational Policy Committee expressed concern that the current inflated grading system doesn’t differentiate students and suggested that an A should represent “extraordinary distinction.”

The committee wrote that their recommendations for next school year “are intended to restore grades to their role as meaningful indicators of student performance and feedback, and to support the central academic mission of Harvard College: teaching and learning.” The proposal will come to a full faculty vote ahead of the next school year.

The report shows that the proportion of A’s has exploded quickly. In the 2012-2013 academic year, just 35% of grades awarded were A’s, compared with 66% in 2024-2025.

Aside from a sharp spike during Covid lockdowns, the proportion of A’s has increased at a steady rate. Seventy-three percent of classes now have an A median grade and 95 percent an A- median, according to the Harvard Crimson.

In addition to a 20% cap on A’s, the committee also suggested the university adopt an average percentile rank metric to determine university honors.

Grades are so inflated and so many students near a 4.0 GPA, the report said, that the cut-off for summa cum laude distinction sometimes requires parsing out GPAs to the fifth decimal place.

The move follows an October report by Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh, sent to faculty and students, that called for the restoration of “the integrity of our grading system” and “the academic culture of… the recent past.”

Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist and Harvard professor of 23 years, expressed support for the proposal on X, writing “It’s a collective action problem (every professor has an incentive to inflate even while recognizing it’s bad when everyone does it). Voluntary guidances … are thus useless; only a college wide policy can work.”

He noted that, while his large intro class is still harder than the average at Harvard, the proportion of A and A- grades he has awarded over his career increased from 25% to 65% “so as not to drive away students.”

As a recent student at NYU and Columbia, I know he’s not wrong. High-achieving kids do swap notes on which professors are harder or easier. RateMyProfessor.com, which has been around since 1999, was a go-to for anonymous gossip from former students.

It’s not that kids are necessarily lazy. They just know that, in an inflated grade system, they need to stay competitive with other students who are also seeking out the clearest route to a 4.0 GPA to impress graduate schools or employers.

It’s a predicament that prevents students from challenging themselves for fear of a GPA hit — and professors from challenging them for fear of an enrollment decline.

Of course, current Harvard students aren’t on board. The Harvard Crimson spoke to two dozen students who “overwhelmingly urged faculty to reject the proposal.”

“You accept a bunch of top 3% students in the country and then get surprised that we’re getting all As,” one student said, as though Harvard shouldn’t be harder or more competitive than high school. 

The same student had a remarkably consumerist view of college: “We pay to go here to get the product, which is to have a better signal of performance. If you’re just lowering that for everyone, then you’re just lowering the value you provide as a business for the same cost, even while raising tuition year over year.”

But you’re not paying for a gold star, you’re paying for a rigorous education, right?

Another student seemed to think college is more about making connections than learning. “It misses the point of college, which is to network, go out there, have fun,” they said. “It would create so much pressure where life wouldn’t be worth that much to live.”

The melodrama is ridiculous, but the sentiment is important: Gen Z students have been conditioned to expect laudation by professors and a down-hill battle in the classroom — even at Harvard.

The university should take up this resolution, for the sake of the institution’s reputation and the next generation’s educational integrity.