In the 2024–2025 school year, 60.2 percent of grades awarded at Harvard were A’s, according to the school’s Office of Undergraduate Education. For context, only a quarter of undergraduates received A’s two decades ago, reported The Harvard Crimson.
Harvard students are undoubtedly bright, but should professors be giving them that many A’s? According to Harvard’s new grade inflation policy, no. On Wednesday, the school’s faculty voted 458–201 to put a 20 percent cap on A grades starting in the 2027–2028 school year, reports the Crimson. The plan, the outlet reports, would also allow for professors to give four additional A’s per course enrollment.
A 2025 report attributed Harvard’s “out of whack” (as one faculty member described it) grading system to a few factors, including professors’ unwillingness to be perceived as “demanding” compared to other faculty and “increasingly litigious” students.
The college also acknowledged that the pressure to inflate grades may come from the school itself, admitting that professors were increasingly expected to provide emotional support to students struggling with “difficult family situations,” “imposter syndrome,” and “stress.” As a result, “requirements were relaxed, and grades were raised, particularly in the year of remote instruction.” Many faculty members wanted to “reverse that shift,” but they reportedly feared whether the administration would “have their back.” Finally, the school shifted from assigning high-stakes exams to giving more, lower-stakes assignments, which many professors found difficult to assess in a “sufficiently differentiated way.”
Harvard is not the only school struggling with grade inflation. In Yale’s recent report examining why Americans have lost trust in higher education, the school acknowledged that grade inflation was partially to blame. To “restore common grading norms,” the report recommended instituting “a 3.0 mean, or some other college-wide standard, so that letter grades can once again be used in a reliable and comparable way.” The report also recommended that Yale transcripts provide context for where students stand “relative to the rest of the class,” so students are not penalized for taking more demanding courses. Reason’s intern Ari Shtein, a current Yale student, has suggested this may be a more sensible, context-based approach to tackling grade inflation than instituting a grading cap.
Princeton recognized the grade inflation problem early, and in 2004, it adopted a grade cap policy. But it “abandoned the system a decade later after criticism that it disadvantaged students in competition for jobs and graduate school admission,” reported the Associated Press. Since then, the problem has resurfaced, with A-minuses, A’s, and A-pluses making up 66.7 percent of undergraduate grades in the 2024–2025 school year.
Tackling grade inflation always seems to produce some controversy, understandably among students. When Harvard released its October report on grade inflation, several students told the Crimson the report “misrepresented their academic experience and would add pressure to an already demanding campus environment.”
In a statement released Wednesday, Harvard’s dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh said that grade inflation is a “complex and thorny issue.” Still, she encourages other institutions to confront similar issues with “the same level of rigor and courage.”
Harvard is taking a risk by curbing grade inflation, but it is one that others would need to adopt to restore meritocracy across the board. If other schools continue to dole out A’s like Oprah while others assess students more harshly, employers will continue to receive unclear and potentially misleading signals about students’ academic performance. And grades are not just for employers’ eyes; they are for the students to understand how well they have mastered a subject. If the purpose of a university is to pursue truth, students deserve honest feedback from their professors, even if that means receiving lower grades.
