Every year, the undergraduate faculty at Harvard awards the Sophia Freund Prize to the graduating senior with the best GPA. For many years, the prize went to at least one scholar, generally two if there was a tie. In 2025, there was a 55-way tie. The highest college students all had an ideal GPA. Lots of extra have been almost good. Final 12 months, flat A’s accounted for 66 p.c of grades. A’s and A–’s accounted for 84 p.c.
In Harvard’s Scholar Handbook, an A represents “extraordinary distinction”—an evaluation that is senseless if it applies to two-thirds of scholars. To revive which means to scholar transcripts, Harvard’s grading committee, of which I’m a member, has proposed capping all flat A grades to round 33 p.c throughout undergraduate programs. Our suggestion follows a three-year investigation by Amanda Claybaugh, the dean of undergraduate schooling at Harvard, that discovered that the college’s present grading system is “damaging the tutorial tradition of the Faculty.”
Grade inflation is about greater than numbers. Placing an ideal GPA in attain of so many college students perversely deters them from taking courses that might threaten it. It’s as if college students begin faculty with a shiny new automobile and hope to go 4 years with no scratch. Who would dare go off-road? If educators need to revive tutorial risk-taking, engagement, and inquisitiveness on faculty campuses, then we must always liberate our college students from the tyranny of the impeccable transcript.
After I was requested to hitch Harvard’s grading committee final 12 months, I wasn’t certain that there was an issue. Provided that college students have a harder time getting in now than they did in my day—the acceptance price has fallen from about 15 p.c within the Nineties to about 4 p.c now—the surfeit of A’s may merely replicate the power of the scholars. But college who’ve taught the identical programs for many years report no dramatic enchancment in tutorial efficiency. In truth, many professors say that college students appear much less invested in teachers and fewer motivated to do all of the studying than they was.
A 2025 Harvard report on classroom tradition revealed that college students’ class decisions have been in lots of instances motivated much less by mental curiosity than by the prospect of a straightforward A. This places strain on college to provide extra A’s to make sure that college students enroll of their programs and consider them positively in critiques. As my colleague Steven Pinker has defined, resisting inflation can drive college students away from gateway programs to entire disciplines. As a result of grade inflation makes an ideal GPA not simply potential however seemingly important, chancing even an A– can seem needlessly perilous.
In courses the place the median grade is an A, college students know they want work solely arduous sufficient to land in the course of a category, saving their valuable vitality for extracurriculars (writing for publications, main pre-professional golf equipment) the place true distinction may be earned. “It could be flippant to say that [Harvard] grades are ineffective, however they’re nearly ineffective,” a law-school dean has mentioned. The issue goes past the Ivy League. Research present that the most typical grade in U.S. faculties is an A.
For generations, college students at elite universities underwent a first-year reckoning. Contemporary out of small ponds from Brooklyn to Boise, straight-A college students would get their first B’s, or worse. They might be unhappy, possibly a bit disoriented, but additionally freer to discover and experiment, a bit much less burdened by the calls for of perfection.
Ideally, we are able to restore the sense of educational risk that I skilled as an undergrad at Harvard many years in the past. Regardless of having no creative expertise, I enrolled in a studio-art class taught by the architect Louis Bakanowsky. Along with his Mike Ditka mustache and neighborhood accent, equal components New York and Boston, he appeared extra like a soccer coach than a well-known professor. He haunted the studio, emitting little koans of draftsman’s knowledge as we drew: How a lot can a line say? How a lot is sufficient? How a lot is an excessive amount of?
I moved the charcoal towards the paper, attempting and failing and attempting once more to seize an onion with scraggly roots. “Do you imagine these roots?” Bakanowsky requested, pointing at my drawing. I shrugged sheepishly. “I imagine these roots,” he informed me. “They’ve acquired rootyness.” He patted me on the again and walked away. Thirty years later, I do not know what grade Louis Bakanowsky gave me, however I do not forget that he believed my roots.
That class pushed me to the bounds of my talents and made me uncomfortable, however I didn’t hesitate to take it. Had I been a scholar at the moment, when A’s are largely assured and something much less can really feel like a disaster, I believe that I’d have averted the danger.
After contemplating varied concepts, together with voluntary pointers, including an A+ to the dimensions, or swapping letters for unfamiliar numbers, we arrived at limiting prime grades. Princeton’s cap on A-range grades, in place from 2004 to 2014, famously failed. Its post-mortem discovered that this coverage, which left implementation to particular person departments, didn’t give college students clear indicators about their efficiency or make grading honest and constant throughout disciplines. Their cap additionally had a giant unintended aspect impact: elevated nervousness amongst college students. However Princeton had restricted all A-range grades to 35 p.c, making certain that a lot of the college’s elite college students must accept B’s or much less.
The lesson for us appeared to be to strive a lighter contact. In February we unveiled our proposal to cap flat A grades to round 33 p.c throughout Harvard Faculty. Provided that Harvard’s Scholar Handbook says an A– displays “full mastery,” we noticed no purpose to position a tough restrict on A– grades. Sure, it will invariably create a proliferation of A–’s. However this coverage nonetheless guarantees to revive some which means to Harvard’s transcripts by limiting A grades to solely the strongest performances.
Our proposal was met with broad acclaim from college students and school alike. Kidding! One ballot discovered that 85 p.c of scholars opposed the cap, principally for worry of larger stress and competitors. Among the many college, some fear about threats to tutorial freedom, technocratic fixes for cultural issues, or undue constraints on superior programs, which have a tendency to draw top-performing college students. Others mentioned we didn’t go far sufficient. The college will vote on this proposal beginning subsequent week. We count on it to be shut. (A Yale committee has additionally really helpful a grade cap, although it could set the common grade to a B. Godspeed!)
Sure, a cap on A’s will create extra competitors for A’s. However as long as prime graduate-school slots and job provides are scarce, college students will compete. The query is whether or not they’ll focus their vitality on coursework or elsewhere. And spikes in mental-health issues on faculty campuses over the previous decade have proven that critical bouts of stress and nervousness can accompany lax grading requirements, too.
Some college and college students have argued that the competitors ensuing from a cap on A’s can be antithetical to studying: If everybody learns all the fabric, then why shouldn’t everybody get A’s? We hope to coach the following era of Nobel laureates, the people who find themselves going to think about higher methods of residing and lead us to them. An A– is for not dropping factors. An A is for gaining them in surprising methods. The grade ought to replicate distinctive depth, creativity, and originality—the eye-popping essay, the final drawback on the examination that just a few college students may reply accurately.
My very own faculty schooling skilled me to discover and take dangers. Together with studio artwork, I took programs in behavioral neuroscience and statistics—each outdoors my main and unexpectedly helpful years later. My first semester, I took a category that acquired me obsessive about ethical dilemmas often known as “trolley issues.” This pulled me by a philosophy Ph.D., then into cognitive neuroscience and social psychology, and currently into social-impact ventures. I wasn’t assured A’s in any of these courses, however I took them anyway as a result of a near-perfect transcript wasn’t anticipated then.
Restoring that mindset is greater than grading insurance policies and larger than Harvard. However higher grading insurance policies may also help. To regain the general public’s belief and dwell as much as our personal ideas, establishments of upper studying ought to make our grades imply what we are saying they imply. Our centuries-long dedication is to not a facade of perfection however to hard-won self-improvement. We should imagine our roots.
