Harvard Will Stop Giving A's to Just Anyone

Harvard faculty approved a plan to limit the number of A grades awarded in undergraduate courses. The cap restricts A grades to 20 percent of students in any course, with an additional allowance of up to four students per course. The system applies to flat A grades, while A-minus grades are not capped. Faculty also approved replacing the current GPA-based internal awards and honors approach with a new average percentile-rank system. An alternative grading option that would let instructors opt out of the A cap and use unsatisfactory, satisfactory, and satisfactory-plus was rejected. The changes are scheduled to begin in fall 2027 and run for three years before a new faculty vote.

"Harvard's faculty has voted, by a significant margin, to approve a plan to cap how many A's are awarded to the highest-performing undergraduate students at the country's most prestigious university - a major attempt to rein in the grade inflation that may prompt other elite schools to do the same. The A-grade cap, which limits the number of available A's to 20 percent of the students in any course, plus a possible additional four students per course, was approved via email ballot by a vote of 458 to 201. There will be no cap on A-minus grades under the new system, just flat A's."

"A second provision of the plan, to establish a new average percentile-rank system, instead of the current GPA-based one, for how the school internally determines which students receive awards and honors, was also approved by a vote of 498 to 157. A third provision, to create an alternative grading system for instructors who want to opt their classes out of the new A cap and replace letter grades with "unsatisfactory," "satisfactory," and "satisfactory-plus," was rejected by faculty members by a vote of 292 to 364."

"The two approved plans will go into effect in the fall of 2027 and run for a three-year trial period before the faculty will be able to vote again on whether or not to continue them. The proposals followed years of efforts by Harvard to come up with a way to tackle rising grade inflation at the school, where flat A's made up 60 percent of undergrad grades last year. An October 2025 report by dean of undergraduate education Amanda Claybaugh called for an intervention to restore the integrity and value of Harvard's highest grade, the A."

Read at Intelligencer