Harvard University faculty have approved a cap on the number of A grades that can be assigned in undergraduate courses. (Photo by RICK FRIEDMAN/AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty ImagesHarvard University faculty have approved a plan to cap the number of A grades faculty can assign to undergraduates in any given course. Following months of campus debate and several revisions to an initial cap proposal, the faculty voted 458 to 201 in favor of what’s being championed as a coordinated attempt to fight grade inflation, according to The Harvard Crimson. Their ballots were cast by email over a weeklong period that ended May 19. The policy will go into effect in the fall of 2027 and will be reviewed in three years. The quota on A’s was one of three provisions voted on separately by the faculty. A second would calculate university honors based on students’ average percentile rank rather than their grade point average, and a third allowed for courses to opt out of the grading cap and instead offer grades of “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory,” with an added option of “satisfactory-plusFaculty approved the provision to use average percentile rankings, rather than GPA, to determine internal awards and honors by an even larger margin. But they nixed the third proposal, by a vote of 364 to 292. BackgroundIn February, a Harvard faculty committee had recommended that faculty limit the number of A grades they would hand out in every undergraduate class to 20%, plus an allowance of up to four additional A’s per class. In that 19-page report, the committee proposed two major changes to Harvard’s grading system:a 20% cap on A grades, emphasizing that A’s should be reserved for work of “extraordinary distinction,” andranking students by their percentile standing in each course, a numeric summary that would then be used in place of a grade point average to calculate internal university honors.Because small courses are more likely to “attract advanced and highly motivated students,” the committee also recommended giving faculty the flexibility to assign an additional four A grades above the 20% limit for each class. For example, in a class with 20 students, 8 A grades would be permitted, while in a course of 100, the instructor could allocate 20+4 = 24 A’s. MORE FOR YOUNo caps were proposed for other grades, and two earlier suggestions under consideration— allowing the use of A+ grades and listing median course grades on student transcripts — were not included in the February report.The policy added a “SAT+” grade for instructors wanting to opt out of assigning letter grades for their course. The addition of SAT+ grades would allow faculty to differentiate between students whose course performance is superior compared to those whose work only meets a “satisfactory” threshold. The distinction between SAT and SAT+ grades will not count toward internal recognitions like honors or other requirements.The grading recommendations were in response to a 25-page report, released last October by Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh, which found that grade inflation had become a serious problem at Harvard and was undermining the key functions of a good grading system.Over 60% of all undergraduate grades at Harvard were A’s in 2024-25 – more than double the level of 20 years ago. According to The Crimson, the proportion of students receiving A grades has risen by 20 percentage points since 2015. While the Class of 2015 had a median graduating GPA grade of 3.64, the Class of 2025 stood at a 3.83 average. Since the 2016-2017 academic year, the median Harvard College GPA has been an A.Last year, after the university urged faculty to clamp down on the number of A grades they handed out, the share of A’s dropped from 60.2% in the 2024-2025 academic year to 53.4% in fall, 2025, according to The Crimson. Nonetheless, Harvard leaders concluded that more needed to be done to restore rigor in student evaluations, particularly by making more meaningful distinctions at the top end of the grade distribution. According to the February report, a primary aim of the committee’s recommendations was to uphold both the internal and external roles of a rigorous grading system.The internal use provides information about students’ performance for university purposes, such as “determining levels of honors, selecting recipients of awards and prizes, and establishing eligibility for fellowships and scholarships." Such uses "only make sense if GPA is a meaningful signal of relative performance," wrote the committee.The external role of grades helps inform external audiences about student performance. However, the committee believed that grade compression was causing employers and graduate and professional school admissions officers to complain that “Harvard transcripts no longer provide them useful information about the performance and distinction of Harvard students, forcing them to rely on informal networks of information that advantage students with better networking connections.”ReactionsThe mandated limit on A grades has sparked heated debate at Harvard and across the nation. While it’s enjoyed cautious support from many of the university’s faculty, others have agreed with concerns that it restricts their academic freedom, argued that its design is flawed, and pointed to problems with prior, now discontinued, attempts to establish grade quotas at Princeton and Wellesley. Students, however, have widely panned the idea from the beginning. More than two dozen interviews conducted by the Crimson in February found that “students overwhelmingly urged faculty to reject the proposal.” One student said, “you accept a bunch of top 3 percent students in the country and then get surprised that we’re getting all As.” Another decried the increase in competitiveness he predicted the new policy would have. “It just cuts collaboration. It cuts intellectual conversations. It just encourages people to reserve their own knowledge for the sake of beating everybody in the classroom.” Those negative opinions continued or even intensified up until the faculty vote. A National ProblemHarvard is not unique in its concerns over inflated grading. It’s been recognized as a national problem for years, and it’s been occurring at all kinds of colleges and universities and in most undergraduate majors. According to one review, citing statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics, while the the average college GPA was 2.81 in 1990, it had increased to 3.15 by 2020. The Harvard plan will be watched closely by other institutions. Will it restore evaluative rigor and help strengthen academic standards, or will it prove to be a heavy-handed mandate that fails to achieve its aims? That final grade remains to be assigned.