Well, they’ve done it. 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. Nearly 70 percent of faculty voted on the proposal.
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.
