Harvard Faculty Committee Proposes Cap on A Grades

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/2/6/faculty-propose-grade-cap/
 

Faculty Committee Proposes Cap on A Grades, New Internal Ranking System

A faculty committee proposed a sweeping overhaul of Harvard College grading that would sharply limit A grades and introduce a new internal ranking system — changes that could nearly halve the percentage of As currently awarded to undergraduates.
 

 

A faculty committee proposed a sweeping overhaul of Harvard College grading that would sharply limit A grades and introduce a new internal ranking system — changes that could roughly halve the percentage of As currently awarded to undergraduates.

In a 19-page proposal released Friday, the committee recommended capping A grades at 20 percent for every class, with flexibility for up to four additional As per class. The plan would also introduce an internal “average percentile rank” metric to determine honors and awards — a shift aimed at countering what the committee described as a grading system that no longer meaningfully distinguishes student performance.

If approved, the reforms would take effect in the 2026-27 academic year.

The proposal — which has yet to come to a full faculty vote — follows an October report by Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh, which found that more than 60 percent of grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates were As and concluded that the system was “damaging the academic culture of the College.”

That report argued that grades had become so compressed at the top that they no longer performed their basic functions of signaling mastery and guiding internal or external evaluation.

Faculty have already taken steps to curb grade inflation, slashing the number of As awarded from 60.2 percent to 53.4 percent last fall. But the committee argued that voluntary reductions were insufficient to preserve the A as a mark of “extraordinary distinction.”

Under the proposal, only flat A grades would be capped, and no target distributions for other grades would be imposed.

Roughly 60 percent of courses already comply with the proposed cap, according to Computer Science professor Stuart M. Shieber ’81, chair of the faculty committee. Faculty could also opt out of the A grade cap, but only by grading their courses on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Those courses would be excluded from internal honors calculations, a design choice the committee said was necessary to prevent a return to widespread grade inflation.

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“While any changes to grading policies may raise concerns about fostering a competitive culture, we believe that these recommendations take critical steps towards the College’s goal to re-center academics, restoring confidence in the College’s grading system, and better aligning incentives with pedagogical goals,” the committee wrote.

Beyond letter grades, the proposal would overhaul how the College distinguishes students internally. Instead of GPA, honors and awards would be determined using students’ average percentile rank — a measure of how a student performs relative to classmates in each course. The metric would not appear on transcripts.

The committee said GPA has become effectively unusable at the top end: summa cum laude cutoffs are so close to 4.0 that they often require parsing GPAs to five decimal places, the report argued.

By contrast, percentile ranks, the committee argued, continue to differentiate students even in heavily compressed grading environments.

The two reforms are meant to work together. While smaller classes could still allow a higher proportion of As overall, students in those courses would face greater risk in percentile rankings, dampening incentives to game the system by chasing small seminars perceived as grading havens.

Still, the committee acknowledged that the changes could alter the distribution of honors across academic divisions.

“For example, perhaps students in humanities concentrations might be overrepresented in the top 5% of GPAs but underrepresented in the top 5% of APRs, or vice versa,” they wrote.

In testing, however, it found no consistent evidence that students in particular fields would be systematically advantaged or disadvantaged under the new metric.

Notably absent from Friday’s proposal were two ideas raised in earlier discussions: introducing A+ grades and listing median course grades on transcripts.

Including A+ grades in Harvard’s policy “could create continued cycles of upward pressure and reduce the legitimacy of our current grading rubric,” according to the report.

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Publishing course medians, meanwhile, was deemed likely to encourage students to seek out easier classes, particularly since 73 percent of classes students enroll in already carry an A median and 95 percent an A- median.

The proposal also includes feedback from law and medical school admissions deans — all of whom were anonymously referenced — whom the committee said “unanimously agreed” that the proposed cap on A grades would make Harvard transcripts more informative.

“The Harvard A doesn’t make as much of an impression,” a medical school dean said in the proposal, “because there are so many.”

The proposal also addressed concerns about employment and fellowship prospects, suggesting that most employers no longer screen applicants by GPA and that fellowship committees evaluate candidates holistically.

Peer institutions such as Princeton University and Wellesley College have attempted to rein in grade inflation, though none have adopted the specific combination of caps and percentile-based rankings Harvard is now considering.

In a Friday email announcing the report, Claybaugh encouraged students and faculty to attend town halls later this month, ahead of a formal vote by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

“These recommendations will form the basis of eventual formal faculty legislation, but we look forward to hearing feedback from faculty and students during the upcoming town halls,” Claybaugh said in a statement.