Harvard Students Will Freak Out Over New Plan to Cap As at 20 Percent

On Friday, a Harvard faculty committee proposed limiting the number of A grades to 20 percent. This would be a dramatic reduction from the 60.2 percent of As that were doled out just last school year. When expanded to include the percentage of students who received an A+ or A-, nearly 85 percent of grades given out in the 2024–2025 school year began with an A.

In the fall semester, 53.4 of grades given out at Harvard were As. That was the result of an effort of the dean of undergraduate education, Amanda Claybaugh, to combat grade inflation. It remained a pitiful improvement, given that the majority of students are still getting As. That 53.4 percent doesn’t even include the percentage of students who received an A+ or A-. (RELATED: The Cost of Harvard’s Intransigence)

Last year, Claybaugh wrote, “Our grading is too compressed and too inflated, as nearly all faculty recognize; it is also too inconsistent, as students have observed.” She said that the rising share of As meant the university had to institute reforms so as to “restore the integrity of our grading and return the academic culture of the College to what it was in the recent past.”

When Claybaugh released that report, many Harvard students went into meltdown mode.

One student, Sophie Chumburidze, told the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, that she cried after hearing the report calling for stricter grading.

“The whole entire day, I was crying,” Chumburidze said. “I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just sobbing in bed because I felt like I try so hard in my classes, and my grades aren’t even the best.”

Another student, Kayta A. Aronson, told the Harvard Crimson that the report made her “rethink” her decision to come to Harvard. Evidently, she had come to Harvard with the expectation that it would be easy. “I killed myself all throughout high school to try and get into this school. I was looking forward to being fulfilled by my studies now, rather than being killed by them.” (RELATED: Harvard Kennedy School Peddles Ecomysticism)

Another student, Zahra Rohaninejad, complained that raising grading standards would make it “unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes.” She said she can’t “reach [her] maximum level of enjoyment” in learning when she has to worry about grades.

Last year, a group of faculty members released a report finding that many Harvard students skipped classes and failed to do many of their readings. When they did show up for class, students were reluctant to speak and focused on their laptops or phones. In spite of growing misbehavior of this type, grade inflation continued to grow. Despite this lack of focus, in the 2024–25 school year, just 7 percent of grades were a B+, and only 4 percent were a B. That means 4 percent of grades given out were a B- or lower.

No doubt, if a slight crackdown on As sent Harvard students into this much of a tizzy, the plan to limit As to 20 percent of grades is likely to inspire full-on backlash. Such a standard would require them to stop skipping classes or failing to pay attention.

The new report notes the standard laid out in the Harvard student handbook for As: They should be reserved for work of “extraordinary distinction.” The faculty committee recommends returning to this definition by “giving it a quantitative interpretation.”

The faculty report also recommends that the university’s internal ranking system utilize raw scores in the future. The rationale given is that determining Latin honors has gone as far as considering the fifth decimal place of students’ GPAs, given how close all the GPAs are.

There is also a caveat for the 20-percent cap on As: The committee recommends “allocating an additional four A grades to each class to raise the effective cap for smaller courses.” For a 16-person course, for example, 7 students could receive As. Other students could also receive an A-.

The chances of this proposal actually passing a full faculty vote seem slim, given how drastic a change this is. Surely, many faculty members will argue that this would be too mean to students like Zahra Rohaninejad, who feel grades make it too hard to enjoy their classes.

There is also a chance, however, that collectively coming to a standard would bring back a demand for academic excellence.

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