It’s difficult to ignore how much pressure seems to be in the air when you stroll through Harvard Yard on any given afternoon, past the worn brick of Widener Library and the iron gates. Applications for internships, research fellowships, and excessive course loads are all on top of an academic setting where practically everyone seems to be receiving As. Not a few pupils. Not the best quarter. roughly 60% of them. One of the more candid discussions American higher education has had with itself in recent years revolves around that figure.
This week, Harvard faculty members have been voting on a proposal that would cap pure Twenty percent of students receive an A in each course, with a tiny buffer of four extra As to account for smaller seminars. The plan, which was created by a faculty subcommittee and influenced in part by an honest report from the dean of undergraduate education in October 2025, is an attempt to acknowledge that their own grading has become somewhat meaningless, something that universities rarely do voluntarily. About 25% of all Harvard grades were A’s twenty years ago. That percentage reached sixty percent last year. The top mark ceased to feel like a distinction at some point, and the drift was steady rather than abrupt.
The extent to which things have drifted is somewhat absurd. In the 2024–2025 academic year, 55 students received the Sophia Freund Prize, which was previously given to maybe two graduating students each year for the highest GPAs. GPAs must now be calculated to five decimal places for the selection process. Five. That particular detail alone reveals more about Harvard’s grading system than any committee report could. It’s obvious that something went wrong with the system measuring the students, not the students themselves, when a prize intended to recognize the best becomes almost routine.
The faculty proposal might be the right instinct used in the wrong way. Despite his misgivings, government professor Steven Levitsky voted in favor of the cap, calling it “clumsy and arbitrary.” Having taught at Harvard for 26 years, he recounts seeing students who receive an A-minus on a paper quickly change it to pass or fail in order to avoid the flaw on their record. Treating an A-minus as a failure is a sign of something more serious than grade inflation. It exposes a campus culture in which the initial goal of education has been subtly subsumed by perfectionism. “We’ve just gotten to the point where everybody expects an A all the time,” Levitsky stated, “and so we need to do something.”
Naturally, students are less persuaded. Eighty-five percent of the eight hundred undergraduates surveyed expressed strong opposition to the cap. The worries are justified because Harvard students are being compared to applicants from other universities across the nation, where grade inflation is also pervasive, when they compete for corporate jobs or graduate school placements. Theoretically, limiting A’s at Harvard while other universities continue to award them freely could disadvantage Harvard students. Alternatively, because the academic arena has become more competitive, it might force them to compete in extracurricular arms races. What would actually happen is still unknown.
Harvard is not the first institution to attempt this. In 2004, Princeton placed a 35% cap on A-range grades; however, ten years later, the cap was removed after it was discovered to increase competitive stress without providing much relief. Wellesley attempted to cap mean grades at B-plus in some classes, but due to similar concerns, the policy was quietly discontinued in 2019. It appears that the lesson from both experiments is that applying mechanical solutions to cultural issues usually results in friction rather than change. The Harvard subcommittee claims to have examined those shortcomings and created a less intrusive version, but less intrusiveness does not always equate to greater effectiveness.
There’s a sense that Harvard is actually dealing with a values issue rather than a grading issue. Sofia Mikulasek, a philosophy student, is pointing out something that a 20+4 formula can’t completely address when she writes in the Harvard Crimson that her peers have come to believe perfectionism is attainable—that a 4.0 is something you maintain rather than something rare. Long before any committee realized the curves had changed, grades began to serve as a stand-in for self-worth. The more difficult discussion about the true purpose of an elite education appears to have just begun, regardless of the outcome of this vote.
