Harvard may soon make an "A" feel rare again. A faculty committee has proposed capping the top grade to roughly one-fifth of those handed out in each undergraduate course, a move aimed at rolling back decades of grade inflation, reports the New York Times. Last year, about two-thirds of all undergrad letter grades at the Ivy League school were A's. Under the new plan, instructors would give A's to 20% of students, plus four extra A's per class. In a 100-student course, that would mean no more than 24 A's, though A-minuses and below wouldn't be restricted, as it's not technically a grading "curve," per Harvard Magazine.
The proposal, which could face a faculty vote this spring, is meant to restore the "A" as a mark of "extraordinary distinction. The plan also calls for using students' percentile rank within a class—not GPA—to determine eligibility for honors and internal awards. Legal scholar Joshua Silverstein, who studies grading, called the idea an important step toward making grades meaningful again for students, employers, and grad-school admissions officers.
The Harvard Crimson reports that if the proposal gets a green light, the changes would take place in the 2026-27 academic year. Harvard's move follows a short-lived experiment at Princeton, which curbed A's in the 2000s but dropped its cap after backlash over stress and cutthroat competition—a concern critics are already raising in response to the news out of Cambridge.
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