Faculty decisively approve grading changes

Faculty voted by a wide margin to limit the total number of A’s in undergraduate classes, as part of a broader effort to rein in grade inflation and recenter academics at Harvard College — with proponents hailing the adoption as a principled collective effort to restore meaning to grades and address a complex issue in higher education.

Nearly 70 percent of voting faculty approved the grading cap — which would limit A grades to 20 percent of the undergraduates in any course plus an additional four students, with no limit on A-minuses — with a 458 to 201 vote, in weeklong balloting that closed late Tuesday and was tabulated and audited Wednesday. The policy will take effect in the fall of 2027.

At the same time, the faculty voted 498 to 157 to adopt a companion policy that would introduce an internal “average percentile ranking” (APR) for calculating Latin graduation honors and prizes, instead of using GPAs. This new ranking, which would not be published on transcripts, would work in concert with the grading cap to provide more finely tuned data on comparative student performance.

Both of those measures were developed over the past year and introduced in February by a 13-member Subcommittee on Grading that tried to strike a balance in addressing what it called an “urgent collective action problem” without being punitive, while aiming to reset grades to circa-2010 levels.

“For decades, grade inflation has been a collective-action problem: everyone saw it, but no one faculty member could fix it alone,” said Stuart Shieber, subcommittee chair and the James O. Welch Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science.

In a joint statement with the other subcommittee members, Shieber thanked colleagues, students, and administrators for months of input and deliberation, yielding a collective vote by faculty “to make their grades mean what they say they mean.”

“We are gratified that the FAS faculty has approved the core elements of our committee’s recommendations for simple, effective measures to address the problem of grade inflation — an essential step in the broader effort to recenter academics,” he added.

Instructors who wish to opt out of the grading cap and percentile ranking will be able to offer courses on a satisfactory (SAT)/unsatisfactory (UNSAT) basis. While adopting the two policies from the subcommittee, the faculty rejected a separate amendment introduced amid debate in the spring, which would have added a third grading option (“SAT+”) for courses opting out of the grading cap. That measure was defeated, with 364 voting against the question and 292 for it.

Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh thanked the grading subcommittee for its considerable work, as they “dug deeply into a complex and thorny issue — grappling with a problem that many people have recognized, but no one has solved.”

“They did not shy away from controversy, nor content themselves with half measures,” she added. “Instead, they drew deep on their experience as teachers and their expertise as researchers to develop a proposal equal to the gravity of the challenge and the ambition of this institution.”

Both the grading cap and internal ranking emerged from years of consideration that preceded even that subcommittee itself, with administrators and faculty recognizing that grade inflation — and a related problem of grade compression — had become so extreme to have caused grades to lose their meaning.

By last spring, flat A’s comprised two-thirds of letter grades issued at Harvard College, while the median cumulative GPA at graduation had risen to 3.83 from 3.56 in a mere 15 years. The rubric in the student handbook — which stipulates that grades of A-minus and above should reflect work of “excellent quality” and “full mastery,” with A reserved for “extraordinary distinction” — had become an afterthought.

Critics among the student body and faculty pushed back against the 20 percent cap for its perceived harshness or for encroaching on academic freedom, but supporters described the proposal as a calibrated measure that would instead reset the total percentage of A’s likely to about one-third of letter grades.

That’s because of the 20 percent “plus 4” clause, which will allow instructors in a 10-student seminar to award up to six flat A’s, while as many as 34 A’s could be issued in a large lecture with 150 students. There will be no cap on grades of A-minus or below.

Amid growing concerns over grade inflation in the aftermath of the pandemic, then dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana commissioned the Office of Undergraduate Education in May 2022 to evaluate recent grading data and possible approaches for addressing the issue. That resulting 35-page report was released in February 2023.

In November 2024, Claybaugh appointed the 13-member subcommittee to develop specific proposals for the faculty to consider. While that group did its work, Claybaugh released a “Re-Centering Academics at Harvard College” report in October 2025 that placed grading reform squarely in the middle of a wider effort to re-establish the classroom as the heart of the undergraduate experience.

“We owe our students a functioning grading system. Specifically, we owe them grades that send clear signals, that give them a good sense of their strengths and weaknesses and that communicate their areas of distinction to employers and admissions committees,” Claybaugh wrote. “We owe our students much more than that. We owe them an education that is meaningful as well as rigorous.”

In February, the grading committee released its two-part proposal, with the intertwined grading cap and APR system, rolling it out at a series of discussion forums and at the March Meeting of the Faculty. Responding to that early feedback, the subcommittee broke the proposal into separate votes and added the “SAT+” amendment, while deciding to postpone enactment from fall 2026 to fall 2027. Claybaugh formally introduced those changes at the April Meeting of the Faculty, when debate was so robust that the discussion continued into May, before formal balloting opened.

Under the terms of the vote, the College will now form an implementation committee to prepare faculty and instructors as well as students for the fall 2027 implementation.

On Wednesday, the subcommittee members called the process — and outcome — an example of effective governance that they “hope other universities will follow.” Claybaugh agreed. “The faculty as a whole considered the proposal with the seriousness it deserved. Over three months, they debated premises, re-analyzed data, and considered alternatives, before determining that this was the right approach,” she said, deeming it a “consequential” vote.

“It will, I believe, strengthen the academic culture of Harvard; it will also, I hope, encourage other institutions to confront similar questions with the same level of rigor and courage. This vote is an important step toward ensuring that our grading system better serves its central purposes: giving students meaningful feedback, recognizing genuine distinction, and sustaining the academic mission of the College.”