Harvard faculty voted 458 to 201—nearly 70 percent—to approve a policy that caps the number of As a professor can award to a mere 20 percent of the class, with allowance for up to four additional As. This is their newest and most aggressive attempt to combat the grade inflation which has plagued both the institution and academia as a whole in recent years.
In the 2020-21 academic year, Harvard awarded As 79% of the time, a 19% increase from a decade earlier. This is part of a larger nationwide trend at both the high school and college level. Grade inflation is amplified in part by educators’ need to satisfy students, an issue exacerbated by sites such as RateMyProfessor. In 2022, a survey by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) found that 70% of college professors inflated grades to keep students satisfied.
Grade inflation obliterates the fine distinctions between excellent and satisfactory work, encouraging students to give only the minimal effort necessary to achieve an acceptable result. Employers and higher education admissions officers also struggle to determine which students are truly best qualified when As are abundant.
As such, many see Harvard’s decision to limit the number of As that professors can award as a momentous step towards restoring academic rigor and rewarding excellence. And it is true that this policy achieves just that: when only a percentage of the student body can earn an A, top grades come to represent exceptional effort rather than standard achievement.
Perhaps this approach would work in large intro classes—think General Chemistry or English 101—where hundreds of students fill large lecture halls. Capping the number of As in these classes would reward students who stay on top of the curve—those who consistently attend lectures, take notes and ask questions—while weeding out those who are not interested in putting in the effort.
However, for the majority of classes, a competitive grading policy undermines academic cooperation and fosters a cutthroat culture in which students are pitted against each other as they compete for the top grade. It discourages students from studying together or tutoring each other because nobody wants to be outperformed.
In short, Harvard’s grading policy is veering toward a reality in which students lock themselves in private cubicles to study, rip pages out of textbooks to gain an advantage over their peers and enviously guard every scrap of knowledge they can.
These effects are not limited to a single campus. Harvard stands as a paradigm of academic standards and influences other university policies to a significant degree. Their adoption of competitive grading standards will spread like a contagion to other institutions. The end of academic cooperation at Harvard means the end of academic cooperation everywhere.
Beyond the university scale, such a culture does not translate to the real world. Employers value hires who know how to collaborate on an issue to come to a single solution. Harvard is doing its students a disservice by failing to prepare them adequately for this reality.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. It is possible to reward only exceptional work while also fostering a culture of supportive cooperation. For instance, guidelines establishing high expectations for what type of work receives an A would combat grade inflation while still encouraging a positive and supporting academic culture. Additionally, an institution-wide standard would protect professors from negative student reviews because harsher grading policies would become the norm.
Grade inflation certainly needs to be curbed, but this should not and cannot be done at the expense of far more critical skills such as collaboration and community support. Harvard should rethink and reconstruct its competitive grading policy before academic culture takes a permanent turn for the worse.
