America’s oldest and most prestigious university may soon be deliberately taking many of its students down a notch. This week, Harvard faculty members are voting on a contentious proposal to rein in rampant grade inflation, which would dramatically change how the highest marks are awarded to undergraduate students. Other universities have tried and failed to implement grade caps, and the faculty who designed Harvard’s plan have tried to learn from their mistakes. The proposed changes include not only a cap on how many A grades teachers can give to students, but an entirely new system for ranking which undergrads are really the best of the best. Not surprisingly, the proposal has prompted fierce debate within the Harvard community and beyond. Here’s a primer on what’s happening and the arguments for and against limiting A’s.

. The three changes Harvard is considering

Faculty are voting on three separate provisions of a proposal made by Harvard’s faculty grading subcommittee, which would make major changes to how the school evaluates undergraduates. Each only requires a simple majority to pass.

(1) A “20 percent plus 4” cap on A grades Instructors would only be able to award A’s to 20 percent of undergraduate students enrolled in a course, with the option of awarding A’s to an additional four students per course, regardless of the size of the class. That provision is meant meant to protect students enrolled in small seminars.

There would be no cap on A-minuses. (There is no A-plus at Harvard; a flat A is the highest possible grade and is meant to indicate work of “extraordinary distinction.”)

(2) A new percentile-based internal-ranking system for honors and awardsHarvard currently determines which students are distinguished with honors and awards based on their grade point average. This new system would shift to students’ average percentile rank instead. Instructors would submit students’ raw scores in addition to their letter grades, and that data would be used to calculate students’ APR. It would only be used internally by faculty for the purpose of honors and awards, and would not appear on student transcripts. While GPA measures a student’s absolute performance in a class, APR measures their relative performance compared to the rest of the class.

(3) An opt-out of the A capUnder this plan, instructors who don’t think the A-grade cap is suitable for a specific course would be able to use grades of either satisfactory-plus, satisfactory, or unsatisfactory. There are already a number of undergraduate courses at Harvard that are only graded satisfactory/unsatisfactory, but this policy would would introduce satisfactory-plus as a new, higher distinction. These grades would not factor into APR calculations.

If approved, the changes would go into effect in the fall of 2027 for a three-year trial period. After that, there would be a review process and faculty would get to vote again on whether or not to keep the new policies.

Faculty have until Sunday to submit their email ballots. Voting is encouraged but not mandatory, and the results will be announced on Monday, May 20.

. How and why did the proposal come about?

Virtually everyone at Harvard agrees that grade inflation has become a problem, and last year that the school’s Undergraduate Education Policy Committee’s Subcommittee on Grading went all in on addressing it. Its work culminated in a 25-page report released in October by Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh, which concluded that high grades among top Harvard undergrads have become so compressed that they have lost much of their integrity and value, per the Harvard Gazette:

“Our current grading practices are not only undermining the functions of grading; they are also damaging the academic culture of the College,” Claybaugh wrote in “Re-Centering Academics at Harvard College.” She emphasized that exhortations alone “won’t be enough, nor is there a single policy fix. But coordinated action — individually, collectively, and institutionally — can restore the integrity of our grading and return the academic culture of the College to what it was in the recent past.”In real terms, the plan would pull grading back to 2010 levels, when A’s accounted for one-third of transcript marks. By 2025, more than 60 percent were flat A’s while the median cumulative GPA at graduation climbed from 3.56 to 3.83 in 15 years. Where it was once newsworthy for two students to tie for the Sophia Freund Prize for the highest GPA, dozens now share the honor. And summa cum laude, reserved for the top 5 percent, has ratcheted to a hair’s breadth from 4.0.Beyond diluting the classroom experience, the proliferation of A’s has shifted stress to extracurriculars and penalized students from less-resourced high schools by magnifying the cost of a first-semester B, the subcommittee found.

“Our current grading practices are not only undermining the functions of grading; they are also damaging the academic culture of the College,” Claybaugh wrote in “Re-Centering Academics at Harvard College.” She emphasized that exhortations alone “won’t be enough, nor is there a single policy fix. But coordinated action — individually, collectively, and institutionally — can restore the integrity of our grading and return the academic culture of the College to what it was in the recent past.”

In real terms, the plan would pull grading back to 2010 levels, when A’s accounted for one-third of transcript marks. By 2025, more than 60 percent were flat A’s while the median cumulative GPA at graduation climbed from 3.56 to 3.83 in 15 years. Where it was once newsworthy for two students to tie for the Sophia Freund Prize for the highest GPA, dozens now share the honor. And summa cum laude, reserved for the top 5 percent, has ratcheted to a hair’s breadth from 4.0.

Beyond diluting the classroom experience, the proliferation of A’s has shifted stress to extracurriculars and penalized students from less-resourced high schools by magnifying the cost of a first-semester B, the subcommittee found.

That report led to the core of the current proposal, released by the subcommittee in February, to update grading policies with a handful of primary reforms, including capping flat A’s and shifting to percentile-based internal ranking system. As the Harvard Crimson reported at the time:

Faculty have already taken steps to curb grade inflation, slashing the number of As awarded from 60.2 percent to 53.4 percent last fall. But the committee argued that voluntary reductions were insufficient to preserve the A as a mark of “extraordinary distinction.” …The committee said GPA has become effectively unusable at the top end: summa cum laude cutoffs are so close to 4.0 that they often require parsing GPAs to five decimal places, the [October] report argued. By contrast, percentile ranks, the committee argued, continue to differentiate students even in heavily compressed grading environments. The two reforms are meant to work together. While smaller classes could still allow a higher proportion of As overall, students in those courses would face greater risk in percentile rankings, dampening incentives to game the system by chasing small........

© Daily Intelligencer