Harvard University faculty has approved a plan to cap the number of A grades instructors can assign to undergraduates in any given course.

Following months of campus debate and several revisions to an initial cap proposal, the faculty voted 458 to 201 in favor of what’s being championed as a coordinated attempt to fight grade inflation, according to The Harvard Crimson.

Faculty ballots were cast by email over a weeklong period that ended Tuesday. The policy will go into effect in the fall of 2027 and will be reviewed in three years.

The quota on the number of top grades was one of three provisions voted on separately by the faculty. A second provision, approved by an even wider margin than the cap, would calculate university honors based on students’ average percentile rank rather than their grade point average. And a third provision, nicked by a vote of 364 to 292, would have allowed for courses to opt out of the grading cap and instead offer grades of “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory,” with an added option of “satisfactory-plus."

Background on Harvard’s Grading Changes

In February, a Harvard faculty committee had recommended that faculty limit the number of A grades they would hand out in every undergraduate class to 20% plus an allowance of up to four additional A’s per class. In that 19-page report, the committee proposed two major changes to Harvard’s grading system:

A 20% cap on A grades, emphasizing that A’s should be reserved for work of “extraordinary distinction”

Ranking students by their percentile standing in each course, a numeric summary that would then be used in place of a grade point average to calculate........

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