What a diploma measures when A’s are the new normal

Early decision applications are going out this fall, most of them due by mid-November, and the families sending them are committing to a very large bill. What they receive at the end of four years is a transcript and a diploma, and it is fair to ask what those two documents now report. 

Two issues answer the question, and they run in opposite directions. 

The first is grades. Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy collected grading records from American colleges and universities going back to 1940. In 1960, they found, C was the most common grade in the country, and D’s and F’s together outnumbered A’s. In their latest data, from the late 2000s, the A was the most common grade, at about 43 percent of all letter grades. That is 28 percentage points higher than in 1960, which means the A had nearly tripled its share. 

The most selective schools have gone furthest. By Harvard’s own count, A’s made up 24 percent of all grades awarded in 2005, 40 percent in 2015 and 60 percent in 2025.

Princeton tried to hold the line. In 2004 it told every department to hold A-range grades to less than 35 percent. Ten years later its faculty voted the limit away, after years of student complaints that it hurt them against applicants from schools with no such limit. Princeton’s own review found no measurable harm, but the perception was enough. Once most schools inflate, a school that grades honestly looks as though it is penalizing its own graduates, and few institutions will bear that cost for long.

Harvard is about to test that: In May,........

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