Harvard’s new cap on ‘A’ grades is doomed to fail 

Harvard College recently voted to cap A grades in its undergraduate courses. More specifically, it said that no more than 20 percent of the grades given for any course in the college can be an A.

There are no limits on A-minuses or any other grade below an A. 

Some wasted no time in applauding Harvard’s decision, celebrating a move they see as a crucial step in combatting the existential terror of grade inflation. The reality, though, is that grade inflation is a red herring — one that is meant to distract us from larger, more systemic issues that few universities want to confront.  

Here is the major problem with Harvard’s approach: policies that mandate grade caps, especially on A’s, have failed at nearly every institution where they have been tried. Princeton jettisoned a similar cap in 2014. In 2019, Wellesley College threw out its own draconian rule that average course grades needed to be capped at B . Harvard thinks it will be the exception to this pattern. We shall see.

Princeton’s experiment illustrates why these failures are so common. From 2004 to 2014, this fellow Ivy mandated a cap of 35 percent on the entire range of A grades (A-, A and A ). After a decade, the policy went up in flames. Faculty voted in large numbers to rescind it, and the whole affair was swept under the rug as quickly as possible. It seems only right to give kudos to Princeton for recognizing the problems with their system and for rectifying them. Too few institutions take this kind of action.

Why did the policy fail?........

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