On Wednesday, Harvard announced that its Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) approved a faculty-led proposal to cap flat A’s in undergraduate letter-graded courses at 20% of enrollment, plus up to four additional A’s per course. According to Subcommittee on Grading member Professor Alicia Holland, the “vast majority” of eligible faculty participated in the week-long online vote. In the end, about 70% of participating faculty voted in favor of this measure — a resounding endorsement of the effort to restore the meaning of an A at Harvard College and “Re-Center Academics.”
What You Need To Know
The A cap passed overwhelmingly. FAS approved the “20% + 4” cap on flat A’s (458-201, or about 70% in favor).
This was a three-prong vote. After splitting the proposal at the April FAS meeting, faculty voted over the past week on three separate parts:
(1) the 20%+4 cap on As,
(2) the Average Percentile Rank (APR) system for internal awards, and
(3) the Satisfactory+ (“SAT+”) grading option.
APR passed; SAT+ failed.
The proposal’s Average Percentile Rank (APR) system for internal honors and prizes passed (498-157, about 76% in favor). APR is designed to rank students relative to classmates and average those percentile ranks across courses, adding more distinction than GPA alone can provide internally.
The proposal to add a SAT+ grade (a “high pass”) within Satisfactory / Unsatisfactory (SAT/UNSAT) — Harvard’s pass/fail option for courses opting out of the A cap — failed (292-364). While the measure to add a SAT+ mark failed, the SAT/UNSAT opt-out system remains.
Implementation starts in Fall 2027. An implementation committee will spend the coming academic year working through remaining details and faculty questions before the cap takes effect in academic year (AY) 2027-28 (not AY26-27). The policy will be reevaluated three years after it’s taken effect, with another faculty vote needed to make changes.
Why Harvard Faculty Finally Acted
The results of this vote didn’t happen overnight. Harvard has increasingly recognized grade inflation and compression as institutional problems for years.
In May 2022, then-College Dean Rakesh Khurana commissioned the Office of Undergraduate Education (OUE) to draft a report “in response to growing concerns among the Faculty over rising grades.”
In January 2025, the FAS Classroom Social Compact Committee found that “many Harvard College students do not prioritize their courses” and “faculty view student curricular disengagement with alarm.”
In Spring 2025, a Crimson survey found 87% of responding FAS professors agreed grade inflation was a problem at the College, and 69% agreed Harvard undergraduates don’t sufficiently prioritize their coursework.
What changed over the last academic year was candor about the extent of the problem and determination to change it. After Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh went on the record in The Atlantic in August 2025 to acknowledge that A’s at Harvard had lost their meaning and a “shadow system of distinction” had taken over, the OUE’s Fall 2025 report put hard numbers and blunt institutional analysis behind that diagnosis — including that A’s accounted for 60.2% of College grades in 2025, up from 24% in 2005 and 40.3% in 2015.
Stats on Grade Inflation at Harvard College
In AY24-25, 84% of grades awarded were A-range grades (A or A-).
In AY24-25, 73% of enrollments were in courses with a median grade of A, and 95% of enrollments were in courses with an A-range median.
In 2010, 1 student won the Sophia Freund prize, given to the student graduating summa cum laude with the highest GPA. In 2025, 55 students won the prize.
In AY24-2025, the College’s summa cum laude GPA cutoff was 3.989.
The projected impact of the proposal’s 20% + 4 cap will result in a shift from 60.2% of grades being flat A’s (2025) to ~34% (roughly where Harvard stood in 2011).
The OUE report also described the incentive structure driving inflation as “a classic game theory problem,” the same collective-action dynamic 1636 Forum first walked readers through last fall. It’s a dynamic that’s been sustained by fear: faculty broadly concur that grades have risen while work quality has declined, but they feel “powerless” to grade differently from their peers when handing out lower grades alone risks lower enrollment and harsh evaluations from students.
The faculty Subcommittee on Grading translated that diagnosis into a reform proposal designed to solve the collective-action problem, and then refined key details based on student and faculty feedback, including delaying implementation to Fall 2027 and counting students who opt to take a course pass/fail in the cap’s denominator.
That delay is one of the most consequential choices in the final package. The upside is that it gives faculty time to recalibrate assessments so an A can properly distinguish extraordinary achievement from all other grades, and gives an implementation committee time to resolve the unglamorous but important questions the proposal itself hasn’t fully answered (for example, whether the A cap in large language courses taught exclusively in sections will apply section-by-section, or across all sections).
While the hurdle of a faculty vote has now passed, the challenge is far from over. As we’ve previously noted, that same delay also creates some risk of a transition year when expectations splinter. Some faculty or whole departments may choose to begin tightening standards immediately (Dean Deming said the College would “strongly encourage” faculty to follow the proposal in this planning year), while others may wait until Fall 2027. If two identical grades can carry different meanings depending on the course or instructor, it may fuel anxiety and second-guessing before the proposal officially takes effect.
For the reform to succeed as part of Harvard’s broader “Re-Centering Academics” effort, the College will need to execute implementation thoroughly and consistently. That means:
Clearly and widely communicating the reform to employers, graduate schools, and fellowship programs, including with Harvard’s own graduate schools
Supporting professors with resources on how to recalibrate their coursework and assessment standards to determine “extraordinary distinction” worthy of an A
Setting expectations with students and continuously making the case, through both actions and words, that this reform is necessary to fulfill Harvard’s mission of academic excellence and better serve students
Building the administrative and IT systems necessary to enforce the new grading and APR systems
On one hand, bringing grading standards roughly back to 2011 levels is more modest than it may initially sound. On the other hand, this vote is a remarkable step for the FAS faculty to take and what it signals should not be understated. It provides a solid foundation for broader efforts to rebuild a culture at Harvard where academic distinction is both legible and trusted.
For years, grade inflation pushed distinction into the shadows, contributing to a campus culture where students increasingly “view extensive extracurricular commitments as a more fulfilling, meaningful, and useful allocation of their time” and producing headlines like The New York Times’ “Harvard Students Skip Class and Still Get High Grades, Faculty Say.” The faculty’s vote represents an attempt to pull that distinction back into the classroom — and, with it, pull academics back toward the center of the student experience at Harvard (and perhaps eventually at Yale and beyond).
The OUE’s Fall 2025 report concluded with a section titled, “What We Owe Our Students.” Having laid out the report’s data and logic, Dean Claybaugh ends with a call to duty:
We owe our students a functioning grading system. Specifically, we owe them grades that send clear signals, that give them a good sense of their strengths and weaknesses and that communicate their areas of distinction to employers and admissions committees. We owe our students much more than that. We owe them an education that is meaningful as well as rigorous; we owe them an education that feels “worth it” to them.
In the end, the reform reflects a simple premise: that Harvard owes its students grades that mean something. With this vote, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences agreed.