“Students know that an ‘A’ can be awarded . . . for anything from outstanding work to reasonably satisfactory work. It’s a farce,” said a faculty member.
“We are terrified of the A-,” one student admitted. Another added, “I think the current grading system is working very well.”
These are among the many tensions (and shocking findings) at the heart of Harvard’s latest step to address grade inflation: a new report titled, “Re-Centering Academics at Harvard College: Update on Grading and Workload,” authored by Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh on behalf of the Office for Undergraduate Education (OUE). It’s Harvard’s clearest, most unflinching look yet at how grading has gone off the rails, and what it plans to do about it.
We’ve praised Harvard before for its rare honesty on this issue in The Atlantic and The New York Times. This report goes further. It reads as part research paper, part wake-up call — an appeal to bring real rigor and learning back into the classroom.
Drawing on surveys and interviews with students, faculty, and administrators; internal grade and Q score (Harvard’s end-of-course student evaluations) data; and reviews of other universities’ attempts to curb grade inflation, the report has a simple premise: Harvard’s mission is to educate its students — and the current grading system undermines that mission.
For readers of our three-part series on grade inflation, the diagnosis will sound familiar. But this report’s details make it even harder to look away. It is eloquent, data-rich, and often bluntly uncomfortable.
The report concludes with four concrete recommendations for professors, a call for faculty collective action, and encouragement for administrators to “have [faculties’] backs” as they recalibrate grading. It also previews further proposals from a task force of the Educational Policy Committee (EPC) and reflects on the failed reform attempts of Yale and Princeton: “Grading is a problem too complex to admit a single solution,” the report notes. “The history of these efforts reveals that exhortations won’t be enough.”
Still, for all its depth, the report mostly stops at diagnosis. The recommendations are relatively narrow, and its single paragraph on collective action feels more like a nudge than a strategy. If Harvard wants faculty to act in coordination and not leave departments to solve a collective action problem alone, it’ll need to offer more than encouragement and a handful of suggestions.
Harvard nonetheless deserves credit for candor. By airing its data and acknowledging the depth of the problem at the College level (though rigor issuesexist at other Harvard schools), it’s doing more than most institutions. Yale, by contrast, just announced: “To woo students, French department makes courses easier.”
With Harvard-Yale around the corner, here’s hoping Harvard keeps this momentum going.
What You Need To Know:
Grades at Harvard are both inflated and compressed at the top. A’s now make up 60.2% of grades (up from 24% in 2005), and the Class of 2025 averaged a 3.8 GPA.
Faculty say they can’t grade honestly. Nearly half say they “simply cannot” give the grades students truly deserve; others say they can do so only “with difficulty” due to systemic pressure.
Graduate schools struggle to tell Harvard students apart. Admissions committees say that with so many A’s, students are harder to distinguish; students respond by piling on more extracurriculars and credentials to stand out.
Incoming students may be less prepared to meet academic expectations. Especially in the humanities, faculty are concerned about students’ comprehension of complex texts, stemming from pandemic-era learning loss and diminished ability to focus.
Harvard sees no silver bullet. Harvard is tackling grade inflation as a collective action problem requiring multiple, simultaneous fixes, rather than the one-off efforts by peer institutions failed.
The report suggests four steps for faculty to take by spring. These include reviewing grading distributions from 2015, reducing reliance on effort-based assignments, clarifying standards for A-level work, and aligning grading across multi-section courses.
Harvard’s promise of coordinated reform remains vague. The report devotes just one paragraph among its 25 pages on its collective action next steps, and offers little guidance beyond encouraging faculty to collaborate.
More recommended reforms are coming (eventually). A new task force is exploring structural grading reforms, but there’s no timeline or formal proposals yet.
1636 Forum’s Key Takeaways
We’ve pored over the new report so you don’t have to. Keep reading for 1636 Forum’s Key Takeaways on:
The scope and stakes of grade inflation
The institutional and cultural pressures fueling grade inflation
How students are adapting (and struggling) in a distorted academic system
How Harvard plans to respond, and what it will take to succeed
Here’s what stood out:
A PROBLEM NO LONGER DENIED: SCOPE AND STAKES OF GRADE INFLATION
The report confirms, and further quantifies, what Harvard has been saying for months: grade inflation is systemic and it’s undermining Harvard’s ability to educate students.
Over the past six months, Harvard has increasingly acknowledged the extent of its grade inflation problem. In The Atlantic and The New York Times, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh conceded that faculty now give A’s “pretty much to everyone.” A January 2025 reportfrom Harvard’s Classroom Social Compact Committee found that students “often don’t attend class,” and prioritize extracurriculars over academics. The Class of 2025 had an average GPA of 3.8, and a Crimson survey of Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) faculty taken in the spring of 2025 showed that nearly 90% of respondents agreed Harvard has a grade inflation problem.
This new report by Harvard College quantifies just how far grade inflation has gone. It describes how the College now faces “considerable compression at the top of the scale.” In 2005, A’s made up just 24% of grades. By 2025, they accounted for 60.2%. Grade inflation rose steadily from the early 2010s to the late 2010s, then accelerated in the late 2010s and ultimately spiked during the pandemic’s remote instruction period, and never receded. The summa cum laude GPA cutoff now sits at 3.989, up nearly a tenth of a point in five years.
As one section bluntly states, “about half of the faculty surveyed reported that they simply cannot award the grades students have actually earned, while the rest reported that they can do so only with difficulty.”
THE INSTITUTIONAL AND CULTURAL PRESSURES FUELING GRADE INFLATION
The report finds that behind many causes of grade inflation lies a single force: misaligned incentives that often require collective action to fix.
The report surfaces a complex mix of institutional, interpersonal, and cultural forces that shape faculty grading behavior. Some pressures act on individual faculty; others can only be countered through collective action (as one professor noted: “This is a classic game theory problem”). Between Part I and Part II of our three-part series on Harvard’s grade inflation problem, we explored nearly all of these factors:
— Administrative pressure to accommodate students: The College “has been exhorting faculty to remember that some students arrive less prepared for college than others, that some are struggling with difficult family situations or other challenges, that many are struggling with imposter syndrome—and nearly all are suffering from stress.” Absent clear support on how to address these challenges otherwise, faculty have often responded by relaxing standards.
— Student pressure on faculty to assign high marks: With A’s now the norm, students fear anything less could jeopardize their chances at competitive jobs or graduate school. Some students dispute grades directly, while others turn to advisors who, as the report notes, “advocate inappropriately on students’ behalf.”
— Fear of negative course evaluations: In 2008, FAS professors voted to formalize course evaluations, turning the informal course evaluation system into the now-standard Q Guide. The report notes that since then, many instructors (especially non-tenured or non-ladder) increasingly hesitate to grade more stringently. Ironically, the data show grades barely predict Q scores, and workload doesn’t correlate at all.
— Faculty competition for concentrators and high enrollment: In Part Iof our series, we explained the pressure faculty face to keep enrollment numbers high. The report adds another layer: senior faculty “feel responsible for drawing undergraduates into their concentrations,” which can create a “race to the bottom” to compete for students, as one faculty member put it.
Despite faculty concerns that students are doing less, the data suggest students are working more than ever.
The report notes that “many faculty believe that hours worked have gone down, even as grades have gone up” and that 69% of FAS faculty surveyed by The Crimson agreed that Harvard students “do not sufficiently prioritize their coursework.”
The numbers suggest otherwise. In 2025, students reported spending 6.3 hours per course per week outside of class, up from 5.55 hours in 2015. On average, students said they spent 45 hours per week on academics, far more than the 10 to 15 hours they reported spending on extracurriculars.
This discrepancy may partially be explained by national trends pointing to lower incoming academic preparation — or, at the very least, changing academic and media environments.
One explanation may stem from the “shadow system of distinction.” Because “students sense that their grades are insufficient to distinguish them from one another,” the report notes that students increasingly chase additional academic credentials, such as secondary fields, double concentrations, language citations, or concurrent master’s degrees. In 2015-16, 85.6% of students took a four-course load per semester, while by 2024-25 that number had dropped to 69.5%, with more students taking five or more courses instead.
Faculty, especially in the humanities, also point to a shift in students’ academic habits and preparedness that may be shaping their classroom performance. The report highlights growing concern that students are arriving at Harvard less prepared for the demands of reading-intensive courses. Students struggle more with complex reading, prompting some faculty to shorten or simplify assignments. The report attributes this to national trends: fewer complex texts in high school curricula, coupled with a media culture that makes it harder for students to sustain focus. (As The Atlantic details, more Ivy League students are showing up to college without ever having read a full-length book. Some Harvard students say you can also graduate without reading one either.)
Together, these patterns suggest that the challenge may be less about students’ underlying capacity to learn, and more about the set of tools they enter college with, including their ability to focus and engage deeply in an environment increasingly shaped by digital distraction and pandemic-era disruptions.
Past efforts to reform the University may have contributed to today’s challenges.
In 2007, Harvard commissioned a FAS task force to revitalize excellence in teaching, which produced a “Compact to Enhance Teaching and Learning.” Among its recommendations was to encourage more innovation and creativity in pedagogy, with the Bok Center for Teaching and Learningproviding “consultations” to individual instructors and departments looking to do so in line with best practices.
According to the new report, faculty have “more than met this call,” often by redesigning courses to “increase learning.” Many shifted away from high-stakes exams toward lower-stakes assignments, believing this would help students retain material. But as the report notes, these changes may have had side effects: “lower-stakes assignments are more effective at rewarding effort than at evaluating performance, giving students the false sense that they’d mastered material that still eludes them.” The report calls this shift “fundamentally at odds” with a grading system designed to differentiate performance.
The pandemic’s academic effects are far from over.
The report mentions COVID only in reference to the spike in grades during remote instruction, but its impact runs far deeper. Today’s undergraduates experienced formative academic years during the pandemic, disrupting the development of focus, habits, and interpersonal skills.
Though Harvard has rolled back many pandemic-era policies, there’s no true return to a pre-COVID baseline. Students who were in middle school during the pandemic are now entering college. The University should not assume these disruptions will fade on their own.
HOW STUDENTS ARE ADAPTING (AND STRUGGLING) IN A DISTORTED ACADEMIC SYSTEM
At least some of students’ fears about the “shadow system of distinction” are valid.
The report notes, “increasingly, [graduate] admissions committees tell us that it can be difficult to tell Harvard students apart.”
If this is the case, it’s no surprise that students are taking on more courses and extracurriculars to stand out. But it also underscores a key point from Part III of our grade inflation series: Harvard should coordinate with its own graduate schools to ensure admissions officers interpret new grading distributions consistently.
Students may need to learn not to equate effort with excellence.
The report finds that many students misunderstand what grades are meant to evaluate. They often see grades as a reflection of how hard they worked, rather than the quality of what they produced. As the report puts it, students “don’t know what constitutes ‘excellent’ or ‘extraordinary’ work in a discipline,” and may not realize that grades are intended to measure that standard.
Students reported that grades felt “fair” when “they work hard and get an A” and “unfair” when they “work hard and don’t get an A or when another student doesn’t work hard and does.”
While the report paints with a broad brush, there are individual students who are frustrated with the current system and yearn for more rigorous courses and feedback.
While much of the report emphasizes systemic pressures and collective behaviors at play, it also captures a quieter frustration among students who want more rigor. Some describe their coursework as feeling “fake” when high grades are the norm and feedback is minimal. One student “lamented that no instructor had ever told her that she could do better work,” while others felt finals were so easy they could have “aced [them] on the first day of class.” In other words, Harvard’s “gem” courses (the easy A, low-workload courses) that students seek out are, as the report puts it, “counterfeit.”
HOW HARVARD PLANS TO RESPOND, AND WHAT IT WILL TAKE TO SUCCEED
Harvard aims to avoid the missteps of other universities that have tried to curb grade inflation.
The report notes that other institutions like Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, Cornell, and Wellesley have each tried single fixes. These range from Yale’s “raising awareness” of high grades among faculty to “influence faculty practices, to Cornell and Dartmouth adding median course grade data on student transcripts, to Princeton’s cap on A’s (as we covered in Part II and Part III of our series). None worked because “grading is a problem too complex to admit a single solution.”
In contrast, Harvard says it is attempting to implement multiple of these strategies (and more) at once, and is also treating grade inflation as a collective action problem.
The report offers four targeted requests for faculty to begin reining in grade inflation, and signals more proposals to follow.
The report calls on faculty to take four steps before the spring semester:
1. Consider recalibrating grading distributions to 2015 “when grading was not overly stringent, but we did assign a broader distribution of grades.”
2. Reassess how much weight they place on effort-based assignmentsversus assignments that demonstrate students’ content mastery.
3. Articulate their grading standards so students understand what constitutes excellent, A-worthy work output, not just effort.
4. Standardize grading in multi-section courses taught by multiple Teaching Fellows to ensure consistency.
The Educational Policy Committee has also “charged a faculty committee with exploring possible adjustments to our current system of honors and grading,” which include:
— Allowing a limited number of A+s to distinguish the “very best students.”
— Recording the median grade for each course on transcripts to reduce the incentive to seek the easiest courses.
— Developing alternate internal systems to express grades and distinguish students when determining prizes and honors.
The report didn’t indicate a timeline for these proposals, just that they are still seeking faculty and student input and that “none will be adopted without the vote of the FAS Faculty.”
Without follow-through, Harvard risks repeating its peers’ mistakes.
The report highlights some promising voluntary efforts already underway, such as departments establishing grading standards within concentrations and large gateway course faculty working to align grading expectations. The OUE encourages other groups of faculty to do the same. Rather than outlining any next steps to begin institutional coordination, the report says the OUE “would be very happy to convene these conversations, if that would be useful.”
This light touch may be deliberate. For meaningful culture change to take root, faculty must agree that grade inflation is real and worth tackling. This data-rich, rigorously argued report helps lay that groundwork, while also urging FAS and College leadership to show faculty “every day” that the leaders “have their backs” as they recalibrate standards.
Still, questions remain about what happens next. When Harvard released its Antisemitism and Islamophobia Task Force reports last spring, President Garber asked each school dean to submit an action plan by semester’s end. Here, there’s no comparable request. The OUE is gathering feedback from students, but the path forward remains vague.
Money may complicate things further. With Harvard facing the prospect of no future research funding, a $300+ million annual endowment tax, and cuts to incoming PhD seats by more than half, reforms that rely on better trained instructors, like standardizing grading across multi-section courses, may be harder to pull off. Those PhD students are the ones who do most of the grading, and there will be fewer of them to do it.
We’ll keep you updated in our weekly newsletter on new developments in Harvard’s efforts to curb grade inflation. Please keep sending us your questions in the meantime and we’ll keep trying to answer them!