In 712 Harvard course offerings last year, every enrolled undergraduate received an A.
In another 532, A’s were common enough that the class would have violated the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ newly approved grade cap — a policy that will soon limit top grades in most undergraduate courses to 20 percent of students, plus four more.
Together, those courses made up more than half of all undergraduate course offerings in a confidential grading dataset obtained by The Crimson, offering the clearest picture yet of how deeply Harvard’s grades have been compressed at the top — and how unevenly the faculty’s new cap will hit when it takes effect in fall 2027.
A Crimson analysis of more than 22,000 rows of course-level grading records found that A grades rose from roughly 44 percent of undergraduate grades in 2014-15 to about 63 percent in 2024-25.
But the rise was not spread evenly across the College.
In Arts and Humanities courses, roughly 78 percent of students received A’s last year. In Social Sciences, the figure was 62 percent. In the Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, A’s made up 57 percent and 56 percent, respectively.