Harvard faculty voted to impose a roughly 20 percent cap on A grades beginning in fall 2027, approving the College’s most aggressive attempt in decades to reverse grade inflation and reshape academic standards.
Faculty voted 458 to 201 for the first plank of the three-part proposal, which will limit A grades in undergraduate courses to 20 percent of enrollment, with flexibility for up to four additional A’s.
The measure passed with 69.5 percent of votes cast.
Faculty also approved a companion measure to use average percentile rankings, rather than GPA, to determine internal awards and honors. That measure passed 498 to 157, with 76 percent of participating faculty in favor.
But faculty rejected the proposal’s third plank, which would have allowed courses to petition to opt out of the A cap if they were graded on an unsatisfactory, satisfactory, and satisfactory-plus basis. That measure failed 292 to 364.
Together, the votes represent a sweeping intervention in Harvard College’s academic culture — one that will sharply reduce the share of A’s and place new constraints on grading decisions traditionally left to individual instructors.
The decision marks a major victory for Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh and the faculty subcommittee that designed the plan after warning that Harvard’s grading system had become too compressed at the top to distinguish exceptional work from merely strong performance.
It also signals that faculty were willing to endorse a mandatory cap despite months of objections from students and professors who argued that the proposal could heighten competition, discourage intellectual risk-taking, and infringe on faculty autonomy.
Students overwhelmingly disapproved of the proposal. Nearly 85 percent of respondents to a February survey administered by the Harvard Undergraduate Association said they disapproved of the proposal.
But faculty support held — and ultimately proved decisive.
The policy was repeatedly revised before reaching the ballot. When the proposal was first introduced in February, its architects pitched the A cap and percentile-ranking system as paired reforms: the ranking system would prevent students from avoiding larger or more difficult courses in search of better grades under the cap.
After pushback, the subcommittee separated the measures into distinct votes, delayed implementation by a year to fall 2027, and added a “satisfactory-plus” designation for courses that chose to opt out of the system.
In the weeks before the vote, some faculty also pushed for a more complicated alternative to the“20 percent plus four” formula that would have tightened limits in smaller courses. But that amendment failed to make it onto the final ballot after faculty favored the original formula in a preliminary poll.
The approved cap represents a dramatic escalation from the College’s recent voluntary effort to curb grade inflation. In October, Claybaugh wrote that Harvard’s grading system was “failing,” reporting that more than 60 percent of undergraduate grades awarded during the 2024-25 academic year were A’s.
In response, faculty reduced the share of A grades by nearly seven percentage points in the fall semester. But Wednesday’s vote points to a faculty intent on a more ambitious approach to the problem.
Claybaugh hailed the vote in a statement, calling it an “important step” toward repairing the College’s grading system.
“This is a consequential vote,” she wrote. “It will, I believe, strengthen the academic culture of Harvard; it will also, I hope, encourage other institutions to confront similar questions with the same level of rigor and courage.”
Members of the subcommittee that drafted the proposal added that the cap would restore the value of a Harvard transcript.
“This matters for our students above all. A Harvard A grade will now tell them, as well as employers and graduate schools, something real about what a student has achieved,” they wrote. “An A will once again be what Harvard’s guidelines have long said it is: a mark of extraordinary distinction.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
—Staff writer Abigail S. Gerstein can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at abbysg.97. Follow her on X @abbysgerstein.
—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at amannsm.38. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.
