Harvard Says It’s Handing Out Too Many A’s. Students Are Fighting Back.
Report from Ivy League school finds rampant grade inflation, but students complain administration is moving goal posts
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—The last time Jake Kamnikar remembers receiving anything other than an A on his transcript was in third-grade art class. He is now a freshman at Harvard.
That streak could end soon.
A recent internal report found that Harvard is dishing out too many A’s, and that the current undergrad system is “failing to perform the key functions of grading” and “damaging the academic culture of the College more generally.”
The report prompted uproar from some Harvard students who say they already study a lot, sleep very little and face immense stress to perform academically. Many feel they worked hard to get into Harvard, only for the school to contemplate moving the goal posts.
“You admitted these students because they have straight A’s, and now they’re getting a lot of A’s, and it’s, like, ‘This is a problem.’ And I’m thinking, how on earth is that a problem?” said Summer Tan, a Harvard senior.
Harvard’s report on its undergraduate college found that about 60% of grades were A’s during the 2024-25 school year, a jump from about 25% in 2005-06. The median GPA upon graduation is now 3.83, up from 3.29 in 1985.
The average time students spend studying outside class has barely changed, from 6.08 hours a week for each of their courses in fall 2006 to 6.3 hours this spring, according to the report by Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education. New faculty reported surprise at how lenient grading is, and nearly all expressed “serious concern” about grade inflation.
Making the Grade
An internal report showed Harvard College is giving out more ‘A’ grades and students are graduating with higher GPAs.
“We’re not trying to make Harvard something that it’s not,” Claybaugh said in an interview. “We’re trying to bring it back to what it was when it was really at its best.”
The report includes recommendations to curb grade inflation and restore rigor. Harvard is considering introducing a limited number of A-plus grades, and displaying the median grade for every course on transcripts to provide more context to employers and admissions committees.
Students have bashed and bemoaned the report across campus. One told the student newspaper she was crying “the whole entire day.” Some cited the college’s increased selectivity in admissions as justification for higher grades.
One challenge in addressing grade inflation, particularly for professors, is the fear that cracking down could send enrollment plummeting. Claybaugh plans to host a dinner with faculty to discuss grading plans, and has encouraged them to revert to how they graded 10 years ago.
Steven Pinker, a professor who teaches an introductory psychology course, said he has felt compelled to inflate grades at a similar rate to the collegewide data, even though he believes student performance has sunk.
Pinker has given a similar final exam since 2003, and now sees students score 10 percentage points lower on the multiple-choice portion. (He doesn’t know whether his sample group is the same, though: It is possible better students now are skipping his course in favor of a neuroscience one).
“A course with a reputation for a tough grading distribution will repel students,” Pinker said. “Everyone has an incentive to keep inflating grades unless everyone else stops simultaneously.” A separate study published by Harvard this spring, however, found that course difficulty and grades had a minimal effect on the scores students gave instructors on evaluations.
Many students recognize both sides of the grade-inflation argument. Alfred Williamson sees a disparity between his two majors. He said he has coasted through some classes for his government major, but has to work harder in his physics major.
“The classes where you can get away with not doing readings and not studying and not engaging in discussions, and still do well—that’s the real problem,” said Williamson, a sophomore.
But too much rigor disincentivizes academic exploration, students say. Williamson thought twice about majoring in physics because he worried it could lower his GPA and prove challenging if he applies to law school.
Tan, the college senior who had straight A’s in high school, said she sleeps about six hours per night, though during some stretches of college it has been three or four. She is juggling a part-time job at an ice-cream shop and about 35 hours a week as vice president of a campus politics center, among other extracurriculars.
“It’s not like I’ve managed to breeze my way through Harvard,” she said, pointing to B’s and some humanities courses with heavy reading loads.
Kamnikar, the freshman and economics and psychology double-major, thinks Harvard students should expect to be held to higher standards. But, he added that “learning should be inquisitive and not unnecessarily stressful or demanding.”
The root of Harvard students’ stress is generally their ambition, Claybaugh said. “When they weren’t all getting A’s, they were stressed. And now that they are all getting A’s, they are still stressed,” she said.
Grade inflation isn’t confined to Harvard; the problem has drawn President Trump’s scrutiny. He asked colleges to “commit to grade integrity” in his administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” an agreement it wants universities to sign in exchange for federal-funding advantages.
“It has reached a comical level of inflation,” said Christopher Schorr, director of the higher-education reform initiative at America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank.
Princeton University capped the number of A’s starting in 2004, but discontinued that practice after finding the policy increased stress, among other issues. Other schools didn’t follow suit, creating uneven comparisons for graduates.
Experts hope that this time around other schools will follow Harvard. Claybaugh said she has heard from peer institutions since the report was released.
In any case, the debate has been raging for years. In 1894, less than a decade after the grading system was put into place, a standards committee at Harvard said that A’s and B’s were sometimes given “too readily.”
Write to Roshan Fernandez at roshan.fernandez@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
Harvard students spent an average of 6.3 hours a week this spring studying outside of class for each of their courses, compared with 6.08 hours a week in fall 2006. An earlier version of this article incorrectly failed to state that the weekly study hours are per course. (Corrected on Nov. 12.)
