Each year, the undergraduate college at Harvard awards the Sophia Freund Award to the graduating senior with the highest GPA. For decades, the award went to one student, sometimes two if there was a tie. In 2025, there was a 55-way close The best students all had perfect GPAs. Hundreds more were nearly perfect. Last year, straight A’s accounted for 66 percent of the class. A and A– accounted for 84 percent.
In the Harvard Student Handbook, an A stands for “abnormal variance” — a rating that is meaningless if applied to two-thirds of students. To restore meaning to student transcripts, Harvard’s grading committee, of which I am a member, has recommended including all A grades up to around 33 percent in all undergraduate courses. Our proposal follows a three-year investigation by Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education at Harvard, which found that the school’s current grading system is “destroying the academic culture of the College.”
Grade inflation is closer to numbers. Keeping a perfect GPA out of reach for many students prevents them from taking potentially threatening courses. It’s like students starting college with a shiny new car and hoping to live four years without a scratch. Who would dare to go off the road? If educators want to revive academic risk-taking, engagement, and curiosity on campuses, then we must free our students from the tyranny of the inappropriate copy.
When I was asked to join the Harvard grad committee last year, I wasn’t sure there was a problem. Given that students have a much harder time getting in now than they did in my day—the acceptance rate has dropped from about 15 percent in the 1990s to about 4 percent now—an A score can only reflect the students’ strengths. Yet faculty who have taught the same course for decades report no improvement in academic performance. In fact, many professors say that students seem less invested in academics and less motivated to perform read all than they were.
Harvard’s 2025 report on classroom culture revealed that students’ class choices were in most cases motivated less by intellectual curiosity than the prospect of an easy A. This puts pressure on faculty to deliver more A’s to ensure that students enroll in their courses and evaluate them well in audits. As is my colleague Steven Pinker he explainedanti-inflation can drive students away from gateway courses to entire careers. Because grade inflation makes a perfect GPA not only impossible but seem important, even an A- can seem unnecessarily risky.
In classes where the average grade is an A, students know they need to work just hard enough to land in the middle of the class, saving their precious energy for extracurriculars (writing for publications, leading pre-professional clubs) where real difference can be made. “It would be ridiculous to say that (Harvard’s) scores are meaningless, but they are almost meaningless,” the law school dean said. has said. The problem is beyond the Ivy League. Studies show that the standard grade in American colleges is A.
For generations, students at elite universities went through first-year math. Fresh from small ponds from Brooklyn to Boise, straight students would get their first B’s, or worse. They would be sad, maybe a little confused, but they would also be freer to explore and experiment, unencumbered by the demands of perfection.
In fact, we can restore the sense of academic possibility that I experienced as an undergraduate at Harvard decades ago. Despite having no artistic talent, I enrolled in a studio art class taught by architect Louis Bakanowsky. With his Mike Ditka mustache and neighborhood accent, equal parts New York and Boston, he looked more like a football coach than a famous professor. He haunted the studio, giving out clever little cones of the composer as we sketched: How much can a line say? How much is enough? How much is too much?
I moved the coals across the paper, trying and failing and trying again to catch the scratchy rooted onion. “Do you trust those roots?” Bakanowsky asked, pointing to my drawing. I gasped weakly. “I trust those roots,” he told me, “They have found it roots.” He patted me on the back and left. Thirty years later, I don’t know what class Louis Bakanowsky gave me, but I remember that he believed in my roots.
The class pushed me to my limits and made me uncomfortable, but I didn’t hesitate to accept it. If I were a student today, when A’s are pretty much guaranteed and anything less can feel like a disaster, I suspect I’d avoid that risk.
After considering various ideas, including optional guidelines, adding an A+ to the scale, or replacing letters with unknown numbers, we came up with reducing the maximum score. Princeton’s peak in A-range scores, in place from 2004 to 2014, was a major failure. His autopsy found that this policy, which left implementation to individual departments, did not provide students with clear signals about their performance or make grading fair and consistent across disciplines. Their hat also had a major unexpected effect: increased anxiety among students. But Princeton had cut all A grades to 35 percent, ensuring that most of the university’s elite students would have to settle for a B or less.
The lesson for us seemed to be to try a light touch. In February we launched ours suggestion achieving A grades up to about 33 percent across Harvard College. Given that Harvard’s Student Handbook says an A- indicates “full mastery,” we saw no reason to put a hard limit on A- grades. Yes, this will cause the spread of A–. But this policy still promises to restore some meaning to Harvard transcripts by assigning A grades only to the strongest performance.
Our proposal was met with much praise from students and faculty alike. A joke! One opinion poll found that 85 percent of students opposed the cap, mostly for fear of too much stress and competition. Among faculty, some worry about threats to academic freedom, technological fixes to cultural problems, or undue restrictions on advanced courses, which attract top-performing students. Some said we didn’t go far enough. The faculty will vote on this proposal starting next week. We hope to be close. (The Yale Committee too it suggested grade limit, although it would keep the average grade up to a B. Godspeed!)
Yes, A grades will make it more competitive for A. But as long as top graduate school positions and job offers are few and far between, students will compete. The question is whether they will focus their energy on the course or elsewhere. And the rise of mental health problems on college campuses over the past decade has shown that severe bouts of depression and anxiety can accompany lax grading standards.
Some faculty and students have said that competition based on the A’s cap would be counterproductive to learn: If everyone learns all the material, then why doesn’t everyone get an A? We hope to teach the next generation of Nobel Prize winners, people who will think of better ways of living and lead us to them. A- is for not losing points. A is for finding them in unexpected ways. The grade should reflect depth, creativity, and unique originality—an eye-catching essay, a final problem on the exam that only a few students could answer correctly.
My college education trained me to explore and take risks. Along with studio art, I took a course in behavioral science and statistics—outside of my career and unexpectedly years later. My first semester, I took a class that made me focus on ethical problems known as “trolley problems.” This pulled me through the Ph.D. of philosophy, then in cognitive psychology and social psychology, and more recently in social impact partnership. I wasn’t sure of an A in any of those classes, but I took them because the subtitles were almost entirely unexpected at the time.
Bringing that thought back is bigger than grading policies and bigger than Harvard. But better grading policies can help. To restore public trust and live up to our own principles, institutions of higher education must make our symbols mean what we say they mean. Our dedication over the centuries is not to the surface of perfection but to hard-earned improvement. We must trust our roots.
