College Uncovered: Making A's count

Harvard faculty have approved a controversial plan to overhaul the college's grading system, including new limits on how many A's professors can award. The goal: make an A mean something again.

But the debate goes beyond transcripts and GPAs. At a moment of deep skepticism toward elite higher education, some supporters say tougher grading could also help restore trust in institutions like Harvard.

In this episode of College Uncovered, GBH's Kirk Carapezza heads to Harvard Yard, where high-achieving students worried about their futures are pushing back. And we hear from professors divided over a broader question: What are grades actually used for?

Economist Jeff Denning of the University of Texas at Austin explains why easier grading may weaken students' incentives to study and to truly learn the material.

Meanwhile, a faculty report from Yale's Committee on Trust in Higher Education argues that grades at elite universities often no longer do what they're supposed to do: measure and communicate learning. We hear from two of the report's authors, sociologist Julia Adams and law professor Sarath Sanga.

And finally, The Hechinger Report's Jill Barshay explains why, in the age of the easy A, parents may be getting a misleading picture of how their kids are actually doing.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

Massachusetts Avenue at Johnston D, Harvard Square.

Harvard is known for handing out a lot of A’s, more than half of all grades issued to undergraduates here. So is that a problem? Well, some faculty want to restore the idea that an A represents extraordinary distinction by capping the number of A’s.

And many of the high achieving students here inside Harvard Yard are not happy about it.

This might sound egotistic, but I think everybody I know here works extremely hard.

If you do well enough to reach a certain threshold, I don’t think you should be curved down because other people also do well.

That’s sophomore Nayeen Das. He’s a physics major from Lexington, Massachusetts and senior Alexandria Westwright, a government major from Pittsburgh. I met them in Harvard Yard as they left class and as a tourist flocked to the John Harvard statue to rub its bronze foot.

Both Das and Westray say great inflation is real, but they worry limiting A’s could hurt students after graduation, when GPAs can matter in competitive job markets and grad school admissions.

Because you’re being compared to these students from other schools.

It’s a farce to say that there’s nothing distinguishing Harvard students just because we all have A’s.

This is College Uncovered, a podcast from GBH News that pulls back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Kirk Carapezza. Today on the show, higher eds deflate gate.

Harvard faculty have overwhelmingly passed a controversial plan to overhaul the college’s grading system and limit how many A’s they can give out. The stated goal? Make A’s meaningful again.

So let’s just call it MAMA or maybe MAMA. Whatever they end up calling the new policy, comedian and Harvard graduate Conan O’Brien noted it in his commencement speech.

Welcome trustees, deans, faculty, alumni, graduates, families, my fellow honorands, Justice Department spies, and that Uber Eats driver delivering mimosas.

Conan congratulated Harvard president Alan Garber for stewarding the class of 2026.

Fantastic job, sir. Really nice. Really nice.

Normally, I would give you an A plus, but in keeping with upcoming Harvard policy, I’m adjusting your grade to a C minus.

Trust me, it’s for the good of the school.

Well, whether it’s good for the school or not, another unstated goal might be restoring some public trust, or at least tamp down public resentment towards selective higher ed institutions like Harvard. More on that later. Other universities have tried similar policies, only to abandon them under pressure from students and their tuition-paying parents.

So will the Harvard Plan work? For years, Harvard and other selective or highly rejective colleges have been known for handing out a lot of A’s. At Harvard, more than half of all grades awarded to undergraduates last year were straight A’s, up from just a quarter 20 years ago.

Many faculty and administrators tell me those figures reveal a grading system that no longer evaluates and communicates meaningful differences in student performance. So, how exactly would this new Harvard plan work to fix that? Well, under the new policy, the number of A grades in any given course will be limited to the top 20% of students, plus four additional A’s per class.

So I wasn’t a math major, but that means in a class of 20, a professor can give no more than eight A’s. In a class of 80, the limit is 20. The new grading policy goes into effect in the fall of 2027, and administrators will then review it after three years.

Tenured government professor Stephen Lewicki says A’s have practically become the expectation on campus, and that pressure can influence professors too.

I can give an A minus and almost inevitably face a bitching, whining, complaining, entitled student in my office, or I can give an A and not have to bother, and I can get back to my work.

Lewicki hopes the new policy pushes back against a culture where more and more students expect the top grade.

All I aspire to here with this reform is getting kids used to getting A minuses. The status quo is unacceptable, and so we’ve got to experiment. Even if there are some pitfalls, even if there are problems initially, we have to try to experiment.

For Lewicki and other, shall we say, less outspoken professors, limiting A’s is also about reminding students that it’s okay to fail, or at least like me, get a B plus once in a while. Other faculty though strongly object to this plan.

So the biggest problem with talking to me is that I oppose the policy for 47 reasons, and I never know which one to start with.

Allison Frank Johnson has taught history at Harvard for more than two decades.

I teach modern European history. I also chaired the German department for seven years.

Johnson says she hates the new grading system in part because it assumes only a fixed share of her students can produce outstanding work.

For me, grades are an incentive to get students to do their very best work and to reflect on the work that they’ve done, not a way of ranking them against one another.

Johnson says the number of students in her classes who earn straight A’s has definitely crept up over the years. But as a teacher, that’s not even her top concern in the classroom.

I’m worried about AI. I’m worried about figuring out how to determine if my students are doing the work themselves. I’m worried about fairness.

Am I grading students who do their own work? Am I getting students to actually come into the classroom and engage with the ideas that I have? Am I able to keep my political views out of the classroom in a way that allows students to determine their own opinions and yet at the same time not silence myself?

Because I’m teaching about Nazis, right? That’s political. I think they’re bad.

I’m not neutral about it. So there’s a thousand things that I worry about in teaching and like, oh no, it used to be that only 15 percent of my students are getting A’s and now 40 percent of my students are getting A’s. That is not my number one worry.

And in the age of AI, she says she’s constantly thinking about what human skills she wants her students to develop over the course of a semester.

Being able to express yourself orally and in writing, to make an argument, to defend it with evidence, but also to know when what you’re reading is reliable and when it’s something that you shouldn’t necessarily trust. So evidence assessment is something I’m emphasizing more and more and more as our national ability to do that seems to be corroding. But why should somebody else tell me that the percentage of students who are going to excel at doing those things is going to be exactly 20?

If I can do better, if I can become a better teacher and convey those skills better, I still can’t give my students higher grades.

Grade inflation has been creeping up at American colleges for decades, and economists say that comes with serious consequences. When top grades become the norm, students may have less incentive to push themselves academically.

And so if you have weaker incentives to study, you’re less likely to learn the material. It turns out learning the material is helpful for you in the future.

That’s Jeff Denning, an economist at the University of Texas Austin. While some students worry lower grades could hurt their future prospects, Denning’s research suggests grade inflation may actually hurt students in the long run. Here’s how it works.

Denning identifies teachers who give out high grades relative to the average standardized test scores of their class.

We are able to categorize teachers into grade inflating and not in grade inflating teachers and compare students who have different kinds of experiences in high school and then link them to their earnings records. We find students who experienced more grade inflating teachers, they have lower earnings later in life.

The EZA phenomenon also reflects how American higher education has become increasingly transactional, tuition in exchange for jobs. And the Harvard debate comes at a time when students nationwide are reading less and increasingly relying on artificial intelligence for help. So cheating is top of mind.

Faculty at Princeton recently approved a policy requiring proctored in-person exams, changing a long-held honor system that relies on students to monitor themselves. And other institutions are increasingly experimenting with alternatives to traditional grades. So-called competency-based education, an idea first established back in the 1970s, is making a bit of a comeback.

At Brandeis University, as we’ve reported on this podcast, administrators are shifting their focus from grades to students’ competencies, adding a second transcript designed to measure skills beyond courses and GPAs.

Grades, of course, exist to evaluate and then communicate what students have learned. A faculty-produced report from Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education finds that the Ivy League University and at many peer institutions no longer do that. The report concludes decades of grade inflation have rendered the college grading system almost meaningless as an academic measure.

To restore common grading norms, the trust committee recommends capping course grade averages at a B. Sociology professor Julia Adams co-chaired the trust committee, which in its widely covered report gave a brutal assessment of academia’s role in fueling distrust and resentment toward US colleges and universities. And committee member Sarath Sanga teaches at Yale Law School and is an expert in grade inflation.

Sarath and Julia, thank you so much for speaking with College Uncovered.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you.

So, Sarath, from your perch there, what’s the problem with grade inflation?

Well, across higher ed, we’re seeing faculty even being reported being pressured by the structure to award higher grades than they might otherwise in order to maintain enrollment and student evaluations. So one of the problems of many is I would say that even inflation is not the most interesting feature. It’s the compression that it produces with more and more students being awarded the very top grade.

That means the way to think about the current system is that it’s essentially only identifying the bottom end of the class and not enabling the higher end to distinguish themselves.

And what are faculty there at Yale recommending?

We make two specific recommendations. The first is perhaps the big one, and that is to essentially normalize the GPA to 3.0. That is so that an average performance essentially merits a B.

That will take some buy-in and a lot of work. But in the meantime, we also recommend simply reporting more on the transcript itself to produce more contextualization for the grades themselves. And this is because an A in one class may not mean the same thing as an A in another class.

So reporting something like the average grade or the percentile is the specific thing we recommend that the student achieved within the class will help parents and students and employers and graduate admissions officers to make sense of the grade.

Julia Adams, in the context of public trust in higher ed, why do you think these kind of changes are necessary now?

Our committee was formed, of course, by President Mari McInnes at Yale to address the broad question of declining trust in higher education. Grade compression, grade inflation is one small piece of that, but it’s an important piece, particularly for the faculty whose ability to chart the performance of students in the faculty’s area of expertise is really one of the foundational aspects of faculty academic life.

How do you respond to other professors who say grading isn’t just about ranking students against themselves? Historian Allison Frank-Johnson at Harvard, for example, told me Yale and other schools are capitulating to outside criticism of higher education. Here she is.

You talk to a bunch of angry donors who think that universities are ruined by admitting first gen students and students of color and that naturally standards are going down and A’s don’t mean anything anymore. And I think that there’s a socioeconomic explanation for the kinds of people that are making these complaints. It has nothing to do with the work that our students are doing in the classroom.

I’d like to see some evidence that your granddad was doing like the Lord’s work at Harvard College because he was a super genius and got a C anyway. And yet the grandson is like a loser and all he cares about is, you know, watching beach volleyball, YouTube videos, and somehow he’s getting an A. I don’t think that’s what’s happening.

So, Sarath, what do you make of that argument?

Gee, I think it’s importing a lot of moral and political language into what is fundamentally a design question. So the question that I would ask is not what do the donors demand or what political message will this send or what angry alum could we placate? I would ask, how can we do right by our students?

Our obligation is to teach them well and to evaluate them rigorously, to give them back information about how they did relative to other peers, and even relative to their performance in other classes. So I think the way that the conversation has been framed is fundamentally wrong. The current system produces extraordinary anxiety and pervasive strategizing.

Students are choosing classes for expected grades rather than what they want to learn because there’s nothing in the system’s design that prevents it. I don’t think anyone is with a straight face actually defending the status quo, because the status quo is a very sharp, sharp trend toward all students getting A’s, which is to say toward no student being given individualized feedback.

Sarath Sanga is a law professor at Yale, and he studies how people and organizations set their own rules. Julia Adams is a sociology professor. She co-chaired the university’s trust committee.

Julia and Sarath, thank you so much for your time and your perspective. Thank you so much. Thanks, Kirk.

Harvard and Yale are not the first to wrestle with grade inflation. Several other colleges have already tried to directly address it, including Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, Amherst, and Wellesley, more than two decades ago.

Unlike Harvard, there was no quota on the number of straight A’s or any kind of letter grade.

Akila Wirapana chairs the Economics Department at Wellesley, and he studied his own college’s policy. Beginning in 2004, Wellesley strongly encouraged, but did not require, professors to aim for an average grade of B+. Wirapana found grades dropped significantly, mostly in the humanities and social sciences.

Enrollment in majors like English, History, and Philosophy also declined, and student ratings of those professors fell, too.

It became called the grade deflation policy, which immediately suggests, I’m getting a grade lower than what I deserve. Why should my daughter come to Wellesley and get lower grades, and find it harder to go to graduate schools?

After years of complaints, and as sticker prices continued to soar, the women’s college ended the practice in 2019. At Harvard, historian Allison Frank Johnson says, looking forward, she’s not concerned fewer students will major in history or other humanities.

You know, of my like 47 reasons, that’s not even one of them. If this were the right thing to do, no, if it were the right thing to do, we would have to do it, right? I’m not a person who’s going to say, oh, I know this is the right thing to do, but I don’t want fewer students to take my class because I only, people only take my class to get easy A’s.

I mean, that would be a ridiculous ground for opposing this policy. It’s not the right thing to do. Students don’t only take my class because they’re looking for easy A’s.

I think what students are going to stop taking are classes that they think other hyper talented students are in.

Internal Harvard reports produced by faculty and student journalists show many professors feel their hyper talented students do not prioritize their courses because they’re spending more time on extracurriculars, sports, internships, and even filming TV shows just to stand out from the pack. A political reporter for the New York Times, for example, says in his bio online that he graduated from Harvard, but quote, mostly skipped class to report for the campus newspaper.

In today’s world, practically what distinguishes students at Harvard right now is not necessarily great because everybody has A’s because they work very hard. It is actually seen in our extracurriculars and the whole thing that we are criticized for working for.

Alexandria Westray, the government major from Pittsburgh we heard at the top of this episode, says students feel enormous pressure to take on leadership roles outside the classroom.

Students have taken upon ourselves to actually create a system in extracurriculars and internships that does distinguish who really can handle a lot of pressure, who has a lot of responsibility.

Her classmate, Michelle Baldorama, is from Virginia and says she’s not surprised so many Harvard students get A’s.

I think my peers work extremely hard for their grades. So, like, it makes sense that that would be the outcome.

Baldorama worries the new grading system will discourage academic risk-taking, pushing students away from harder courses that might hurt their GPA. She recalls taking a tough class in which she did not get the top grade.

I did take a statistics class. It was really hard. I did not get an A in it.

Can you tell me what you did get?

A B. It was the only one, but it’s fine. But it’s like I’m glad that I took that course.

Now with Harvard limiting the number of A’s available to earn in each class, she thinks students may become even more strategic about protecting their GPAs.

Students want to succeed, of course, and so do their tuition-paying parents. In elementary, middle, and high school, parents check report cards, ask about homework assignments, and even help their kids study. If all of that fails and they have the means, well, the ends justify hiring private tutors.

Jill Barshay covers education for our partner, The Hechinger Report. She says, in the age of the easy A, it’s easy to be misled.

I think it’s because A’s are so familiar to all of us, and we associate them with excellent, right? If you’ve gotten an A, you assume you’re doing really, really well. And in an era of grade inflation, where teachers in elementary, middle, and high school are issuing way more A’s, it’s the great inflation in K to 12 is even greater than the great inflation in higher ed, which you’ve also been discussing on this show.

And you just don’t recalibrate it. You assume that the A that you’re familiar with from your own childhood represents as much excellence now as it did back then.

And you don’t buy that?

Well, we know we don’t buy it because the number of A’s is going way, way up. And it could be that maybe students are just a lot smarter these days. But what we know from other data is that test scores have gone down, down, down.

And what that means is what an eighth grader can do today is much less than what an eighth grader could do a decade ago. And so it can’t be that more students are really deserving of the highest grades.

You wrote recently about this experiment and this new study that finds parents often assume everything is fine when their kids’ report card shows mostly A’s, even when standardized test scores are slipping. And that assumption may underestimate the help and guidance that their child actually needs?

There’s a theory among scholars that parent investment is so important in kids. It’s not just what teachers do in the classroom. And the way parents get signals about what to do is they look at test scores and they look at grades.

And a fascinating experiment took place with researchers at the University of Chicago in Oregon State, where they surveyed 2,000 parents with two fictitious students named Robert and Stacey. And they gave them different scenarios for the kids. Imagine that Robert and Stacey had low grades and low test scores, and they gave the parents an imaginary $100 and asked how they wanted to spend it.

They could spend it on anything, on vacations, on tutoring, after school programs, paying bills. And when both grades and test scores were low for Robert and Stacey, the parents invested a lot more of that $100 in improving their students’ skills. And they even invested more of their own time reading to their kids, helping them with homework.

But when test scores were low and grades were high, so imagine a very low, almost failing test score and an A, the parents didn’t step in as much. And the converse, when test scores were high but grades were low, the parents were much more inclined to step in with help. So that showed that parents really placed much more value on test scores.

And in fact, there was a survey accompanying the experiment where it said that 70% of the parents said they trust grades more than tests when making decisions about their child, and fewer than 9% trusted the test scores more.

We’ve seen grade deflation efforts in the past, and often student complaints and tuition-paying parents stepping in and these practices. We saw that happen at Wellesley College here in Massachusetts. What do you make of these recent efforts by Harvard and other selective colleges to recalibrate their grading system?

It’s admirable, because what is the point of having a grading system where everyone gets an A? And a trophy, right? It’s a participation award, right?

But like you say, really hard to implement and stick with. I believe Princeton tried in the early 2000s, I think in 2004, and there was a bit of grade deflation at Princeton, but the students were really angry because they thought it was hurting their chances of getting into great law schools and medical schools and who knows, internships at Goldman Sachs. And in 2014, they abolished it and grades went back up again.

Jill, do you think great inflation contributes to public resentment and the kind of distrust of higher ed institutions like Harvard?

I think we need to distinguish between what contributes to distrust and what’s the main driver of distrust. Certainly. I mean, we can all be cynical when everyone gets a participation, a trophy, you’re like, how great are these grading systems?

Right? But I don’t think those are the main drivers of distrust in higher ed. You’ve got complaints across the political spectrum.

The far right thinks American professors are too woke and indoctrinating students. Everyone’s upset about unfair admissions policies that give extra benefits to rich potential donors and legacy students and athletes. I think the biggest problem are the costs.

Everyone is frustrated with how high tuition is and how some kids pay different prices for the same seat. It’s frustrating.

Or colleges, it’s unclear. It’s nearly impossible to figure out how much college will actually cost.

Right.

So what else should higher ed do if you’re advising a college president or a faculty senate? What should they do about that distrust? Or what can they do?

I think it’s important to address great inflation. That alone is not going to solve the trust problem with higher ed. But it’s certainly admirable to try to do it.

And Harvard does need to be the first mover because it can lead the way. In the same way that Harvard was leading a resistance to the Trump administration, it can lead a resistance to great inflation. And if Harvard finds a way to succeed with this, maybe other colleges and universities can follow.

And they’re certainly paying attention. Jill, this is a consumer-facing podcast. If I’m a student or parent, what should I know about great inflation to make sure I’m getting the most out of my education?

The first thing that parents and students need to know is that great inflation is rampant and that an A does not mean that you’ve mastered the material, that you have the skills you’re supposed to have for your grade level.

So that grade I got from Father Kiznowski, to easy A Father K. I might not have earned it completely.

Well, maybe he liked you, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are writing at an exceptionally high level, right? That you’re not above expectations and going above and beyond. Many students are getting A’s for just kind of doing the basic work that kind of like a B in our time.

Or a gentleman’s C.

Well, I don’t know that an A is a gentleman’s C. I don’t know that it’s that bad, but maybe more like a B or even a B minus.

Okay.

What parents should be looking at is also the test scores, and not just the test that the teacher is giving, but standardized test scores. Compare it with the spring assessments. Compare it with the SAT or ACT score that your child is taking in high school.

When you see a discrepancy, that’s when you need to ask questions. Now, of course, tests don’t measure everything we care about, but they do measure some basic skills, and when there’s a big gap, ask questions.

Jill Barshay covers education for our partner, The Hechinger Report, where she writes the weekly proof points column and a weekly newsletter about education research and data. Check it out and subscribe. Jill, thank you so much for your time and perspective.

Thanks for having me, Kirk.

This is College Uncovered. I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH News. You can find our stories about great inflation and efforts to tamp it down and all of our higher education stories online at gbhnews.org.

You can find all of our podcast episodes wherever you enjoy audio. This episode was produced and written by me, Kirk Carapezza, and it was edited by Azita Ghahramani, Lisa Wardle, and Adeline Sear. Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.

Our project manager is Isabel Hibbard. Our theme song and original music is by Left Roman out of MIT. Head of GBH Podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

College Uncovered is made possible by Lumina Foundation. It’s a production of GBH News and distributed by PRX. Thank you so much for listening.

The post College Uncovered: Making A’s count appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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This story was originally published June 9, 2026 at 1:00 AM.