Harvard Just Took a Big, Brave Step Against a Nationwide Problem

 

 

“In a vote whose results were announced on Wednesday, Harvard faculty decided to do something we have talked about for decades but never managed to pull off: cap the number of full A’s in every course.

 

The new rule imposes a “20 plus four” formula, meaning only about 20 percent of the students in a course can receive full A’s. (The asterisk is that it’s actually 20 percent plus four more students, an adjustment that’s designed for small, advanced seminars that tend to be more collaborative.)

 

Now comes the hard part — making sure this change improves the education we offer, something that depends on much more than just the decisions made on our campus.

 

Easy A’s are a problem for a whole lot of reasons. They reduce the incentive to learn, which means that students leave college with less knowledge and fewer skills. They make it hard for truly exceptional students to stand out from their merely successful peers. And though inflated grades might seem to lower pressure on students, the opposite is also true; grade-point averages got so high at Harvard that just two A-minuses were recently enough to disqualify students from graduating summa cum laude.

 

Over the seven years that we two have taught EC 10, the university’s introductory economics class, we gave full A’s to over 4,000 students, or more than 49 percent of the people we taught.

 

That places us below the average of our fellow instructors, who in the 2024-2025 academic year awarded full A’s 60 percent of the time.

 

Although all the highest-ranked EC 10 students had mastered the material, they hadn’t all crossed the threshold of “extraordinary distinction” that the student handbook says a full A is supposed to represent.

 

Like many of our colleagues, we wanted to grade more rigorously, but worried that doing so would disadvantage the students in our course or unintentionally push some away from our field of study. This is exactly the kind of collective-action problem we teach about in EC 10 — in which people agree in theory that everyone should act so as to benefit society as a whole, but then in reality pursue their own individual interests. It’s a pattern that, in other contexts, has resulted in fisheries being depleted, public land overgrazed and rivers polluted. In the case of grade inflation, the pressures are especially severe for junior faculty, who fear that honest grading will result in worse course evaluations, lower enrollments and slimmer prospects for tenure. That type of fear fed on itself, producing grades that were not only high but continually rising — in other words, inflation.

 

Various deans exhorted the Harvard faculty to stop giving out so many A’s, but little changed until we acted together to bind ourselves as a community. When individual incentives pull in the opposite direction of what is best for society, the only durable solution is a mechanism that incentivizes or requires everyone to act in the common good. We talk about that in EC 10, too.

 

Ultimately, grade inflation hurts not just the quality of individual students’ education; it hurts the university — any university — as a whole, by corroding its reputation for excellence. Asked about Harvard’s proposal, the dean of Yale College, Pericles Lewis, told The Yale Daily News, “I don’t want an A at Yale to be seen as a lesser A.”

 

The approach Harvard chose is one of many possible ways to overcome grade inflation. Every proposal that was floated, including this one, has downsides and unfair cases. The 20-plus-four approach, for example, would penalize a class that had unusually many talented and hard-working students. But it provides an easy-to-understand, workable solution to the grade inflation that plagued the old status quo. So we chose it.

 

Anti-inflation measures are hard to maintain, however. Princeton’s cap on A’s lasted from 2004 to 2014; Wellesley’s grade-deflation policy lasted from 2004 to 2019. Both were repealed under student and faculty pressure. For our new cap to work, we will have to show that it is part of a broader effort to improve education and learning — that we are not simply punishing our students with lower grades but raising the bar with more challenging and exciting classes. And more academic competition too.

 

The effort can’t be limited to just Harvard. Almost all universities have seen their grades become inflated over time, but the same collective-action problem that applies at the level of individual Harvard classes also applies at the level of institutions. Easier-grading schools may believe that they are giving their graduates an advantage. We hope that all schools decide to push back on grade inflation — both to advance their students’ education and, as the reputational costs of grade inflation become clear, to strengthen their graduates’ chances in the job market and graduate admissions.

 

Employers and graduate school admissions committees should play a role, too, by rewarding schools that make grading more meaningful and more informative. They should demand a nationwide system that tracks and compares grading policies at different schools — and assume the worst of any school that refuses to participate. Barring this, they should push individual schools for more information on average or median grades by class, as McGill University and Dartmouth do.

 

When a school’s transcript stops distinguishing students from one another, employers and graduate schools fall back on what they can: connections, internship pedigrees, the polish of a personal essay (increasingly written with artificial intelligence). Grade inflation doesn’t just devalue an A; it also quietly hands more weight to factors other than what a student actually learned. That is true at Harvard and every other school that has let its grades drift upward. Bringing inflation down is hard. The alternative is worse.

 

Jason Furman, a contributing Opinion writer, was the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017. David Laibson is a professor of economics at Harvard University. Together they teach Harvard’s introductory economics course.” [1]

 

1. Harvard Just Took a Big, Brave Step Against a Nationwide Problem: Guest Essay. Furman, Jason; Laibson, David.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. May 21, 2026.