70% Vote in Favor of Plan to Limit A Grades at Harvard

UPDATE May 20, 2026 11:50 AM CDT

Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences has voted 458-201 in favor of a plan that will see the school cap the number of A grades doled out to undergraduates. The New York Times reports solid A grades will be limited to 20% of students in each course, with the ability for professors to hand out four additional As. Amanda Claybaugh, the dean of undergraduate education, described the potential impact of the "consequential vote" in a statement: "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." The new system will come into force in fall 2027, reports the Harvard Crimson.

May 13, 2026 7:07 AM CDT

Harvard could soon make straight As a lot less routine. The university's Faculty of Arts and Sciences began voting Tuesday on whether to cap the share of solid A grades a professor can hand out, a move aimed at reining in an A boom that now accounts for nearly two-thirds of all undergraduate marks—up from about one-quarter two decades ago. Axios reports more than 50 students in last year's class graduated with perfect GPAs.

The online ballot, which closes in a week with results due May 20, asks faculty to decide on three changes. The headline item would generally limit solid As to 20% of a class, with four extra A grades allowed per course (a move intended to account for small seminars where a larger share of students might do exceedingly well); A-minuses aren't affected. Inside Higher Ed does the math: a class of 10 students, for example, could see up to six A's, while a class of 100 students could see up to 24 top marks. The other questions: whether to shift internal honors calculations from GPAs to percentile ranks, and whether to introduce "satisfactory," "unsatisfactory," and "satisfactory-plus" options.

Backers say the cap is "intentionally modest," as Axios puts it, and could restore meaning to grades in an era when employers and grad schools view inflated GPAs warily. Opponents warn that quotas intrude on academic judgment and could hurt Harvard students competing with peers from schools without caps. "Churchill once described democracy as the worst system of government except for all of the other alternatives that have been tried, and that's how I view this reform," Latin American studies professor Steven Levitsky tells Inside Higher Ed. "It's clumsy, arbitrary, and represents some degree of invasion into faculty autonomy. It is not ideal. But the alternative is the status quo, and the status quo is awful." If approved by a simple majority, the new rules would start in fall 2027 and face a three-year review.