Harvard’s new cap on ‘A’ grades is doomed to fail

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Harvard College recently voted to cap A grades in its undergraduate courses. More specifically, it said that no more than 20 percent of the grades given for any course in the college can be an A.

There are no limits on A-minuses or any other grade below an A.

Some wasted no time in applauding Harvard’s decision, celebrating a move they see as a crucial step in combatting the existential terror of grade inflation. The reality, though, is that grade inflation is a red herring — one that is meant to distract us from larger, more systemic issues that few universities want to confront.

Here is the major problem with Harvard’s approach: policies that mandate grade caps, especially on A’s, have failed at nearly every institution where they have been tried. Princeton jettisoned a similar cap in 2014. In 2019, Wellesley College threw out its own draconian rule that average course grades needed to be capped at B+. Harvard thinks it will be the exception to this pattern. We shall see.

Princeton’s experiment illustrates why these failures are so common. From 2004 to 2014, this fellow Ivy mandated a cap of 35 percent on the entire range of A grades (A-, A and A+). After a decade, the policy went up in flames. Faculty voted in large numbers to rescind it, and the whole affair was swept under the rug as quickly as possible. It seems only right to give kudos to Princeton for recognizing the problems with their system and for rectifying them. Too few institutions take this kind of action.

Why did the policy fail? According to the report written by the faculty committee that initially recommended the change, the biggest concerns had to do with Princeton graduates being competitive for jobs and graduate schools with GPAs ever so slightly lower than their peers from other universities. There was also the issue of losing prospective students to other Ivies, because they and their parents were scared off by the grade cap.

The same document notes that Princeton undergraduates reported, through a survey, feeling as if they were only focused on letter grades rather than feedback, and that their courses had become overly competitive. There is certainly no better way to turn a vibrant classroom into “Lord of the Flies” faster than to create artificial scarcity of the commodity that our institutions seem to prize more than anything else.

What’s more, a grade-capping policy does not solve anything other than adjusting the baseline distribution of a particular set of grades. It does nothing to address larger issues that lay just under the surface of debates about grade inflation.

For example, if Harvard is worried about what their grades will say to employers, graduate schools and the public at large, they should focus more on communicating the amazing things their students are doing, building, starting and designing — perhaps through a more illustrative kind of transcript. That’s the real opportunity for innovation. These are the kinds of stories that say far more about a university’s value than any breakdown of individual grades.

It would also mean that students would need to have continued opportunities to do this work, and it would assume that faculty are already teaching dynamic courses that focus on critical thinking, creative problem solving, and meaningful projects. I legitimately wonder whether Harvard is willing to test that assumption.

Harvard, like many other institutions, is relying too heavily on grades as meaningful metrics. Like Atlas, grades simply cannot bear the weight that so many in the education sector wish to place upon their shoulders.

We know now from decades of research that grades are not scientific or objective measurements of student learning. They are reflections of progress on an individual instructor’s learning goals as determined by performance on activities, assignments and exams created by that same instructor. Someone teaching the identical course down the hall will have different goals, different assignments and different grades. Imagining that grades are some kind of universal certification of mastery over an established body of knowledge is the root of a lot of troubles in education today.

Higher education, and the press that reports on it, both tend to look disproportionately at the Ivies for guidance and leadership. But the Ivies don’t represent the circumstances and conditions at the vast majority of institutions in this country, and following their example does not often make practical sense. I strongly urge others not to emulate Harvard as they run headlong into a disaster of their own making.

Joshua Eyler is senior director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and assistant professor of teacher education at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of “Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It” and “How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching.”

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