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Chasing rigor and challenge and quality is an eternal cat-and-mouse effort in higher education. Every ten or fifteen years, a new panic about grade inflation catches the imagination (see, e.g., Valen Johnson’s 2003 book Grade Inflation:A Crisis in College Education and Lester Hunt’s 2008 Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education) but never quite like the Inflated Grade Panic of 2026. This one has caught the attention of all the many critics of higher education, steeped as we are in the concomitant AI Panic of 2026, and the Don’t Coddle the Left Panic of 2024-26.
A perfect stew.
How, everyone wants to know, are we going to make high grades meaningful again? (They never were, BTW.) How can we force students to care about the quality of their work? Let’s terrify them into excellence.
“Restoring the meaning of grades” sounds good, like all backward-looking efforts.
But it won’t work.
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Harvard has announced a plan to limit the number of A’s in a class to 20 percent, or 20 percent plus 4 (or more, depending on the size of the class). It doesn’t matter if all of them are extraordinary or just pretty darn good. The number of A’s is fixed.
The idea is that this is going to fix a terrible problem: the students aren’t all excellent but they nearly all get excellent grades.
Never mind that Harvard accepts only about 4 percent of the applicants, which should mean that they are all extraordinary. (Hey, if they’re not extraordinary, maybe the admission process is flawed. But that’s hard to fix by decree, as they have to weigh so many considerations….and also their admissions process has also been under attack for years.) The meritorious…are underperforming? The winners in the childhood academic sweepstakes are not as worthy as they should be?
Attention to grades sweeps over so many other problems with education and society, and it is not likely to solve any of the real problems.
Never mind the gaming of the system throughout childhood, the multiple pressures and incentives that have convinced these masters of the universe that the stakes, as represented in their grades, are a matter of life and death, for instance in McKinsey or Wall Street internships or medical school admissions. Never mind that the outcomes of college are nearly always spoken of in terms of further competition, or pure instrumentality. Return on investment. Efficiency.
Never mind that the students will be graduating into a heartless system with fewer and fewer decent opportunities.
Never mind that the classes are seen by many as the price they pay for the high-power networking to which they devote themselves tirelessly.
Never mind that outsourcing learning to AI is easier than ever, and in fact promoted by many institutions of higher education.
Never mind that faculty will be evaluated by the students that they evaluate.
No, let’s up the stakes.
Let’s reduce the number of excellent grades, where the majority of the students will receive only almost-excellent grades.
All meaning will be compressed into a tiny range of those few decimal points, where distinctions are essentially just “vibes.”
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This demand for limiting the number of A’s has been tried before. Princeton tried it in 2004 and cancelled it in 2014. The University of California Berkeley tried it. Duke tried it. In the interest of communicating their stricter system, these schools often included the mean for each course on the transcript.
Did it make students pay more attention to genuine learning?
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Grading on a curve, or having grading distributions predetermined, is logically and pedagogically problematic.
Grading on a curve has been labeled “educational malpractice” by some STEM educators.
Instead of having students focus on learning, they will fixate on every tiny point. Already faculty experience what is often called, disparagingly, “grade grubbing” or more neutrally, “negotiating.”
Complaints will escalate up to the department chair, to the dean. Lawsuits will be filed.
Students will cheat more.
They will sabotage each other.
Faculty lives will get harder.
The Academic Hunger Games will leave a bloody mess, but they will not produce more academic excellence and deeper and more creative work.
The focus will not be mostly on points but entirely on points.
But the administration can say it is being tough, that it is upholding standards. (This is laughable when we have a federal administration completely disregarding not only norms but laws, such as self-dealing and violating the war powers act.)
I know that faculty voted to institute this change.
But I have to say that I am not predicting improved outcomes, only a bit of cover.
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Until we have conversations about the meaning of higher education, until we improve the job market, until we have honest conversations about the failure of conventional grading systems to communicate meaningfully or to motivate authentically, measures such as this are going to continue to be tried, and they will continue to fail.
I wager that this will reemerge again in another decade. Sigh.
I’m all for deepening learning, having truly high standards, and focusing on the meaningful.
I fear that this approach will lead away from all that.
The saddest thing is that assessment is being questioned everywhere, often phrased as “alternative assessment,” and the drawbacks of our conventional systems are well recognized. Doubling down on a system that does not really work seems futile.
But we can watch this latest effort at insisting on the strictest of the conventional unfold before our eyes.
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This was written without the use of Generative AI.
This may not be used to train artificial intelligence technologies, models, or systems.
