More Work, Fewer Screens: How Harvard’s Classroom Changed in Three Years

In spring 2024, students in General Education 1038: “Sleep” told the College they spent about two hours a week on the course outside of class. For years, it had been known as a “gem,” Harvard slang for classes that ask little of their students.

Two years later, that had changed. Students reported spending nearly four hours a week on the course, and its syllabus now declared: “GenEd 1038 is a tech-free zone during all lectures and sections.”

One student put it more plainly in the Q Guide, the College’s end-of-semester course evaluation: “definitely no longer a gem.”

“Sleep” was not an outlier.

A Crimson analysis of every undergraduate Q Guide evaluation from fall 2023 through spring 2026 found that Harvard students are spending substantially more time on coursework than they did three years ago — with the steepest increases concentrated in departments and programs that once had among the lightest workloads.

Among courses offered in both fall 2023 and fall 2025, students in the later semester reported spending roughly 20 percent more time on work outside of class. For a student taking four courses, that amounts to about four additional hours of coursework each week.

The increase was broad but hardly even. Of 35 departments and programs with enough courses to measure, 25 grew significantly heavier and none grew significantly lighter. Most of the rise came in fall 2024, and several of the College’s already-heaviest departments barely changed.

The classroom changed in other ways, too. A Crimson review of roughly 4,300 syllabi found that professors have increasingly restricted generative AI and pushed laptops and other devices out of class. The share of syllabi with an AI policy rose from roughly 40 percent in the 2023-24 academic year to 57 percent in 2025-26, and most of the new policies limited AI use. Device bans more than doubled, from 6 percent to about 14 percent, and reached nearly a third of Gen Eds.

These findings come amid a College-wide effort to “re-center” academics that has focused heavily on grading. In October 2025, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh released a report finding that more than 60 percent of undergraduate grades were A’s and arguing that Harvard’s grading system was undermining the College’s academic culture. In May, faculty voted to cap A grades beginning in fall 2027.

But on workload, Claybaugh’s report reached a different conclusion. It found that Harvard did not “have a problem with workload overall,” saying that its data suggested students “are working as hard as they ever have — if not more.”

The Crimson’s analysis shows how unevenly that shift has played out. College-wide averages, like the ones in Claybaugh’s report, obscure a sharp rise in fields where students once reported relatively little work: History of Art and Architecture courses grew 56 percent heavier, Classics 45 percent, History 41 percent, and Psychology 32 percent. Gen Eds grew 51 percent.

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science — already among the College’s heaviest departments — barely moved.

Students, for the most part, have taken the changes in stride. More than a dozen students who spoke to The Crimson said the added work had not substantially changed their experience. A Crimson analysis of nearly 62,000 written Q Guide comments also found little evidence of growing dissatisfaction: the share with a negative tone held at about 1 in 10 across all three years, while a smaller share of comments mentioned stress, anxiety, exhaustion, or burnout.

A College spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on The Crimson’s findings.

Harder, but Not Everywhere

The rise in students’ reported workload is not news to administrators. In her October 2025 report, Claybaugh wrote that students in spring 2025 reported spending 6.30 hours outside of class per course each week, up from 5.55 hours in spring 2015. She concluded that Harvard courses were “not falling far short” of the 12 hours of weekly work per course that accreditation requires, including class time.

A chart in the report’s appendix tracked that average semester by semester, showing a clear jump in fall 2024. But the report did not break the figures down by division or department.

The Crimson’s analysis followed the College’s undergraduate courses across semesters and found the same pattern. Reported workload held steady between fall 2023 and spring 2024, then rose about 16 percent the following fall. By fall 2025, courses had grown 5 percent heavier still.

Across all undergraduate courses, the average reported workload rose from 5.9 to 7 hours a week from fall 2023 to fall 2025. Spring semesters rose from 5.7 hours in spring 2024 to 6.5 hours in spring 2026, a year after the period the report covered.

Broken down by division, Humanities and Social Science courses, which averaged about five hours a week in fall 2023, grew 22 and 28 percent, respectively. Courses in the Science division and SEAS grew 12 and 9 percent, respectively.

In the social sciences, Sociology courses grew 35 percent heavier, Anthropology 33 percent, and Economics 26 percent. Government, the division’s largest department by number of courses, grew 13 percent. In the humanities, Linguistics grew 51 percent, Theater, Dance, and Media 42 percent, and Music 38 percent.

The Science division was split. Courses in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology grew 37 percent heavier and Molecular and Cellular Biology 26 percent. Mathematics and Statistics, the two heaviest departments measured at the College, each changed by less than 4 percent.

A handful of departments did not follow the trend. Workload in Philosophy and Art, Film, and Visual Studies stayed roughly flat.

The General Education program saw one of the sharpest shifts. In spring 2024, the program rolled out new guidelines urging instructors to share grading criteria with students and “ensure students who do not attend class regularly or do not complete course readings and course assignments are not able to earn an A/A- grade.” Fall 2024 was the first semester after the guidelines were rolled out.

In fall 2023, 25 of 41 Gen Ed courses averaged under four hours of work per week. In fall 2024, one of 33 did. Of the 42 Gen Eds offered both before and after the guidelines took effect, 40 grew heavier. In 37 of the 40, the instructors remained the same.

Still, most Gen Eds fall short of the program’s own guideline, which tells students to expect to spend about six to eight hours. In 2025-26, about three in four Gen Eds averaged less than six hours.

Unlike most courses, Gen Eds undergo recurring review by the Standing Committee on General Education, which considers materials including Q evaluations and grade distributions.

Sarah B. Craycraft, a lecturer on Folklore and Mythology who teaches a Gen Ed, said the committee recommended she reintroduce seated exams. Craycraft kept the course’s capstone project and added the exams to it last year.

“It was too much work for the students. It was too much work for the teaching staff,” she said. “So we’ve actually scaled back our workload this year.”

The co-chairs of the Standing Committee on General Education, Psychology professor Fiery A. Cushman ’03 and Earth and Planetary Sciences professor Brendan J. Meade, acknowledged the rise in an emailed statement.

“Faculty indicate that this is not typically a result of more assigned work, but rather because students have been increasingly engaged with classwork,” the pair wrote.

Some instructors pointed to closer accountability. Students in General Education 1050: “Act Natural” reported 3.2 hours of weekly work in fall 2023 and 5 hours in spring 2025. But the course’s instructor — Theater, Dance, & Media professor David M. Levine — said the volume of its assignments had not changed.

“I don’t feel that the workload has increased over time. I do feel like the amount of time students spend on the work has increased, partially because they’re getting evaluated more on whether they’ve done the work,” he said.

Margaret C. Rennix, the assistant director for humanities and social sciences support at the Academic Resource Center, wrote in an email she had heard from professors that they believed students were struggling more with readings than in the past — but that the evidence was currently anecdotal.

“I’m not currently seeing any evidence to suggest courses have gotten more difficult or are assigning more pages,” Rennix wrote in an email.

Introductory math courses were among the most stable at the College. Math 1a, Math 1b, and Math 21a each stayed within about half an hour per week of their fall 2023 levels.

Brendan A. Kelly, the director of introductory mathematics, credited the program’s standardized curriculum and its position as a requirement that does not compete for enrollment.

“Students were responding to lighter and lighter workloads, and voting with their attendance, and so it created incentives for courses to dial down the workload, whereas intro math, we’re a requirement and there’s not a good substitute,” Kelly said.

‘Enjoy AI’

The Crimson reviewed the generative AI and in-class device passages in about 4,300 syllabi, sorting each course’s AI policy as a ban, a conditional policy, or broad permission.

For two years, the share of syllabi with an AI policy barely moved, holding at about 40 percent from fall 2023 through spring 2025. Then, in fall 2025, it jumped to 57 percent, and it stayed there in spring 2026, at 58 percent.

Most of the new policies limited AI rather than encouraging it. The share of all syllabi banning AI outright rose from 19 percent in 2023-24 to 25 percent in 2025-26. Conditional policies, which permit AI for some tasks but not others, grew from 11 to 19 percent. Policies broadly permitting AI stayed at about 6 percent.

Stances split by discipline, largely along the same lines as the workload increases. In 2025-26, a third of Arts and Humanities syllabi banned AI, compared with 21 percent in Social Science, 15 percent in the Science division, and 10 percent in SEAS.

Permissive policies ran the other way: 18 percent of SEAS syllabi broadly allowed AI, compared with 12 percent in Science, 7 percent in Social Science, and 4.5 percent in Arts and Humanities.

Across the three years, Classics, Slavic Languages and Literatures, History and Literature, and Philosophy banned AI in at least 40 percent of their syllabi, while about a third of Computer Science syllabi permitted it broadly. The Social Science division changed fastest, with bans rising from 11 percent of syllabi to 21 percent.

Individual policies range widely. French 128: “Growing Pains: The Coming-of-Age Novel” tells students that ChatGPT “hallucinates, is often wrong, runs on slave labor” and “is accelerating climate collapse.”

“Speaking just for myself, I know I sleep well at night knowing I’m not contributing to the collapse of society and general civilizational-level brainrot by using ChatGPT or other forms of generative AI,” wrote Annabel L. Kim, a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, in the course’s syllabus.

At the other extreme, the entire AI policy for Organismic and Evolutionary Biology 141, a biogeography course, reads, “Enjoy AI.” Economics 1005: “Economic Growth and the Social Issues of Our Time” says students should “use ChatGPT (or some analogous LLM tool) to produce the first drafts” of two assignments.

Some instructors reversed themselves. Psychology 1750 told students in fall 2024 they were “free to use generative AI tools however you like.” Its revised policy a year later: “No AI.”

The College does not currently impose a uniform course-level AI policy. Harvard College Dean David J. Deming wrote in a Sept. 2 email that advisory guidelines would come “by the end of the academic year.”

Until then, each instructor sets the rules, and a student’s schedule can span all three kinds of policy.

Siya C. Patel ’29, a prospective Biomedical Engineering concentrator, said her language classes allow almost no technology, while her physics class is “a different story.”

“They actually encourage us to even use a little bit of ChatGPT,” she said. “Not to answer, but guide us through the questions. Same thing with my engineering class.”

‘Totally Analog’

Device rules tightened faster. In 2023-24, 6 percent of syllabi banned laptops or all personal devices in class. In 2025-26, 14 percent did. Among syllabi with any device policy, full bans rose from about a third to more than half.

Gen Ed moved furthest. In 2025-26, 18 of 58 Gen Ed syllabi, or 31 percent, banned devices, up from 9 percent two years earlier. Big lectures followed: nearly a quarter of courses with more than 100 students banned devices.

The social sciences caught up with the humanities. In 2023-24, 5 percent of Social Science syllabi banned devices, about half the rate in Arts and Humanities. By 2025-26, both divisions stood at 16 percent. Science and SEAS started from almost nothing: under 2 percent of their syllabi banned devices in 2023-24. By 2025-26, 7 percent of Science syllabi and 9 percent of SEAS syllabi did.

Government led that shift. Three of its 70 syllabi banned devices in 2023-24. In 2025-26, 12 of 50 did, including seven junior seminars and three introductory courses. In fall 2024, Government 50, a data science course, told students to “bring your laptop to class and be ready to code along.” A year later, its syllabus read, “no laptops for taking notes.”

Psychology 1 made the same move in a single year. In fall 2025, it set aside the first few rows as a “No Laptop Zone.” By spring: “laptops and other electronic devices are not permitted in class.” Philosophy had the highest rate of any department with at least 20 syllabi, with 10 of 26 syllabi banning devices in 2025-26.

The bans reached even the divisions where hours grew least, led by introductory math. Math 1b’s syllabus went from “You are welcome to use calculators/computers in class” in spring 2025 to “No technology is allowed in class meetings” that fall, and Math Mb, Math 21a, and Math 1a adopted similar rules. Chemistry, Statistics, Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology had no device bans at all.

“I’ve watched four classes already this semester, and it is amazing how attentive students are,” Kelly said. “They’re in the mathematics, they’re having productive conversations, they’re at the board doing things.”

Some of the rules don’t appear in syllabi at all. The English Department has settled on what Christopher Pexa, an English professor, called a “de facto non-screen, non-device policy.”

“It’s not a prohibition. It’s not enforced. It’s not really articulated in a formal way. It’s just a kind of consensus that we have among ourselves,” Pexa said.

This semester, for the first time, Pexa’s classroom is “totally analog,” including in-class writing on paper, he said.

In Lindsay Zhao ’30’s Expos class, students brought a printed course pack. The no-device rule, Zhao said, has made classmates participate more.

“People have to be fully focused on the material, and they have to go in already having read the material because we only have it in front of us and we cannot access it online or anything,” she said.

What Students Wrote

The added hours have not made students noticeably unhappier with their courses.

The Q Guide asks students what they would tell future students about a course. The Crimson analyzed about 62,000 unique comments on undergraduate courses, scoring their tone with an open-source language model that it first checked against comments labeled by hand.

The tone barely moved. About 11 percent of comments were negative in 2023-24, and about 11 percent were negative in 2025-26. Comparing each course with itself, numerical ratings dipped by less than a tenth of a point on a five-point scale in fall 2025 and recovered in the spring.

Students also wrote less about strain. The share of comments mentioning stress, anxiety, exhaustion, or burnout fell from about 4 percent in fall 2023 to about 2 percent in spring 2026, even as comments grew longer over the period.

Comparing the same course across semesters, when a course’s reported workload rose by an hour, its average rating fell by about 0.05 points.

In Gen Ed, the same hour was associated with a drop of about 0.2 points, four times the College-wide figure and the largest of any group. In fall 2025, when Gen Ed workload peaked, Gen Ed ratings reached their lowest points of the three years.

Dozens of comments over the last three years declared some version of “no longer a gem,” most of them about Gen Eds. “Geneds are all becoming harder, so just keep that in mind,” one student wrote in fall 2025. “I think in a post-degemfication world, this is a reasonable GENED,” another wrote this spring.

In at least three courses, students wrote that instructors had made work harder in response to AI. A student in Computer Science 1090A wrote in fall 2025 that instructors “said multiple times they knew that students were using LLMs so they were simply making them harder and longer to compensate.” A student in Government 1759 wrote in spring 2026 that the course seemed to be “making the exams much harder to counteract the use of AI since they’re take home.”

In interviews, students said the added work had not changed much for them.

Patel said she spends five or six more hours a week on coursework than she did last year, but that she has also become more efficient.

“The workload has stayed relatively similar,” she said. “But I’ve become more efficient at handling work.”

Aviva K. Di Paolo ’27 said she began preparing more for seminars after faculty passed the grading cap, because she now worries more about her participation grade.

“I get a little anxious to go to class now,” Di Paolo said. “I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m being graded on how much I participate in, and want to make sure I’m participating in a meaningful way.’ And so that maybe has added an extra 45 minutes onto what I was already doing.”

“Nothing that I would say is very substantial,” she added.

The comments also show how quickly expectations can shift. In spring 2025, as classmates complained that “Sleep” had been “degemmified,” one student defended it.

“People keep saying it’s harder now and that it’s no longer a GEM, but I don’t think that’s true,” the student wrote. “All things considered, it’s super easy.”

—Staff writer Sebastian B. Connolly can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at sbc.23. Follow him on X @SebastianC4784.

—Staff writer Summer E. Rose can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at ser.85. Follow her on X @summerellenrose.