A Grade Cap Will Be Hard, but It Will Be Worth It

Say our grades are capped.

For a couple of years, Harvard students will hold onto the standards of success that exist now. The 3.0 GPA will hold a special kind of shame. The fact that you are unable to maintain a 3.9 and run The Crimson will feel like a devastating failure. Being ineligible for some of the most prestigious fellowships in the world will affect your sense of self-worth. Much of the class of 2029 will rue the current seniors, who got to have everything they thought was promised.

In three years’ time, current freshmen may still very well measure themselves by the standards of today. But the class of 2032 will know that this idea of success was never promised. The sophomores and juniors will have only heard rumors about it. By 2030, almost everyone who had first-hand experience of the current grading culture will be gone. In its stead, a new common understanding of what it means to be successful here will have emerged.

A transition to a grading system like the one the faculty committee proposed will entail some painful years. While the current standards of success continue to have cultural grip — so long as they feel true to the majority of undergraduates — it will be harder to be here. But I am confident that this period will end, and that we will emerge a more self-aware, healthy, and sincere student body for it.

In the rhetoric that surrounds this debate, one often hears the argument that Harvard students are “exceptional,” and so it should come as no surprise that we obtain exceptional grades. We have good reason to think this is true — we are at Harvard, after all. But it is itself exceptional to be exceptional at many things all at once. Yet that is the standard that rules the College — we expect ourselves to be amazing students, entrepreneurs, researchers, consultants, and more, all at the same time.

The transition the committee is recommending will force us to finally admit the absurdity of this requirement and to face the difficult truth that we probably never really achieved this standard. In all likelihood, we can only pursue one thing — or a handful of things — with excellence. Truly exceptional performance, even if only in a field or two, should be more than enough for us.

It is tempting to point to our high school success as evidence of broad excellence. After all, we (paradigmatically) aced high school classes while balancing many extracurriculars. High school classes, though, are typically oriented towards mastery, not distinction. An A in high school does not necessarily indicate exceptional ability. Colleges should not be so limited, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences grading scheme already demands that the A means work of “extraordinary distinction.” We were chosen, ultimately, because someone thought we were capable of genuine distinction. We should give ourselves the chance for such distinction to be reflected on our transcript.

The proposed cap will make Harvard a more interesting place to be. It will force students to fully commit to one pursuit or another: the best possible grade in a class, the best possible social life, the best possible consulting application, or any one of the incredible opportunities this institution gives us. None of these hold more moral weight than another. But we have wrongly believed that we can have all of them, and so we are incentivized to spread ourselves thin and feel that falling short of perfection is failure.

We have wanted everything for a long time, and in that desire, we have lost what makes wanting anything worthwhile: a depth of meaning that only comes with immersion, commitment, and the type of attention reserved for what we love. Gradually, we will ask ourselves what is really worth committing to, and we will be able to give a deeper account of how we are spending our time. I am eager to know what my dazzlingly impressive peers will choose, what aspects of themselves they consider most worth developing.

Of course, this is a rather optimistic take on what will come of this change. Whether or not the school becomes permanently more competitive is itself a collective action problem, this time on the part of the student body. Unlike the faculty, we don’t have access to policy-levers about how we treat each other. It will come down to decisions we make on a daily basis when we are confronted by classmates who seem to have a better or worse understanding of the course material than we do.

Certainly, some of this is contingent on how the outside world reacts to our grades, but on this point, more than any other, it seems the faculty have done their homework. If they are right — that employers and graduate schools will interpret our transcripts in their context — then there is no good reason to believe competition will be necessary.

We have a chance to create a new culture for ourselves, one that will make Harvard students put stake in how they develop themselves during their time here. I am hopeful that we will take it.

Sofia Mikulasek ’27, a Philosophy concentrator, is affiliated with Currier House.