Deming Says Faculty Will Be Urged to Cap A Grades Next Year if 2027 Plan Passes

Harvard College Dean David J. Deming said administrators would “strongly encourage” faculty to begin capping A grades in their courses next year if the College’s grading reform takes effect in fall 2027.

Speaking at an open forum Tuesday night, Deming said the one-year implementation period included in an amended version of the grading proposal released Monday was designed to give faculty time to adjust their courses before the cap becomes mandatory.

“We’ve got one year. We’re going to strongly encourage you to follow it, and then we’re going to make you follow it after that,” he said. “And we’ll use the year to manage the transition, to work through all the logistical issues.”

The new grading proposal, which the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is scheduled to vote on next Tuesday, would institute a cap limiting A grades to roughly 20 percent of students in each course, plus up to four additional A’s. A previous version had the policy taking effect next fall, but that timeline was pushed back a year in revisions released Monday.

Deming said the delay responded to a concern he had heard repeatedly from students: that in courses where scores are already clustered near the top, a sudden cap could penalize students who perform well but fall just short of a newly compressed threshold.

He said the implementation year, in part, is intended to give faculty time to adapt their courses — potentially changing both grading practices and course material — to create more differentiation among students before the cap takes effect.

“People said, I think fairly, ‘I don’t want to be in a situation where if I get a 95 I’m going to get an A minus or a B plus,’” he said. “That requires faculty to change the way they grade, and then possibly change some of the course material itself, to create some differentiation.”

The amended policy also tasks Deming with appointing a committee to oversee the rollout — which he described as a routine feature of his role as dean, rather than a signal of special administrative authority over the process.

Deming, who co-chairs the Education Policy Committee alongside Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh, acknowledged that the proposal may not represent the ideal solution to grade inflation but said it was preferable to inaction.

“I don’t know what the right answer is, but I don’t think it’s obvious that we have arrived at the best possible solution,” he said. “But that’s not really the task. The task is, we have something before us that has been the outcome of a faculty-led, deliberative, multi-year process, and then we have a choice: we want to vote for this, or we want to keep the status quo.”

He added that the policy includes a mandatory three-year review, meaning its effects would be assessed relatively quickly.

“We’ll know pretty quickly if there are problems, and we have an ability to work and try to solve them,” he said. “You shouldn’t think about this as a one shot — it’s over. It could be an evolution.”

Deming also pushed back on a recent Crimson op-ed by Harvard Business School professor Scott D. Kominers ’09, who argued that the cap would penalize students for enrolling in courses with a high concentration of top-performing students, discouraging them from taking difficult courses.

Deming said the criticism failed to account for the fact that grading already varies dramatically across departments — a problem the cap would help address.

“The error he’s making is not thinking about the fact that the problem he identifies is actually made better by the policy,” Deming said. “Right now, there’s huge disparities across classes. Actually having a situation where 20 percent of the class plus four gets A’s in all the classes makes the classes more similar, not less similar.”

Kominers said in a Wednesday interview that the cap would continue to skew incentives around course selection.

“The cap becomes binding even on these very difficult, small courses,” he said. “You can be systematically punished for taking a hard course in a way you were not able to be before.”

When pressed on the concern that a grade cap would increase competition among students, Deming said the premise was not necessarily accurate.

“If this policy worsens competition among students, that would be regrettable,” he said. “But that presupposes that you and I are in a class together, and you know you’re going to get an A and I’m not. I just don’t think that’s true for most students.”

He rejected the idea that capping grades would discourage students from working together, saying that collaboration still served students’ self-interest even under a cap.

“I think students know that when you study with other people, you learn more, and that that’s actually cooperative,” he said. “It’s not a zero sum game, that we can both learn more and both do better, particularly in the larger class.”

Deming also said that reactions to the proposal have split sharply depending on how directly someone is affected by it.

“There’s an almost perfect correlation between non-students’ views of the policy and their personal relationship to it,” he said. “Parents of current students tend to be quite negative about it, but alumni who graduated a few years ago, or parents of former students, tend to be quite positive.”

He said the pattern illustrated the challenge of leading a policy that requires thinking beyond the interests of current students alone.

“My job is to think not just about you, but all the past, present, and future students of Harvard College, and to preserve the value of what we do here for everybody,” he said.

Deming also disputed the characterization that student opposition to the proposal is overwhelming, saying he has spoken with many students who privately support it.

“I’ve talked to a lot of students who, maybe especially privately, are in favor of it,” he said. “I think the critics seem to be louder than the supporters.”

He added that he would take student concerns seriously if the policy passes and generates significant backlash.

“I don’t want our students to be upset, and I want to make their lives better,” he said. “If it passes and there’s a bunch of consternation, I’m going to take that very seriously.”

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