As Yale Floats 3.0 Mean GPA, Harvard Faculty Leaders Defend Lighter-Touch Grading Proposal

Members of the Harvard faculty subcommittee that drafted a proposal to cap A grades said Yale’s recent recommendation of a 3.0 mean GPA would cut deeper into student transcripts than Harvard’s own plan — even as they welcomed Yale’s entry into a debate that has so far unfolded largely in Cambridge.

The Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, in a report released April 10, urged Yale College to adopt “a 3.0 mean, or some other college-wide standard” to address grade inflation, alongside a new percentile-rank metric on transcripts. A Harvard committee proposed a different instrument: a 20 percent cap on A grades per course, with four additional As permitted, and no mandated distribution across other grades.

Government professor Alisha C. Holland, a member of the Harvard subcommittee, said the two proposals would land in very different places on student transcripts.

“I would expect — especially in the short term, as instructors make adjustments – that the median grade at Harvard will be an A-minus,” Holland said. “That is far off from the mean of a 3.0 that Yale is recommending.”

A Yale spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Holland said the subcommittee had considered and rejected capping A-minus grades or targeting a specific mean. She pointed to Princeton’s 2004 policy capping A-range grades across departments, which the school repealed a decade later amid concerns that it disadvantaged students in the job and graduate school markets and had a detrimental impact on their well-being.

“We wanted to propose a sustainable reform that would still allow Harvard students to thrive once they leave the College,” Holland said.

She added that Harvard’s handbook reserves the straight A for work of “extraordinary distinction,” while the A-minus signals full mastery — a standard, she said, that many Harvard students can reasonably be expected to meet.

Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh, whose report on grading last October prompted the subcommittee’s work, said Harvard’s policy was designed around its own students rather than a uniform benchmark.

“Their proposal is tailored to the needs and capacities of our students,” Claybaugh said.

Claybaugh said the subcommittee had weighed proposals that would cap grades below the A, but that a colleague had convinced her such a cap rested on a flawed assumption about how Harvard grades should be distributed.

“We just don’t know what we would expect the distribution of grades in a Harvard classroom to be,” Claybaugh said. “There’s no reason to expect that it would be a bell curve.”

African and African American Studies professor Paulina L. Alberto, a subcommittee member, wrote in a Tuesday email that Harvard had rejected a mean-GPA approach after examining how similar efforts had fared at other schools.

“Our own committee considered, and then set aside, any system that would mandate a mean GPA or impose a curve, because we learned from the experiences of other schools in which those efforts failed,” she wrote, citing concerns that such systems tie instructors to “giving a certain number of low grades to offset higher ones.”

Alberto wrote that Harvard’s approach instead “restores meaning to the principles already adopted in the Student Handbook” while applying “the lightest possible touch.”

Claybaugh said the Yale and Harvard committees had not been in contact before the release of either school’s report. Holland said Harvard’s reports have been public throughout, and that she “wouldn’t be surprised if the Yale committee did read what we proposed.”

Holland, Claybaugh, and Alberto all said Yale’s entry into the debate was a sign that grade inflation was not a Harvard-specific concern.

“The fact that they, even in this broad report on public trust, took on the issue of grade inflation and the way that it’s undermining the credibility of universities shows that universities beyond Harvard are grappling with this issue,” Holland said.

“I’m proud that Harvard’s been out in front on this issue, but I’m reassured that other schools will be following along,” Claybaugh added.

Holland noted that the Harvard proposal, which the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is expected to vote on in May, builds in a three-year review — a window she said could allow the committee to revisit its approach as peer institutions move.

“It is possible that the national context and reforms undertaken by other universities at that review will shape whatever measures the committee ultimately recommends,” Holland said.

She added that if Harvard’s proposal failed, “another university, perhaps Yale, or perhaps a different university, is probably going to take the lead.”

—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.