After A-Grade Cap Passes, Students Warn of Competition and Narrower Course Choices

Harvard undergraduates voiced strong opposition to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ decision to cap A grades at roughly 20 percent of undergraduate course enrollment, warning the policy will fuel competition, narrow course selection, and disadvantage students from less-resourced backgrounds.

Nearly 70 percent of voting faculty backed the cap, which will take effect in fall 2027 and marks the culmination of months of deliberation over how to address two decades of grade inflation at the College. A companion measure, which will use average percentile rank instead of GPA to determine internal honors and prizes, passed with 76 percent support.

Student opposition to the proposal has been consistent throughout the process. Nearly 85 percent of undergraduates surveyed in a February Harvard Undergraduate Association poll said they opposed the cap.

The Crimson spoke with more than a dozen current and incoming students in the hours after the vote. Most said they had expected the cap to pass, but few were satisfied with the outcome.

“Based on my conversations with the faculty, I thought that it would get passed, but I was also disappointed,” Orli L. Cooper ’28 said.

Several students said the cap would reshape the classroom environment more than it would push them to work harder, replacing absolute standards with relative ones.

“Beforehand, it was just a question of are you earning these grades or not, and now it’s a question of are you doing better than the other people in the class,” Riley Cullinan ’27 said.

Stephen Hall-Nunez ’28 said the collaborative culture among STEM students was one of the factors that drew him to Harvard over other schools, and that the cap could erode it.

“Everybody is remarkably willing to help each other out instead of fearing that they’re perhaps assisting someone in getting ahead and taking your opportunities from them,” Hall-Nunez said. “I’m worried that if you’re competing for a limited number of A’s, that might change.”

Others said the policy would shape which courses they enroll in at all. Dayana A. Rangel ’30, an incoming freshman, called the prospect of capped A grades “very anxiety-inducing.”

“I think it’ll influence my course selection by possibly making me reconsider taking harder classes,” Rangel said. “I think this will be the case for many students as well, who, like myself, come from public education, and especially first-generation and low-income backgrounds.”

Cullinan said the cap cut against the premise of a liberal arts curriculum.

“I think it’ll discourage people from taking electives in fields that they aren’t already good at or don’t know much about,” Cullinan wrote in a statement. “Which kind of undermines the whole idea of a liberal arts education.”

Not all students opposed the policy. J. Jules Sanders ’28 said he was “glad” it had passed.

“I’ve had professors say to me that they’re concerned about the reputation of a Harvard degree given how open of a secret grade inflation here has been,” Sanders wrote in a statement.

Matthew R. Tobin ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, said he was “surprised” but “nonetheless delighted” by the outcome.

“I understand that the cap is not perfect in principle, but nonetheless, we need to solve this problem eventually, and it seems like the only way to really solve this problem is with some kind of uniform rule that will apply consistently between classes,” Tobin said.

Chris Irankunda ’29 said the new cap would force him to rethink his approach to coursework.

“I think that you know the bar has definitely been raised, and that means that the systems I have right now, the study habits I have, everything that I’m currently used to definitely has to go through some sort of change,” Irankunda said.

Students were less troubled by the second component of the policy, which replaces GPA with average percentile rank in calculating Latin honors and other internal awards.

“I do see the point in that,” Hall-Nunez said. He acknowledged that high average GPAs under the previous system had made it difficult to distinguish among top students. “You do lead to a situation where you can’t distinguish between people, and that is the one thing this policy does.”

Some students said they felt undergraduate input had carried little weight in the faculty’s deliberations. After the proposal was introduced in February, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh held a series of town halls and offered office hours for students to discuss the changes. Undergraduates also sit on the Educational Policy Committee, which reviewed the proposal.

But Chris Zorn ’28 said the engagement had not translated into meaningful changes, pointing to the broad similarity between the final policy and the version first proposed in February.

“All of the listening coming from the Harvard leadership around this feels performative, because nothing the students said seems to have made any significant impact,” Zorn said.

For some, that gap between consultation and outcome had already begun to settle into resignation.

“I didn’t think that it was going to accomplish the stated goal, but at the same time, what power do we have?” Cooper said. “So I was like, it’s fine.”

—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.