Harvard Faculty to Begin Weeklong Vote on Proposal to Cap A Grades

Faculty will begin voting next week on a contentious proposal to cap A grades in Harvard College courses, casting ballots by email in a weeklong process set to close May 19.

The vote will cap months of debate over one of the most closely watched FAS policy proposals of the year. First introduced in February, the three-part plan would cap A grades at 20 percent of enrolled students with flexibility for an additional four A grades per class; create an internal ranking system for honors and awards; and allow instructors who opt out of the grade cap to grade their courses on a satisfactory-plus, satisfactory, and unsatisfactory basis.

Faculty will vote on each component separately. Any adopted changes would take effect in fall 2027 on a three-year trial basis, with an implementation committee charged with working out the remaining details.

At a Tuesday faculty meeting, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh urged faculty to participate in the vote, which will open May 12 and close May 19 — three days after FAS-administrated final exams end.

“It is crucial to me that everyone votes. And so I just want to end on a kind of ‘get out the vote’ note,” Claybaugh said. “I’ll be writing to people I know on Tuesday saying ‘please vote,’ and I encourage you to do the same.”

The proposal has been repeatedly revised since it was first presented by the FAS subcommittee on grading earlier this semester. Its implementation date was pushed back by a year, the plan was split into three separate motions, and faculty floated changes to the formula that would determine how many A grades instructors could award.

At Tuesday’s meeting — held again in the Science Center to accommodate a large turnout — more than a dozen faculty members spoke on the proposal.

Supporters argued that the proposal would help faculty resist pressure to award high grades and restore credibility to a grading system in which A’s have become increasingly common. Opponents countered that the cap would curb faculty autonomy, fuel competition among students, and fail to address the deeper incentives driving grade inflation.

History of Science professor Alex A. Csiszar said the proposal would not do enough to change the pressures that led faculty to grade leniently.

“I believe that we need to start by doing as much as we can to remove the incentives that led faculty like me to grade the way we do in the first place,” he said. “By leaving those incentives in place, and layering on top of them a whole new set of numerical targets, we have metrics battling metrics, and this is going to lead to even more complex gaming behavior from both students and faculty that we cannot predict.”

“Maybe we do need some grading cap at some point, but the implementation is more likely to go well if we first fix as much of the underlying cause as we can,” he added.

Germanic Languages and Literatures Chair Alison Frank Johnson said the proposal would constrain faculty judgement rather than protect it. She challenged the subcommittee’s argument that the cap would give professors more freedom to grade rigorously.

“The solution to our ‘feeling’ unfree, we have been told, is to become literally unfree,” she said.

History Professor Mary D. Lewis also warned against interpreting opposition to the proposal as support for the current grading climate.

“If a faculty member votes no, this should not signal contentment with the status quo,” she said.

In response to the concerns, Claybaugh said that she too found the overarching goals of meaningful engagement and teaching most compelling — but that grading reforms were a necessary stepping stone to meet any of them.

Several faculty members also raised concerns about how the proposal would apply to specific kinds of courses. Astronomy Professor John M. Kovac, who chairs the committee on first-year seminars, criticized the proposal’s satisfactory-plus option, arguing it would undermine the exploratory purpose of first-year seminars.

“Adding a SAT+ runs contrary to the program’s mission, and will introduce hierarchy, competition, impostor syndrome, superiority signaling, and grade complaints into an inclusive and exploratory classroom environment that emphasizes faculty mentorship,” Kovac said.

Classics professor Naomi A. Weiss, who said she supports the proposal overall, raised concerns about its effect on introductory language courses. Though language courses are often taught in small sections, she said they can enroll enough students overall to fall outside the flexibility offered to smaller classes.

“I think many colleagues may assume that these courses would also be covered by the plus four,” she said. “However, intro language courses are often relatively large, even though students are taught in small sections, and it is straightforward to do well in introductory language courses.”

Claybaugh said questions about language courses would be among the implementation committee’s top priorities.

In one of the strongest defense of the proposal, Government professor Alisha C. Holland, a member of the grading subcommittee, compared Harvard’s plan to a more sweeping Yale University report released last month that recommended a target mean GPA of 3.0.

“By comparison, what we’re asking you to vote on is far gentler,” Holland said. “We’re not requiring you to change the average grade or to follow a set curve. We’re not telling you what extraordinary distinction means in your course or your discipline.”

“The question isn’t whether Harvard is going to follow someone else’s lead — the question is whether we’re going to take our own,” she added. “I hope you’ll vote yes.”

—Staff writer Abigail S. Gerstein can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at abbysg.97. Follow her on X @abbysgerstein.

—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at amannsm.38. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.