Claybaugh Urges Harvard Faculty to Follow A-Grade Cap This Fall, Year Before Official Rollout

Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh urged faculty in a Monday email to begin following the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ new cap on A grades this fall, a year before the policy is set to take effect.

In the email, Claybaugh wrote that faculty would need to overhaul their grading procedures to reduce grade compression that could lead to “arbitrary” distinctions between students once the cap becomes mandatory — a concern she wrote students had frequently raised leading up to the policy’s passage.

“They fear that the cap will force arbitrary distinctions, that a student who earned a 97.5 might end up receiving an A, for instance, while a student who earned a 97.4 might end up receiving an A minus,” Claybaugh wrote.

“This is a very reasonable concern,” she added. “Things like that may well happen if our grading remains as compressed as it currently tends to be. To guard against arbitrary distinctions, we’ll need to change the way we grade.”

Faculty voted in May to cap all A grades in undergraduate courses at 20 percent of enrollment, with flexibility for up to four additional A grades. Though the cap will not officially go into effect until the 2027-28 academic year, College administrators have consistently urged faculty to begin abiding by it this coming year.

At a March open forum, Harvard College Dean David J. Deming said administrators would encourage faculty to abide by the cap during the 2026-27 academic year.

According to Claybaugh’s email, several large introductory courses have already agreed to stay within the grade cap this upcoming year.

They include Computer Science 50: “Introduction to Computer Science”; Life Sciences 1A: “An Integrated Introduction to the Life Sciences: Chemistry, Molecular Biology, and Cell Biology”; Economics 10a: “Principles of Economics (Microeconomics)”; Economics 10b: “Principles of Economics (Macroeconomics)”; Humanities 10: “A Humanities Colloquium from Homer to Joyce”; Psychology 1: “Introduction to Psychological Science”; Expository writing courses; and introductory math courses.

According to Brendan Kelly, Director of Introductory Math, three of Harvard’s five largest introductory math courses had already achieved grading distributions in line with the cap this past academic year.

“We are going to look for ways to continue our efforts to really build assessments that help us understand which students are achieving at the highest level, and which students might need some feedback,” Kelly said. “We see the new policy as a good indicator that we’re providing that critical feedback.”

In her email, Claybaugh pointed faculty towards new guidelines released by the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning — including a recommendation that instructors aim for 15 percent or fewer of students to receive the maximum score on a given assignment.

In an interview, Claybaugh emphasized that faculty should treat the 20 percent-plus-four threshold as an absolute maximum to be used only in exceptional cases, not a target.

“There is not a guarantee that each class will produce 20 percent plus four As,” she said. “In fact, if all of them did so, I would worry, because that would suggest to me that the cap was being applied in a kind of automatic and unthinking way.”

The Bok Center guidelines also recommend that faculty shift toward in-person assessments and assign work that includes open-ended questions and opportunities for students to apply course concepts in unfamiliar contexts — changes meant to increase difficulty, decompress grades, and prevent cheating.

Rebecca N. “Becca” Nesson ’98, executive director of the Bok Center, said that she anticipates faculty will need to reduce the weight placed on effort-based assignments and move away from assigning optional extra-credit work in order to mitigate grade compression.

The Center is also recommending that faculty reform their assignments to make it more difficult for students to submit work that is not their own — in part a reflection of the impact of artificial intelligence on the classroom.

“As we’re all trying to adapt to generative AI, we are needing to think through and change the way we do our assessments, to ensure that we have a significant part of our grade that’s really anchored on work that we can confirm that the student really has done in accordance with the course policies,” Nesson said.

Princeton faculty voted in May to require staff proctoring of all in-person exams — a shift away from the school’s 133-year-old honor policy that relied on students to report their peers’ exam misconduct — citing increased concerns about cheating as students’ use of artificial intelligence rises.

Claybaugh said the implementation of grading reform will require broader changes to students’ classroom assessment.

“One of the things that is going to have to happen to provide a greater differentiation of grades at the top is either to add final exams and other kinds of assessments like that, to make existing assessments more differentiated at the top, and to shift the weight from lower stakes assessments that are focused on effort,” she said.

Claybaugh characterized the shift towards effort-based assessments as a lingering effect of course reforms prompted by the move to online learning during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The proportion of Harvard undergraduates receiving A grades sharply increased to about 60 percent during the year of remote learning, remaining relatively flat after that — until the share fell by seven percentage points last fall after Harvard’s discussion of grade reform began in earnest.

Claybaugh also acknowledged separate student concerns that the policy would impact their post-graduate opportunities, but emphasized that the change would be communicated to both graduate schools and employers.

“I will make sure in the fall that everyone knows that grades are already starting to come down. I will make sure people know that by writing to every professional school that our students apply to, writing to every employer who works through our career center,” she said.

“The news that will be communicated is that Harvard is cracking down on grades, and so I’m actually not worried about students,” Claybaugh added. “I can understand why students are worried about that, but I think it’s going to be fine for them.”

—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.