Dear Harvard Administration,

My name is Hayden Brackeen. I am a junior at Harvard College writing to register my staunch opposition to the new grading policies as proposed in Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh’s recent email.

I will not mince words in the interest of brevity. 

It is ridiculous for a school that primarily admits undergraduates based on academic performance to be appalled that its students continue to excel. Is it true that the proportion of A-range grades has been rising over the past twenty years? Yes—we’ve all seen the report. But what has been ignored is that, as A-grades have increased more or less linearly, our admissions rate has decreased linearly. 

The only time that the frequency of A-grades broke this pattern and exceeded what we might expect from increasingly impressive graduating classes was during the early pandemic, when Harvard adopted policies such as test-optional admissions and virtual courses; after these policies were reversed, the frequency of A-grades decreased to almost the same line of best fit they had previously followed.

In my time at Harvard, I have been both a STEM and a humanities concentrator. I have taken courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. My grades are a product of my own hard work and dedication. My transcript serves as a compelling case study against this so-called “grade inflation.” My freshman year transcript reflected the initial difficulty I had in adjusting to Harvard’s rigor. My sophomore year grades dramatically improved, and now, in my junior year, I have been earning the very A-grades crusaded against in this report. 

My trajectory is not a result of mindless grade inflation, but of academic evolution. It is personally insulting to me and to hundreds, if not thousands, of undergraduates to insinuate that our achievements are somehow invalid simply because other highly qualified, intelligent peers have attained them.

It is worth noting that grades have never driven my intellectual or professional development, even when I was measurably outperforming my peers in high school. For me, and I suspect for many fellow students, a quantitative metric of alleged academic superiority has never been a source of particular pride, nor has it compelled me to engage more with my coursework. What has motivated me is personalized feedback from my professors, something provided even for papers that earn As. 

My most recent essays reveal massive improvement from just last spring, even across classes in which I had already received As. This is because grading is entirely secondary to the learning process; a preponderance of high grades doesn’t cause students, especially high-performing students like those here, to stagnate in their academic pursuits. Conversely, I fear that mandating harsher grading would deter students from taking risks or seeking personal growth.

Building an academic community—an academic culture—requires nurturing our students’ scholarly interests. The current system assures students that their hard work will be rewarded, even in fields in which they may lack expertise. I would never have pivoted toward the humanities and found my true passion if I hadn’t felt secure in taking that chance. Under Harvard’s proposed new system, not only would I still be stuck in departments I don’t enjoy, but my mental health would suffer far more than it would have even if I had remained a STEM concentrator under the current system.

To speak of “blame” for something which no other institution would consider a problem is absurd, but if the administration must blame somebody for “burdening” them with such a bright student body, they ought to cast their finger towards admissions rather than faculty (and certainly, rather than students). We cannot chance transforming generations of our best and brightest students into incurious cogs in the machine, terrified of taking risks and paralyzed by uncertainty. I worry that this new grading policy would do exactly that.

In the following paragraphs, I will digress into the specific shortcomings of this plan, its likely negative consequences that I feel have been callously ignored, and precisely how insensitive it is to suggest such a plan in light of Harvard’s own institutional issues.

Why This Won’t Fix Anything (and, indeed, Why It Will Make Things Worse)

In her memo, “Re-Centering Academics at Harvard College,” Dean Claybaugh rightly notes that students are not sufficiently engaged with their academic coursework. However, she ascribes this to grading rather than the more substantial issues at the root of the Harvard experience. I mostly take small and mid-size seminar classes, most of which are only really known to those passionate about their niche subject matters. 

On the few occasions that I felt my classes lacked a sufficiently “academic” character, it was typically because people with no interest in the material were joining to fulfill a degree requirement. The courses were not less engaging because of the content, nor the faculty, nor the supposed ease of getting a good grade. Rather, they suffered because most of the room was only there out of necessity and because of a broader trend toward the belittling of humanities coursework as “easy.”

While a high frequency of A-grades doesn’t solve these problems, it is irrational to conclude from this that it must cause them instead.

The problem is exacerbated vis-à-vis the College’s general education and skill-based requirements, which only a select few courses satisfy. It is not unfair that students’ hard work is rewarded with the appropriate grades; what is unfair is forcing students into courses they have zero interest in, and forcing faculty to teach to rooms where 80% of those present would rather be anywhere else. Making it harder to get an A in these courses will not address the issue; rather, it will make these already unfulfilling courses miserable. 

In my case, I still have to complete three general education courses along with my Quantitative Reasoning and Data requirement next year. Having to navigate an actively adversarial (and I would argue malicious) grading scheme on top of feigning interest in subjects that contribute neither to my intellectual nor professional development would be untenable. 

A much better solution would be eliminating restrictive requirements like general education coursework, instead emphasizing divisional distribution courses; this way, students can explore new disciplines while still tailoring their schedule towards their own interests and personal development, and faculty will have some assurance that most people in their classes are enrolled out of genuine interest.

My own experience is, again, instructive here. Despite taking Math 55 “Studies in Algebra and Group Theory / Real and Complex Analysis” and other technically advanced science courses like Chem 20 “Organic Chemistry,” I still haven’t fulfilled my QRD requirement because these courses didn’t technically use real-world data points. Any hiring or admissions committee would look at my transcript and clearly see that I can work with issues relating to quantitative reasoning, and yet Harvard’s administration would seem to think that I’m numerically illiterate, simply because I haven’t taken a course from a restrictive list of pre-approved offerings. Additionally, nearly every course I take deals with questions of history, society, aesthetics, and culture; am I to believe that none have been sufficient for either my Aesthetics & Culture or Histories, Societies, & Individuals general education requirements?

Beyond its impacts on students, this plan will cause tremendous headaches for faculty. The report specifically acknowledges that many professors’ classes have pedagogical approaches that make this grading scheme untenable. But rather than addressing this concern, the proposed “solution” is to force these courses onto the SAT/UNSAT system and thus nullify their ability to meaningfully indicate a student’s mastery of a subject internally, to employers, or to admissions boards. 

Even using the new grading scheme, the simple truth is that a meritocratic system assesses students’ work in its own right: what is a professor to do if more than 20% of students—of Harvard students—show extraordinary distinction in their work? The proposal’s solution to this is incredibly childish, recommending that professors transfer some of their possible A-grades to faculty teaching harder versions of the same class. How does forcing the world’s leading scholars to play inane games such as this further academic engagement among our student body? In reality, students could be inclined to take harder courses they aren’t qualified for in pursuit of a higher proportion of As. Not only would this impede instruction in difficult classes through inflating enrollment, but these higher class sizes themselves would make earning an A harder and heap more stress on students. 

I must also ask about enforcement. Administrative bloat is already a problem at this school, one that has inhibited many of my professors’ abilities to support their students. A plan this demanding would require even more administration and micromanagement of our already-overburdened faculty. And where is that funding coming from? Certainly not the endowment, which the administration has proven itself to be incredibly miserly with. I strongly suspect that in funding this oversight (intended in both senses of the word), we’ll see further cuts to student life and academic programming, as has been a consistent theme in the past.

Before proceeding to the final part of my argument, I would like to address one other claim in Dean Claybaugh’s report. In the section entitled “The external role of grades,” we are told that higher grades cause employers to “rely on informal networks of information that advantage students with better networking connections.” Make no mistake, what is being described here is simply a holistic hiring process. 

What is far more troubling to me is the insinuation by the memo’s author that the only qualitative benefit a Harvard student might have is their network, when we know that employers and hiring committees look at far more than just GPAs and recommendations. The omission of extracurriculars, work experience, publications, etc., from the discussion is at best ignorant and at worst a malicious attempt to reframe the relationship between grading and employment. 

The nicest word to describe the suggestion that frequent A-grades directly cause this particular brand of hiring inequity is “idiotic”: one of the most frequent and salient critiques of the American job market, even among alumni of schools with more stratified grading scales, is that more qualified, higher-GPA candidates are passed over for those with more connections. It is insulting to the intelligence of Harvard students and faculty alike to pretend that this is an issue peculiar to Harvard when we are more insulated from this problem than students graduating from schools with less name recognition.

Has Anybody Thought This Through? (Or: Please, for the Love of God, Get Your Priorities Straight)

I have resisted comparison with schools like Princeton and Cornell, from which we’ve seen numerous reports from current and former students concerning academic sabotage. These are schools, importantly, which currently (and historically) have more stringent grading policies than those proposed in Dean Claybaugh’s report. Princeton, in particular, tried capping A-grades at 35%. In 2014, Princeton moved away from this because it had measurably increased competition among students, lowered morale, and, per Princeton president and former supporter of the plan Christopher Eisgruber, it was “a considerable source of stress for many students, parents, alumni, and faculty members.”

These two schools are, by all accounts, the most successful among our institutional peers at combating the grade inflation that supposedly causes so many problems here, having the lowest average GPAs of the entire Ivy League. 

Cornell also notoriously installed nets under its bridges to prevent more of its students from committing suicide and taking their own lives. 

That’s worth sitting with for a moment.

Has anybody stopped to think about what we’re doing here? Adopting a worse version of a policy proven to fail, in response to a so-called “problem” that is the obvious result of admitting a high-achieving student body? 

From a student perspective, this smacks of little more than a performative attempt to bolster the resumes of several administrators, coupled with a reckless disregard for our well-being. What role should hordes of faceless administrators have in dictating the lives of countless students whom they’ve seldom made efforts to engage with in the past? The fact that both town halls are being held in small, cramped spaces for only an hour apiece is itself a laughably transparent attempt to shield the administration from the horrors of being held accountable to the students they ostensibly work on behalf of.

In the past week alone, the administration has pushed dozens of student groups out of the SOCH to “save money,” placing these groups’ members and property in flux. This was not a sudden financial hardship that justified unprecedented action. This is a pattern of behavior wherein administrators actively make life here worse to benefit themselves, all while putting out messaging that suggests their actions were unavoidable or even beneficent. 

I think particularly of Harvard’s recent announcement that families making less than $200k a year would have free tuition, while conspicuously omitting the caveat that families like my own—previously on full financial aid—would actually see a higher total cost of attendance due to reductions in aid in other areas.

Harvard’s ailing reputation is not an indictment of its students and their high performance, but rather its leadership and their actions. We already have more administrators than undergraduate students, a level of administrative bloat utterly laughable among other top institutions. 

On the rare occasion that these administrators don’t make a point of being anonymous and unaccountable, they demonstrate open contempt for their students: infamously, hot breakfast programs were slashed in 2008 under the guise of tightening the belt due to the recession, and have only returned to one house in the following two decades. This saved an estimated $900,000 a year for Harvard. They could have saved an equivalent amount by letting go of just nine administrators, but decided instead to materially worsen the student experience for decades’ worth of graduating classes.

If you want to make students care more about their academics, you have to improve student life and wellbeing, not worsen it. Find the funds in our $60 billion endowment—a figure greater than the GDPs of most countries—or lay off the thousands of redundant administrators who cause so many of our problems in the first place. 

Pump the millions of dollars you save into better ingredients and restoring hot breakfast for HUDS, better compensation for dining hall and custodial staff whom we actually see every day, better funding for undervalued programs (including my own academic homes of Folklore & Mythology and the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations); don’t make a school such as Harvard, where we already have to compete to join clubs, even more competitive. Don’t keep passing off administrative failings as if the students are responsible for them.

To cause such stress among our students in times like these, with Harvard being both as privileged and as problematic as it is, is beneath contempt. We live in times when violent political injustices are being perpetrated against millions by our own government, domestically and abroad. Many of our own students will be impacted by the Trump administration’s actions and rhetoric. 

Even beyond these political forces outside of Harvard’s control, we are talking about a school that has practically waged war against its time-capped faculty, even after all its virtue signaling about ending time caps last spring. We are talking about a school whose most vulnerable employees make so little that they have to commute from an hour away. We are talking about a school that, even now, hasn’t taken action against numerous faculty credibly accused of sexual misconduct—about a school where three of its currently employed faculty are extensively named in the Epstein files! 

And yet the biggest problem facing the brightest minds in charge of the most lauded academic institution in the world is that its students are competent? That, God forbid, they might enjoy their education? This is what is at the forefront of your minds? Well, I’m sorry, but in 2026, that should not be headline news.

Harvard has real problems. Fix them. Leave the students alone.

Hayden Brackeen ’27 (hbrackeen@college.harvard.edu)is a guest writer for the Independent.