Harvard College’s Future Grade Cap is Already Reshaping Classrooms

On Aug. 24, a week before the start of the 2026 fall semester, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh told Peer Advising Fellows that Harvard College would automatically turn all course A grades into A-minuses if professors refused to comply with the new grade cap. Claybaugh then retracted her statement on Aug. 27, claiming the grade change was only a proposal. A week later, students returned to campus to find that some courses had already drastically changed their grading policies in preparation for the Fall 2027 grading cap, while others remained unchanged.

Discourse on grading policy changes is nothing new for Harvard. In October 2025, Claybaugh released a memo pointing out that A grades accounted for 60.2% of grades awarded in 2025, up from 40.3% in 2015 and 24% in 2005. In addition, the 2025 GPA cutoff for summa cum laude was 3.989, and 251 students finished their first year with a 4.0.

On Feb. 6, Claybaugh shared an email with University students and faculty titled “Grading Policy Proposal.” It proposed a new grading policy that would take effect once the College’s faculty voted in favor. The plan suggested a 20% cap on A grades, with the instructor’s discretion to add up to four additional A grades.

After the decision was postponed following pushback from both students and faculty, nearly 70% of voting faculty members approved the proposed grading cap (458 to 201), with implementation set for Fall 2027. Faculty also voted 498 to 157 to adopt a companion policy that would introduce an internal “average percentile ranking” for calculating Latin graduation honors and prizes rather than GPAs.

Both decisions were made despite student opposition, with approximately 94% of students opposing the policies in a survey of about 800 conducted by the Harvard Student Association.

Though Claybaugh amended her recent statement, saying that automatically lowering A grades to A-minuses was simply a potential proposal, it still sparked discomfort for many students across campus. “I think hearing it makes me really skeptical for what’s to come, because [Claybaugh] does have a lot of influence,” Eva Santelli ’30 said to the “Harvard Independent.” “It just shows sort of where her intentions are lying. And I don’t really think that’s a realistic thing to implement … especially this year when the A grade cap isn’t even implemented yet.”

Other students understand Claybaugh’s intentions despite skepticism about her decision. “From her perspective, it makes sense for there to be some sort of enforceable penalty, because obviously, if there’s a policy and nobody’s following it, then it’s not very useful at all,” August Damiani ’28 said.

“I do think that this sort of academic system that we have thrives on—I guess you could call it the ‘informed consent of everyone.’ It’s easier when the professors, the students, the administrators—everyone is cooperating together for the same goal of a college education.”

Claybaugh’s “automatic A-” proposal directly responded to dissent from professors who publicly stated they did not intend to comply with the grading cap. On Feb. 26, William Petschek Professor of Mathematics Clifford H. Taubes published an op-ed questioning the ethics of the “20% A-grade” policy, calling into question the fairness of treating students as statistics rather than individuals “graded solely on the merits of their own achievements.”

“What if the proposed grade cap comes to pass? I will ignore it and give A’s as I see fit,” Taubes wrote. “And, if it turns out that the Registrar rejects my grade sheet because of ‘too many’ A’s, then I will let the kind and gentle folk at the Registrar’s Office choose which students get the A and which do not.”

Kyle Davis ’28, a Government concentrator taking “Statistics 110: Probability,” said Professor Joseph Blitzstein similarly didn’t see a fair way to implement the new grading policy in his class next year. “Blitzstein talked about how he doesn’t think necessarily that the stats department has actually experienced any grade inflation, according to some data that he’s seen,” Davis explained. “And so he said he’s going to continue to grade the class like he always does—which I think includes giving … 50% of the class either an A or an A-minus.”

Blitzstein’s analysis echoed the experiences of many students in STEM concentrations. “I’m a CS concentrator, and most CS classes have already had a 20% sort of rough distribution of A [grades]. So a lot of those classes aren’t even impacted,” Damiani said.

Though Taubes is among a group of professors who oppose the incoming grading policy, many have already begun preparing for the policy’s implementation. “Economics 10” professors David Laibson ’88 and Jason Furman ’92, for example, already plan to include the 20% A-grade cap in their classes for the Fall 2026 semester. This follows their op-ed titled “60 Percent of Grades at Harvard Were A’s. Enough Is Enough.”

“Everyone’s just kind of in the same boat of trying to figure out how it’s going to work, and so a lot of my professors do have to really try things out this year,” Santelli, who intends to concentrate in Environmental Science and Public Policy, said. “I know my professor mentioned doing some more quizzes or exams that ensure students have a really deep understanding of the material solely for the purpose of grade differentiation between students.”

As students begin to see the effects of the incoming grade cap, they are considering how it might affect their future course selections. “This is maybe a little naive, but I would hope that the culture around grades and academics broadly chills out a little bit,” Damiani said. “Maybe counterintuitively, this kind of forceful limiting of grades will make people more open to doing the material just for its own sake.”

Other students, especially those who did not experience Harvard before the proposal, thought the grading cap would produce a less intellectually curious student culture. “I feel it myself—and I’ve heard it from a lot of other incoming freshmen—that they’re scared that this A-grade cap is just making everything feel very competitive,” Santelli said.

While peer institutions like Yale University have begun to consider changing their own grading policies, Princeton University plans to maintain the rules it has followed since 2014—the year the college abandoned its own 35% cap on A grades (A+, A, A-). A committee at Princeton found that the policy, instituted in 2004 to deflate grades, had caused students significant stress.

“There are probably going to be some folks that think because it’s harder to get an A that they can’t collaborate or they can’t share anything with anyone because that could give them a leg up or something,” Davis added.

Claybaugh’s recent comments left a lasting impression on many students. “This is not something that is being offered up offhand,” Damiani said. “It’s a very serious policy, so I saw that statement in line with previous [grading proposals].”

Courtney Hines ’28 (courtneyhines@college.harvard.edu) is the News Editor of the “Harvard Independent.”