Harvard College’s Grading System Is ‘Failing,’ Report on Grade Inflation Says

More Harvard College students than ever are passing their classes with flying colors, but the College’s evaluation system is “failing to perform the key functions of grading,” according to a report released by the Office of Undergraduate Education on Monday.

The 25- page report, which was sent to faculty and Harvard College students on Monday, found that more than 60 percent of grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates are A’s, compared to only a quarter of grades two decades ago. It concluded that Harvard’s current grading system is “damaging the academic culture of the College.”

In the 25-page report, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh argued that the rising share of A grades necessitates reforms to “restore the integrity of our grading and return the academic culture of the College to what it was in the recent past.”

A faculty committee is exploring whether instructors should be able to award a limited number of A+ grades to undergraduates to crack down on grade inflation, according to the report. The highest grade undergraduates can currently receive is an A. The committee is also considering a proposal to include the median grade for every course on a student’s transcript.

Concern over high grades at Harvard is not new. Two years ago, Claybaugh presented a report to Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences calling attention to skyrocketing undergraduate marks. A faculty committee concluded in January that undergraduates frequently prioritize other commitments over their classes.

The latest report was released less than a month after the phenomenon catapulted back to national attention, with a New York Times headline concluding that “Harvard Students Skip Class and Still Get High Grades.” President Donald Trump and White House officials have repeatedly called the intelligence of Harvard’s student body into question.

The report drew on years of data on student grades and course evaluations, as well as surveys of faculty and student leaders conducted this summer.

“Nearly all faculty expressed serious concern,” Claybaugh wrote in the report. “They perceive there to be a misalignment between the grades awarded and the quality of student work.”

Grade inflation has accelerated in the past decade, according to Claybaugh. Since 2015, the proportion of students receiving A grades has risen by 20 percentage points. Where the Class of 2015 had a median grade point average of 3.64 at graduation, the Class of 2025 clocked in at 3.83. And since the 2016-2017 academic year, the median Harvard College GPA has been an A.

Grade inflation began to rise rapidly in the late 2010s, then spiked during the shift to remote instruction during the Covid-19 pandemic, before plateauing in recent years, according to the report.

Where Claybaugh’s 2023 report qualified its claims — conceding that rising grades were evidence of grade compression, but not necessarily inflation, because students’ work may be improving commensurately with their grades — the latest report did not hold back.

“Our grading is too compressed and too inflated, as nearly all faculty recognize; it is also too inconsistent, as students have observed,” she wrote. “More importantly, our grading no longer performs its primary functions and is undermining our academic mission.”

But Claybaugh cautioned against associating grade inflation with a decrease in student effort. Using self-reported data students provide when they submit semesterly course evaluations, called Q reports, her inquiry found that the amount of time students say they spend on coursework outside of class each week has remained relatively stable over the past two decades.

“Workload is notoriously difficult to measure, but our data suggest that students are working as hard as they ever have — if not more,” she wrote.

Hours worked have typically fluctuated between 5.5 and 6.5 hours, according to the report. In spring 2025, the average amount of time students reported was 6.46, compared to 5.85 in 2015.

But Claybaugh noted that Q report data does not always align with faculty perceptions of how much their students are working. Some instructors, especially in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, told her “that they’ve had to trim some readings and drop others entirely, that they’ve had to switch from novels to short stories, and that it’s difficult to keep assigning reading in the face of increasing student complaints,” she wrote.

“A fair number of students in reading-intensive courses report doing lower than the average hours of work outside of class,” she wrote.

Changes in media consumption and high school curricula may mean Harvard students find it harder to pay sustained attention to complex texts, Claybaugh added.

She attributed pressure to assign higher grades in part to the College’s course evaluation system. Instructors worry that giving out lower grades will result in less positive reviews, hindering their future job prospects, she wrote — while students have exerted their own “increasingly litigious” pressure on instructors to raise grades.

She also connected the shift to efforts from the College to encourage instructors to be sensitive to students who enter Harvard with limited high school preparation.

“For the past decade or so, the College has been exhorting faculty to remember that some students arrive less prepared for college than others,” she wrote. “Unsure how best to support their students, many have simply become more lenient.”

Claybaugh’s report concluded with recommendations for combatting grade inflation. She suggested instructors clearly communicate the quality of work required for a particular grade and consider instituting in person sit-down exams.

“Seated exams are prudent in this age of Generative AI,” she wrote. “They are also useful for encouraging students to engage with all course materials, and they tend to produce a broader distribution of grades.”

Claybaugh also advocated for working to standardize grading between different sections of the same course, writing that students are often “troubled by inconsistency in grading” by different teaching fellows.

The report also outlined potential changes to Harvard’s grading system, like awarding A+ grades — though it noted that any major revisions would require a faculty vote.

“Permitting faculty to award a limited number of A+s in each course would increase the information our grades provide by distinguishing the very best students,” Claybaugh wrote.

She wrote the committee was also investigating the effects of putting each course’s median grade on a student’s transcript and creating “a variance-based grading system for internal use.” The report did not offer further information on what such a system might look like.

—Staff writer Samuel A. Church can be reached at samuel.church@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @samuelachurch.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.