Now that 'A' is for 'average,' Harvard considers adding A+ grades

Last year, 60.2 percent of grades in Harvard courses were A's, but that's down to 53.4 percent in the fall semester, Dean Amanda Claybaugh told faculty.

In 2005, 24 percent of grades were A's. That rose to 40 percent in 2015, and peaked at 63 percent in the pandemic year of 2020-21.

"After years of runaway grade inflation," Harvard is considering adding A+ grades to distinguish excellent from average performance, reports Mark Arsenault in the New York Times.

In a report issued in October, Harvard’s Office of Undergraduate Education encouraged the faculty to bring grading “back into integrity.” A Harvard A is supposed to be reserved for work of “extraordinary distinction” that shows “full mastery of the subject,” said the report. It suggested "giving more weight to students’ subject mastery, rather than their effort, and including the median grade for each course on student transcripts for context."

Grading for effort? Really?

"Grade inflation is not just a Harvard issue," Arsenault writes. Grades are up at colleges across the nation, even as professors complain students are less prepared for college-level work. High school students are earning higher grades too -- and lower test scores.

In 2004, Princeton "recommended limits on the share of A’s to be awarded, which effectively deflated grades," he writes. Students complained it increased stress and reduced the incentive to collaborate with classmates. After 10 years, faculty ended the policy. "The proportion of A’s and A+’s has since shot up more than 20 percentage points, to 45.5 percent in 2025," Princeton reports.

Students tend to give lower evaluations to professors who are tough graders -- and avoid enrolling in their courses, the Harvard report noted. Faculty members worry that could hurt their careers. The university has promised to reward rigor.

All the economic incentives push professors -- and poorly paid adjuncts -- to give students the grades they want, writes Alex Bronzini-Vender in the Washington Monthly.

GPAs began rising in 1983, say researchers. "It’s more intense at private universities, especially selective ones, but it afflicts campuses of all shapes, sizes, and acceptance rates," writes Bronzini-Vender.

"In the 1980s, as federal support for higher education shifted from federal grants toward student loans taken out on an individual basis, universities began treating students as paying customers," he writes. "And the customer, of course, is always right."

As the number of college-age students contracted, colleges competed on the "quality" of the student experience, he writes. Student course evaluations became the rule, and instructors knew tough grading could ruin their employment chances.

Universities began relying on adjuncts to do more of the teaching. They're not paid well enough to spend the time it would take to grade rigorously, much less to go through a "Kafkaesque appeals process" if a student complains, Bronzini-Vender writes.

It matters, he concludes. "When grades lose their meaning, students lose crucial feedback about their strengths and weaknesses. . . . employers and graduate schools struggle to distinguish between candidates, forcing them to rely on ever-more-arbitrary signals of merit—for instance, the prestige of the college one attended."