A group of Harvard faculty released a proposal last month that would limit the number of students receiving A grades in undergraduate classes to roughly 20 percent of class enrollment, The Harvard Crimson reported. The full faculty is likely to vote on the proposal at a faculty meeting next month.

The proposal follows the release of an October 2025 report revealing that more than 60 percent of grades given to Harvard undergraduates were As and almost 85 percent were As or A-minuses. “Our current grading practices are not only undermining the functions of grading; they are also damaging the academic culture of the College,” the report reads.

The distribution of grades at Williams is not far removed from that of Harvard. A faculty memo released in fall 2024 revealed that 50 percent of letter grades were As during the 2023-24 academic year, prompting discussion among faculty and students alike, although College faculty have not yet taken any formal action.

The proposal, written by the Harvard Undergraduate Educational Policy Committee, would allow professors to award As to 20 percent of their students, plus a maximum of four other students. The proposal would implement a new metric called “average percentile rank,” measuring a student’s average performance across their specific classes relative to their peers. This metric, rather than grade point average, would be used to determine honors and awards.

A February poll conducted by the Harvard Undergraduate Association found that nearly 85 percent of Harvard undergraduates opposed the proposal.

Harvard Professor of Economics David Laibson told the Crimson that he supported the proposal as an effort to combat grade inflation by standardizing grade distribution. “Grading is a collective action problem,” he wrote. “When some instructors raise their grades, that puts pressure on other instructors to raise their grades too, and the pressure for higher grades snowballs over time, making it hard for any course to hold the line.”

Other professors harbor concerns about the plan, fearing that it would create anxiety about the scarcity of As. “Further bean-counting would foster an adversarial, instead of collaborative, relationship between classmates and between students and their instructors,” Yiddish Preceptor Sara Feldman wrote to the Crimson.