Harvard’s Plan to Curb Grade Inflation Will Probably Fail, But There Is Hope

Faculty at Harvard have adopted a plan to fight grade inflation by capping the number of As that can be awarded in any particular class. But I fear that this plan will fail to stem the tide of grade inflation, as have most other previous attempts.

Grade inflation has long been acknowledged as a severe problem in academia. Academic work that would have gotten a B a generation ago now gets an A. From 1990 to 2020, college grade point averages (GPAs) increased by 21.5 percent. At some colleges, such as Yale, As and A minuses account for 80 percent of grades.

Harvard’s brute-force strategy to fight grade inflation isn’t without precedent. It falls in a long line of attempts to curb the practice. The Trump administration, for example, included a proposal to combat grade inflation in its recent compact, but the federal government lacks the authority, capacity, or trust to lead such an effort.

The problem past efforts have run into isn’t a lack of awareness or even a lack of will. It’s that no single institution can act alone without putting itself at a competitive disadvantage. But in an insightful piece, David Eubanks identified the key player that could solve this coordination problem: accreditors. To see why accreditors are uniquely positioned to reverse the trend, we first need to understand what’s driving grade inflation and why previous efforts to combat it have failed.

What’s Driving Grade Inflation?

There is a significant incentive for all actors in academia to accept artificially boosted grades.

Students are the most willing to accept grade inflation. And who can blame them? The boss who offers more money for less work would have many takers among his employees. Students are no different and will, as a general rule, gladly accept higher grades and a lower workload.

Another contributing factor to student demands for higher grades is the consumer mindset. When students pay tens of thousands of dollars for their education, they feel they should get As, regardless of performance. Even students who prefer learning over grades can be swayed to play it safe. After all, it is far less risky to choose the easy‑A course than one taught by a tough grader who will ensure students learn the material but may award lower grades. Those lower grades can reduce a student’s chances of landing a job interview or gaining admission to graduate school.

The second group of people driving grade inflation is professors. As an old Soviet-era joke goes, “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” A similar dynamic is at play with grading. Professors give students high grades, and students reward the professors with high student evaluations. They also benefit from fewer grade disputes since few students with an A will dispute their grade.

The third group driving grade inflation is graduate school admissions committees. Undergraduate GPAs are one of the primary tools committees use to make their decisions. But this means that every college and professor who wants to see their students accepted into graduate school is better off inflating grades.

How to Reverse the Trend

There has been no shortage of initiatives to combat grade inflation. Princeton tried to cap A grades, as Harvard is doing now, from 2004 to 2014, before scrapping the plan. Harvey Mansfield famously started giving students two grades: their official grade for their transcript and the grade they would have gotten without grade inflation. None of these policies has solved the problem. In part, that failure owes to a misdiagnosis of what’s driving it.

Efforts that presume grade inflation is a failure at the individual level, which can simply be remedied with calls for stiffer spines, are doomed to failure. Grade inflation is structural and incentive-driven, and it is therefore futile for an individual professor, department, or even a college to try to fight it. That is why Harvard’s new plan will fail just like Princeton’s.

The key to stopping grade inflation is solving a coordination problem—a prisoner’s dilemma. If all professors stopped inflating grades, we’d all be better off. Yet no professor or college wants to be the only one to stop inflating grades. Thus, the key to stopping grade inflation is solving a coordination problem. And that’s where an accreditor’s ability to apply a policy to many colleges at once sets them apart.

For example, the largest accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), accredits 950 colleges, nearly a quarter of all federal aid-eligible colleges in the country. If HLC adopted contextualized transcripts, or adopted the abandoned Princeton cap on As, or a new Harvard cap, a critical mass of colleges would be committed to ending grade inflation, allowing other colleges and accreditors to follow suit.

Harvard should be applauded for trying to fight against grade inflation, but its efforts are doomed to fail because it cannot solve the coordination problem on its own. Accreditors in general, and HLC in particular, have the best chance of ending the scourge of grade inflation because they are the only ones who can solve the coordination problem.