From The Atlantic: During their final meeting of the spring 2024 semester..., the then-dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, had been providing updates on the graduating class. When he got to GPA, Khurana couldn’t help but chuckle at how ludicrously high it was: about 3.8 on average. The rest of the room soon joined in, according to a professor present at the meeting. They were cracking up not simply because grades had gotten so high but because they knew just how little students were doing to earn them.
Last year, the university set out to study the state of academics at Harvard. The Classroom Social Compact Committee released its report in January. Students’ grades are up, but they’re doing less academic work. They skip class at a rate that surprises even the most hardened professors. Many care more about extracurriculars than coursework. “A majority of students and faculty we heard from agree that Harvard College students do not prioritize their academic experience,” the committee wrote...
The road to grade-inflation hell was paved with good intentions. As more students applied to Harvard and earning a spot became ever harder, the university ended up filling its classes with students who had only ever gotten perfect grades. These overachievers arrived on campus with even more anxiety than past generations about keeping up their GPA. Students sobbing at office hours, begging their professor to bump a rare B+ to an A–, became a not-uncommon occurrence.
At the same time, professors were coming under more pressure to tend to their students’ emotional well-being, Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, told me. They received near-constant reminders that Harvard was admitting more students with disabilities, who’d matriculated from under-resourced schools, or who had mental-health issues. Instructors took the message as an exhortation to lower expectations and raise grades. Resisting the trend was hard. Few professors want to be known as harsh graders, with the accompanying poor evaluations and low course enrollments...
If Harvard is to succeed [in dealing with grade inflation]..., it will be because the political environment has given its initiative an extra level of urgency. The Trump administration’s assault on elite institutions generally and Harvard in particular has put the university’s public standing at stake. Claybaugh believes that the best way to help Harvard is to acknowledge its flaws and try to fix them. Bringing rigor back to the academic mission seems a natural place to start. “We should be making sure that we are living up to our mission to restore our legitimacy in people’s eyes,” she told me. “I don’t want people all across America thinking, It’s a place of ideas I find somehow troubling or offensive, and also, no one goes to class.”
Full story at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/harvard-college-grade-inflation/684021/.
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