Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 150

From the Harvard Crimson: Members of the Harvard faculty subcommittee that drafted a proposal to cap A grades said Yale’s recent recommendation of a 3.0 mean GPA would cut deeper into student transcripts than Harvard’s own plan — even as they welcomed Yale’s entry into a debate that has so far unfolded largely in Cambridge.

The Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, in a report released April 10, urged Yale College to adopt “a 3.0 mean, or some other college-wide standard” to address grade inflation, alongside a new percentile-rank metric on transcripts. A Harvard committee proposed a different instrument: a 20 percent cap on A grades per course, with four additional As permitted, and no mandated distribution across other grades.

Government professor Alisha C. Holland, a member of the Harvard subcommittee, said the two proposals would land in very different places on student transcripts. “I would expect — especially in the short term, as instructors make adjustments – that the median grade at Harvard will be an A-minus,” Holland said. “That is far off from the mean of a 3.0 that Yale is recommending.” ...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/4/23/yale-report-harvard-reacts/.