Throughout this blog series on grade compression, I have argued that: 1. The work of supporting students operates in direct conflict with sorting them, and 2. Society and formal education prioritize sorting. The idea that grades can differentiate students while meaningfully contributing to their learning is a convenient illusion, but the existential crisis compression has provoked—especially at selective institutions like Harvard—makes it obvious that differentiation is the true purpose of grades.
In my last post, I concluded that Team Sort and Team Support should be equally motivated to address compression, if for very different reasons. I will explore how Team Support might respond later, but for now let’s look at Team Sort. Having previously critiqued the 2025 Harvard Grade report’s disingenuous diagnosis of a grading crisis, here I examine how this report and an ensuing proposal for new grade policies promise to fight the culture of high grades. Because Harvard (sadly) serves as a bellwether for higher education, these actions will likely shape how institutions respond to compression more broadly.
Of the proposed grading policy changes, one garnered outsized attention at Harvard and beyond: capping As in undergraduate courses—regardless of size—at 20% plus an additional four, with no limit placed on A- grades. As various criticsnoted, this policy would turn the A into an artificially scarce commodity, likely intensifying competition to meet the cutoff; such high-stakes exhibitions of achievement incentivize short-term performance over long-term learning. The cap would also likely fuel competition for the smallest classes, where that “plus four As” proviso would mean a lot more, as well as flight out of classes where students don’t envision themselves as the highest performers—a point even Harvard’s president appeared to concede.
To be fair, a separate recommendation to distinguish students by average percentile rank (rather than grade point average) for internal honors was meant to slow the deluge toward small courses, though who knows if that policy would actually work. The bigger picture remains the same: the dismal future outlined above seems far likelier than one where artificial grade caps lead students to embrace curiosity, to take intellectual risks, and to orient to peers from a stance of collegiality and collaboration.
Unmoved by these concerns, proposal apologists have offered incongruous and ironic justifications. My favorite example is psychologist and proposal co-author Joshua Greene’s explanation that “under natural selection, molecules form cells, cells form organisms, and organisms form societies, because teamwork is an essential strategy for surviving and flourishing.” By extension, “if the whole class can’t get A’s, you’ve got more reason—not less—to form a study group.” In other words, the conditions that selected for cooperation on an evolutionary scale can be unproblematically analogized to individual students navigating scarcity in a college class. This is Social Darwinism refashioned as selecting for moral virtue.
When reminded that a similar policy to cap A grades at Princeton was famously hated by faculty and students alike and eventually discarded, Greene responds: “Asking Princeton undergrads who have been A students their whole lives to suddenly get mostly B’s is asking a lot … Our proposal is less draconian. With a limit only on A’s, theoretically all letter grades at Harvard could be A’s and A-minuses.” Need I remind readers that a key intention is to decompress grades? Whereas Greene acknowledges (and doesn’t seem to mind) that Harvard might essentially come to have two grades: A and A-. But in Harvard’s hypercompetitive culture, this binary will surely feel like a pass/fail system where, if you’re not in the top 20% (plus four), you must be last,
Those pushing for policy changes at Harvard recognize that in this high (and high-stakes) grade culture, students (and faculty) are miserable. The grade report concedes that faculty and students “are operating reasonably within a system structured by competing incentives—and a culture animated by evolving beliefs about what students need and what good teaching entails.” An imperative follows to “change that system and culture if we want grading to change.” Note the order of transformation proposed here: changing the system and culture will cause grades to change. This may be the truest statement in the report, if administrators actually believed it.
Unfortunately, this is a bait and switch, because the architects of the policy changes refuse to grapple with the systemic and cultural conflicts between supporting learning and differentiating students. Instead, they have conjured up and pledged to restore a “recent past” in which grades simultaneously motivated engagement with learning, communicated feedback about strengths and weaknesses, and distinguished students. This was when grading at Harvard was great.
I do not believe this past ever existed, though I accept that the pressure for high grades was less intense than it is now. Nevertheless, to maintain the illusion that grades can support and sort, the grade report subtly redefines what support entails:
“Because students feel pressured by applications and recruiting, we must make sure they understand what grades are actually required to achieve the goals they have set for themselves, how to make sense of and learn from the grades that disappoint them, how to channel the stress that is inextricable from their ambitions, and how to develop a mature attitude toward achievement.”
Here, support means providing social-emotional tools so students can tighten up and accept that B+ with grace and dignity, as in Harvard’s good old days. This is like a profit-captured company that, facing a rash of employee complaints about housing and childcare costs, health-care premiums, and other financial insecurities, decides to introduce weekly meditation sessions and mandate that all employees attend.
For their part, Harvard students insisted on keeping their A’s, even as compression has made them more anguished and stressed than ever. Despite this widespread denunciation from students, the measure to cap grades passed in May 2026, with close to 70% of faculty voting in favor. However, implementation was postponed until Fall 2027, a decision that created further confusion and consternation.
Harvard claims to “owe” students “an education that is meaningful as well as rigorous.” But the examples of what this looks like to students: “when the faculty seemed to care about their learning,” when students drew a “tangible takeaway” they could apply in other courses, and when they felt “a sense of connection between the classroom and the world,” are as notable for what they emphasize—relationality to people, to course content, to the broader world—as what they lack; none of these examples cite students’ exhilaration with high-stakes performances, receiving B+s (or worse!), or being ranked unfavorably against their peers.
I believe education can be meaningful and rigorous. But as long as rigor is sort-coded, a euphemism for externally driven ranking systems rather than internally driven curiosity and excellence, I don’t see this happening. Whether or not caps decompress grades—and even those proposing the caps seem to have their doubts—policies like these will not help students reengage with learning. True systemic and cultural change requires that both “meaningful” and “rigorous” come to be support-coded, and neither Harvard nor any other institution will get there by changing grading policies alone.
So, what can Team Support offer toward an education that students find meaningful and rigorous? That’s the question I take up in the next post, (hopefully) the last in this series on grade compression. This being a wicked problem, there will be no easy answers on hand. But paying more attention to the question itself is an important start.
Teaching Inquiry 