70% of Faculty Vote to Overhaul Harvard Grading with A Cap

This is ... curve grading, right?

It's a bit alien to me. Where I went to school, you used get scores from 1(lowest)- to 10 (highest) where 6 is "Acceptable". You could curve the questions, but not the students. So theoretically the whole class could all score 1s, or all could score 10s. This makes more sense to me, if everyone works hard, they should all succeed, and if they're all lazy they should fail.

You couldn't arbitrarily decide that exactly 20% gets -say- an 8. I've always wondered what the steelman is for curve grading.

Stack ranking. 10% of your class needs to fail, even if you specifically picked them for their ability to get great grades.

> Faculty voted 458 to 201 for the first plank of the three-part proposal, which will limit A grades in undergraduate courses to 20 percent of enrollment, with flexibility for up to four additional A’s.

Looks like its best not to enroll in classes with more than 5 students.

Cynicism aside, seems like a good step.

The framing that a 20% A cap distinguishes "extraordinary" from "merely strong" work is self-defeating. It measures performance relative to a single cohort, not against any absolute standard of mastery. If 40% of a class genuinely does exceptional work, 20% get mislabeled as mediocre. If it's a weak year and only 5% are truly exceptional, 15% get a free ride. The signal is still noise ... with artificial scarcity bolted on.

Actual grade meaning would require criterion-referenced assessment: define what mastery looks like, grade against that standard, and let the distribution fall where it may across years and cohorts. That's hard and unsexy, so instead we get an administrative quota that launders the appearance of rigor while the underlying problem, that Harvard's admissions process selects heavily for wealth and legacy, goes untouched.

Harvard A's will now tell employers that a learner beat ~80% of a nepotism-filtered, endowment-curated cohort in a single semester. That's a relative rank, not a measure of exceptional work.