Harvard Joins the ‘Right-Wing Conspiracy’—Declares That College Grades Have Been a Joke for Decades
So, it turns out that the little boy was right all along about the emperor’s new clothes.
In an effort to restore grading standards, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences is conducting an email ballot on the administration’s proposal to limit solid A grades at 20% of students per course (plus up to four additional A's, if merited).
For decades, higher education reformers have warned that college grade inflation is “real, rampant, and ravaging our universities”—along with workforce competitiveness. And not only at Harvard. In the early 1960s, 15% of all college grades nationwide were A’s. Today, A’s constitute nearly 50% of all grades. Yet when reformers produced studies demonstrating the problem, defenders of the status quo dismissed the concern as a right-wing myth.
Education commentator Alfie Kohn, in his widely cited 2002 essay “The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation,” argued that the entire issue is ideologically driven. “The crusade against it,” says Kohn, “is led by conservative individuals and organizations.”
This January, a Washington Monthly piece echoed the sentiment, describing grade inflation concerns as “a long-standing conservative grievance” thrust back into headlines by “right-wing media.”
But that was then. Now, Harvard itself has stepped forward. Its recent report reveals that A’s (including A-minuses) account for more than half—and in many courses, upward of 60%—of all grades awarded at Harvard College!
What was once a rare mark of excellence has become the default. The new proposal would those caps listed above. It would also replace the traditional GPA (grade point average) with an internal percentile-ranking system for honors and awards.
On its face, this is progress worth applauding. Grade inflation is no victimless crime. It erodes the signaling value of a Harvard degree. When nearly every transcript is dominated by A’s, employers struggle to distinguish genuine excellence from mere competence.
But most of all, students are cheated. They receive false confidence, graduate with weaker preparation, and enter a competitive world unprepared for honest feedback. Harvard’s willingness to risk unpopularity with its undergraduates is, at minimum, intellectually honest and morally courageous—especially at a time when too many universities prioritize student satisfaction over substance.
However, the proposal contains a fatal flaw, one that risks turning reform into cosmetology. Buried in the revisions is an opt-out mechanism: Instructors may designate their entire course as Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory (SAT/UNS) and then award an unlimited number of “SAT+” grades at their discretion. SAT+ recognizes work “well beyond the minimal expectation” for an SAT—essentially an A by another name, free from the numerical cap.
This is no minor detail. It is a built-in escape hatch large enough to drive a school bus through. Professors uncomfortable with the 20%-plus-four limit—concerned about evaluations, enrollment, or the discomfort of denying top marks—can simply switch to SAT/UNS. The A cap then goes poof, and they can hand out as many SAT+ notations as they wish. Since SAT and SAT+ do not factor into GPA or official honors, the university can claim success while inflated evaluation silently continues on a parallel track.
The Harvard subcommittee itself acknowledged this risk in its March revisions, noting it was “wary of reproducing a kind of grade inflation in this alternate grading framework.”
Yet it added SAT+ anyway, arguing that flexibility would make the opt-out more palatable to faculty. Yes, but that is precisely the problem. Policy should not be written for the comfort of those most likely to subvert it. By creating an unregulated safety valve, Harvard ensures that the most inflation-prone instructors can ignore the cap entirely.
The result is not restored standards—it is standards hidden behind a different label. Over time, the distinction between capped A’s and uncapped SAT+ will blur. Transcripts will still brim with top-tier marks. Public perception of rigor may improve slightly, but the private reality of lax standards will persist.
This looks to me a lot less like reform, and a lot more like rebranding.
Worse, the loophole distracts from deeper failures. Grade inflation arises from a culture that treats students as tuition-paying customers, rewards professors for popularity rather than rigor, and fears any policy that might increase student “stress.”
Real reform would confront these pressures—perhaps by mandating median-grade reporting on transcripts (as passed by the Texas House, but not the Senate, in 2025), reducing the weight of student happiness surveys on teaching evaluations, or requiring genuine grade distributions in every course.
Instead, Harvard has chosen the path of least resistance—limiting the most visible symptom while preserving the mechanisms producing it. The proposed percentile-ranking system for honors is savvy, but it too will be undermined if professors simply migrate their “generosity” to SAT+ courses. Students will shop for easy high-pass classes, and faculty will face the same old pressures with an official workaround.
By embedding an uncapped SAT+ option, the faculty has ensured the reform will change paperwork more than practice.
Grade inflation will not be defeated by clever nomenclature. It will only end when professors are required—without easy exit ramps—to assign grades that truly reflect the distribution of talent and effort in their classrooms.
Until then, Harvard’s policy strikes me as a cautionary tale: Even well-meaning efforts at elite universities can collapse into performative gestures when the hardest part—saying “no” more often—is quietly made optional. Yes, the faculty should approve the cap. But they should also close the loophole. Anything less is not courage but, rather, camouflage.
In sum, now is the time for our universities—and our lawmakers—to summon the resolve of that child in the emperor’s kingdom, strip away the polite fiction of unearned A's, and let transcripts finally tell the unvarnished truth.
