Why Colleges Made Grades Totally Worthless | The Deep

Harvard gives A's to almost everyone now. Not metaphorically, literally. Nearly 80% of all grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates are now A's or A-minuses. 20 years ago, it was just 30%. The effect has been counterintuitive. Students are working harder, stressing more, and learning less inside institutions where grades are becoming meaningless. In Harvard's student handbook, an A represents, quote, extraordinary distinction, a nonsensical designation if almost every student makes the grade. As one law school dean observed, it would be flippant to say Harvard grades are useless, but they're almost useless.

Harvard is proposing a major grading overhaul to fight grade inflation. The plan would cap A grades at 20% of a class. But the crisis begs a deeper question. What's in a grade? If the grading system is so broken and so entrenched, is it finally time to abolish grades? All together.

Most of us grew up on grades. Get good grades was the mantra and the ticket to success in adulthood. The A through F scale feels definitive and inevitable. But there's a catch. Grades feel ancient and permanent, but they're not. While Harvard adopted a marking system at its founding in the mid-1600s, A's, B's, C's, D's, and F's didn't really gain widespread use until the 1940s.

Even in the 1970s, only 67% of primary and secondary schools in the United States were using letter grades. The first university to award ranked markings was Yale in 1785. University president Ezra Stiles evaluated 58 graduating seniors using four labels, Optomy, Second Optomy, Inferiores, and Perjores, roughly translated Best, the Second Best, the Inferior, and the Worst. 20 students were the Best, 10 were officially the Worst. Student self-esteem was apparently not Yale's top priority. American Ivy Leagues eventually found Stiles' system undemocratic, and in the 19th century, Yale adopted the nation's first four-point numerical scale.

In general, universities loved grading by numbers. In 1832, a Harvard faculty report praised grading for, quote, increasing student attention to the course of studies. And encouraging good moral conduct. Other schools followed suit, experimenting with the 100-point scales and public class rankings. But there was still no universal standard. A 3.5 from Yale didn't necessarily correspond to an 88 from Harvard or a B from Mount Holyoke, the first college to adopt an A through F scale. By the early 1900s, percentage-based grading systems were becoming common in American education.

It was also the era of the College Board, when university leaders pushed aggressively for standardization. The concern was simple. Grades needed to mean the same thing from one classroom to another, and one university to another. Anyone looking at a transcript should supposedly be able to understand exactly how a student measured up against peers across the country. As research on intelligence Gained popularity, some academics began to believe that aptitude, like many biological traits, naturally followed a bell curve. Therefore, they argued, grades should too.

Grading on a curve would reduce subjectivity and standardize expectations across teachers and institutions. Not coincidentally, this same obsession with measuring aptitude also inspired Princeton psychologists. And enthusiastic eugenicist Carl Brigham to develop the first SAT exam. For more on that disaster, see my video on why the college board is everything wrong with college admissions.

There were dissenters, God bless them. They argued that measuring intelligence was not the same thing as measuring classroom performance, and that actual student learning might not naturally fit a perfect statistical curve. As one professor put it, grades create a facade of coherence. The dissenters largely lost. By the 1940s, the A through F grading scale had become dominant across American education, even as schools continued using percentages and GPA systems alongside it. And almost immediately, the critics' fears started coming true. As soon as the modern grading system became standardized, the curve itself ...began drifting upward.

Grade inflation chroniclers Stuart Roschacher and Christopher Healy identify two major inflationary periods. The first occurred during the Vietnam era, between 1963 and 1973, when the percentage of A grades skyrocketed from 15% to 32% of all grades awarded nationwide. Researchers theorize this happened because poor grades could jeopardize draft And faculty across the country were reluctant to send students into the war. After Vietnam, there was a brief lull, but since roughly 1988, A grades have steadily climbed from 28% of all grades awarded to today's nearly 80% at elite schools.

At the same time, B grades remained relatively stable, while C's, D's, and F's Diminished significantly. Healy attributes the second wave of inflation to what he calls a new ethos in higher education. Students were increasingly treated less like disciples or protégés and more like consumers. That shift created powerful incentives for faculty to grade more generously. Mandatory student evaluations, soaring tuition costs, and career-focused campus cultures. All reinforce the same lesson. In a consumer environment, the customer is always right. And if everybody inflates grades, everybody feels happy, at least for a while.

But the law of unintended consequences has struck hard. The hidden cost of grade inflation is that A's become simultaneously essential and meaningless. When students arrive at Harvard today, they expect straight A's, because statistically, most of them will get them. But paradoxically, that has created a student culture that feels less free than ever to experiment, take intellectual risks, or challenge itself. Dr. Joshua Green, a psychology professor who serves on Harvard's grading committee, explained it this way. Putting a perfect GPA in reach of so many students is not the only way to get a GPA.

It is the only way to get a GPA. ...perversely deters them from taking classes that could threaten it. It's as if students start college with a shiny new car and hope to go four years without a scratch. Who would dare go off road? When nearly everyone can achieve a near-perfect GPA, protecting that GPA becomes the central organizing principle of college life. Students become less willing to take difficult courses, explore unfamiliar subjects, or risk failure. Intellectual formation has turned into performance management.

This hasn't made students more confident. It has made them dramatically more anxious. Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard's Dean of Undergraduate Education and author of the university's 2025 Grade Inflation Report, put it bluntly, one might expect that a world where everyone got A's would be a very relaxed world, but actually, it's not. What is the most stressed out world of all? The report found students were working harder than ever. In spring 2025, the average reported academic workload rose to 6.46 hours per day, compared to 5.85 in 2015.

One Harvard student explained the problem perfectly. When everybody has A's, students can no longer distinguish themselves through ordinary excellence, so they compensate. ...by overloading themselves with classes, extracurriculars, internships, leadership positions, and constant resume building. Faculty teaching large introductory courses now routinely receive hundreds of grade change requests after major exams. Former Harvard resident tutor Lindsay Mitchell described the psychology this way, Harvard's grade-frenzied atmosphere stems from the way A's...

Flooding the marketplace changes their value as a currency, rendering them both essential and trash at the same time. When you feel that everybody's got an A, then you must get one too, every time, or you have failed to keep up with the mainstream. Yet, all the A's in the world will still do zilch to get you ahead. Great inflation has become a dimension of imposter syndrome that reflects other aspects of this generation's coming-of-age experience. It is similar to looking repeatedly at a friend's social media posts portraying her life as perfect, while knowing that your own posts were curated to obscure a multitude of flaws.

Students aren't so much entitled as they are terrified. The entire system starts to resemble social media. Everyone is projecting perfection while privately panicking that they can't keep up. So, how do you fix a system this deeply embedded in American higher education? Elite universities have tried a variety of solutions. So far, most have failed. Since the 1990s, schools like Dartmouth and Cornell experimented with transparency measures, publishing median course grades online and on transcripts. The result was predictable.

Students began course shopping, avoiding difficult professors and lower-graded classes. Princeton tried a more aggressive solution. By the early 2000s, nearly half of all the grades awarded at Princeton were already in the A range. In 2004, the university imposed formal caps, limiting A range grades to less than 35% in courses and less than 55% in junior and senior independent work. A decade later, the faculty abandoned the policy. Critics argued the caps functioned like quotas. Increased stress and forced elite students to compete for a limited supply of A's.

Postmortems also found inconsistent implementation across departments and little evidence that the system improved fairness or learning outcomes. Now, Harvard is considering grade caps again. Faculty behind the proposal argue that the new version avoids Princeton's mistakes by leaving A-minus grades uncapped and applying standards more uniformly across departments.

Students hate the idea. The Harvard Crimson Survey found that 85% opposed the proposal. But some Harvard faculty members have proposed something even more radical, abolishing grades altogether. Annabelle Kim, a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, suggested replacing traditional grades with narrative evaluations. Faculty already write detailed recommendation letters explaining students' strengths and weaknesses, she argued. So, why not formalize that process? The reaction from students and faculty was immediate.

How would anyone know whether the students were actually learning? But Kim isn't quite as crazy as she sounds. Grades are not inevitable. In fact, a surprising number of schools have experimented with alternative evaluation systems for decades. Several elite law schools, including Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley Law, use honors pass-fail systems, With far less grade stratification. Schools like Alverno College and New College of Florida use written evaluations instead of traditional grades. Fairhaven College uses collaborative evaluations between professors and students, and Reed College and Brown University record grades internally, but do not calculate cumulative GPAs.

At a 2009 meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, Educator Kathleen O'Brien explained how Alverno's narrative evaluations work. Instead of assigning vague letter grades, professors evaluate students against specific competencies and learning outcomes. In one chemistry course, for example, students were assessed on concrete technical skills involving spectroscopy methods, laboratory precision, and chemical analysis techniques. When faculty members are providing written, detailed analyses of multiple course objectives, and are also, for majors, Relating performance to larger goals for the major, so much more is taking place, she said, than in a letter grade.

But fully decoupling American education from grades would require an enormous cultural shift. For better or for worse, the American education system is closely tied to a nationwide A-F GPA system. But like so many conventions in higher education, That system is breaking down, which gives us an opportunity to ask more interesting questions about what education is actually for, and how grades can serve that purpose. The purpose of education isn't deciding if a student is best or worst. Education should draw the student out of Plato's cave.

It teaches him to recognize the shadows on the wall and the puppet masters casting them for what they are. It succeeds when he leaves the cave altogether and steps out into the sunlight of reality. That's what a teacher is supposed to do. Teachers guide students because, in theory, they have already walked the road themselves. They know not only the goal, but also the path toward mastery. They can point out the landmarks, correct mistakes, and help students develop the habits necessary to see clearly and think well.

At its best, assessment is not simply about ranking students against one another, or finding out where they land on a predetermined bell curve. Assessments should help both the teacher and the student understand where mastery has been achieved, where growth is still needed, and what skills or knowledge the student still needs to acquire. In that sense, grades can serve a legitimate purpose. They can communicate progress, readiness, discipline, and achievement both to the student themselves and to future employers or graduate schools. But grades only work if they remain connected to reality.

And if they remain secondary to the relationship between the teacher and the student. Once grades become detached from truth, formation, and meaningful evaluation, they stop serving anyone. Teachers don't believe in them. Students are left adrift. Employers in graduate schools have no information. The Harvard transcript has become performative. It doesn't mean anything.

Whatever replaces the current system, whether that's stricter grading, narrative evaluations, competency-based assessment, or something else entirely, the deeper question remains the same. Does the system help students pursue wisdom, mastery, and truth, or does it simply train them to manage appearances?

If universities can recover an understanding of education as a relationship between teacher, student, and reality itself, then perhaps a Harvard A might someday mean something again. And if they can't, we may eventually discover that we don't really need grades, or Harvard, at all.

If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe to The LOOPcast. We bring you a new episode of The Deep every Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern.