Harvard Crimson supports the recent report on grade inflation at the university by Amanda Claybaugh. The Crimson article on the original report is impressively damning of the whole ridiculous situation.
This editorial is pretty good. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/10/editorial-harvard-grade-inflation-claybaugh-report/ The start isn't very promising The current arrangement — with students working hard as ever and receiving minimal feedback while GPAs precipitously rise — benefits no one. Addressing the problem will require major changes, including ensuring grading functions as a true indicator of mastery, reconfiguring assignments to center learning over volume, and destroying perverse incentive loops. The College should seriously evaluate proposals before letting the arrow fly. That's actually beyond highly debatable. Harvard professors have been commenting that, for most of this century, they've had to cut way back on assignments, etc. It does pick up a bit, though... Nonetheless, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh’s report makes several stark realities apparent. First, it outlines the severity of grade inflation, as evidenced by the astonishing statistic that 60 percent of awarded grades are A’s. Second, it advances the argument that, among other functions, grading has failed to communicate proper information to students. Third, the report offers solutions spanning transcript updates to the introduction of the A+. The result is a campus where nobody feels satisfied. Professors, fed up with students working just enough for an A instead of intellectual satisfaction, report waning classroom engagement. Too many classrooms now are lit with the glow of laptop screens rather than the spark of genuine intellectual curiosity. After commenting on student distress that grades might actually return to reflecting accomplishment (in the particular class, not in terms of being special enough to be admitted to Harvahd), the editorial concludes... The issue of swollen GPAs at Harvard did not appear overnight. We cannot expect to fix it in the same timeframe either. The solutions in this report — and those that have yet to be proposed — should undergo serious scrutiny iteration before they are imposed. Can we truly be confident that measures that have individually failed at other intuitions will somehow work when applied in parallel? Harvard may be feeling the pressure, but reforming hastily could do more harm than good. Harvard students should be here to learn — not get a 4.0. Based on the College’s recent efforts, it appears that dream may someday be achieved. For the time being, we’ll have to content with giving the administration an A. For effort, of course.
I will tell you why grades have risen in my classes in the 25 years I've been at it: my rubrics were largely nonexistent, and now they clearly spell out what I expect in an A or B paper. No guessing at what I mean by Excellent or Good. But grading with a rubric also suggests that students can figure out their own feedback: if you got a B, look at the rubric and it will tell you the difference between a B and an A. I don't do this but have colleagues who do - in large part because you learn over time how many students don't read their feedback at all, so it's potentially a waste of time.
There are a few other items, including national rankings for programs whose students have higher grades and test scores. There's also the issue that has come up with UCSD recently, where 900+ of their incoming freshmen aren't at a high school math level with many of them not at a middle school level, yet they've got a high GPA due to high school grade inflation. https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissions-review-docs.pdf 25% of their incoming freshmen in the study couldn't answer the first question in this photo correctly:
Something at a middle/high school level (at least in my state) that has contributed to much higher grades/GPA, is that students who do not do well on a test the first time often get a 'second chance' to take the same test, with the higher score (almost always the second time) as the one that counts. Also, for assignments that are not turned in, instead of a zero, they get a 50% (the idea is that a zero is hard to make up for) and often they are allowed to turn in assignments late with no penalty. Neither of things benefit kids in the long run, as they don't have the push to really learn the subject as there are relatively no/low penalties for failure.