Grade inflation in the Ivy League may have started innocently enough, with the emergence in post-World War II of the “gut,” the label given to courses in which the professors rarely, if ever, permitted students to flunk. The most famous of these was a course at Harvard on the French Revolution. It was taught by a particularly distinguished professor, Crane Brinton.

Brinton, who died in 1968, was rumored never to have handed out a grade lower than B+. His course was nicknamed “Brunch With Brinton.” When his test for the course included the question “Identify Robespierre,” one student, legend has it, wrote: “A rare French table wine.” Professor Brinton is said to have given him half credit. 

Three generations later, in any event, a new report at Harvard finds that grade inflation has reached alarming levels. Many undergraduate students “do not prioritize their courses and some view extensive extracurricular commitments as a more fulfilling, meaningful, and useful allocation of their time,” according to Harvard’s Classroom Social Compact Committee.

To say that faculty aren’t happy with this trend is an understatement. “Most faculty view student curricular disengagement with alarm,” the report says. The committee is proposing an amendment to the Harvard College Handbook spelling out a basic expectation of the students paying close to six figures for their education: “prioritize their coursework.”

Prompted by 30 listening sessions and 11 surveys of students, faculty, and alumni, the committee also recommends bolstering requirements for class attendance and standardizing grading scales to combat grade inflation that has run rampant in recent decades. 

Ivy League universities have long been accused of offering less demanding pathways in their curriculum, earning the reputation of being “hard to get in, easy to stay in.”

Yet the issue can no longer be avoided. Harvard’s new report comes in the wake of recent challenges to the university’s promises of rigor and integrity, punctuated by accusations from prominent alumni like Bill Ackman of plagiarism, falling standards, and the triumph of diversity initiatives over merit in higher education. 

“Instructors at all ranks have definitely noticed a kind of dropping off in attendance and level of preparedness in recent years,” Harvard history professor Maya Jasanoff, who co-led the committee, tells the Sun. There are “rising expectations for grades, falling expectations for effort.”

A report in 2023 from Harvard College found that the percentage of A-range grades given to college students sorted in the 2020-21 academic year rose to 79 percent from 60 percent a decade earlier. The average grade point average in the 2020-21 year was 3.80, up from 3.41 in the 2002-03 academic year.

“Last semester was probably easier than a semester in high school, and that shouldn’t be the case, because it’s Harvard — it should be hard,” a Harvard freshman Eli Solomon, who went to a private high school in New Jersey, tells the Sun. He notes, however, that he’s taking humanities courses, with plans to major in Government. “I think if you’re in STEM, it’s a completely different story.”

Harvard is far from unique. A report in 2023 from Yale discloses a substantial increase in the percent of A’s and A-’s over the past decade, from 67.23 percent in 2010 to 78.97 percent in 2023. In the 2022-2023 academic year, the mean GPA at Yale was 3.7. In the 1998-99 school year, that number was just 3.42.

Universities have incentives to compress grades on the higher end of the scale. The Chronicle of Higher Education found in a 2023 study that as first-year grade point averages have increased across the country, so have graduation rates. Their explanation is that grade inflation allows more students to reach their minimum graduation requirements, bolstering student retention. That means schools can enjoy greater tuition revenue, higher national rankings, and a boost of reputational prestige from the grade inflation.

As for students, it’s no wonder that they increasingly rely on accomplishments outside the classroom to stand out to prospective employers amid intensifying competition for jobs in consulting, finance or tech. Grade inflation has prompted students to distinguish themselves through letters of recommendation and extracurriculars, serving as what Harvard’s Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh has called “shadow systems of distinction.” 

“People are definitely prioritizing their extracurriculars over academics, especially if you’re trying to go into industry right after college — meaning you’re not trying to go to grad school,” Mr. Solomon says. Students who aspire to work in finance, for example, vie for spots in student groups such as the Charles River Growth Fund, which proclaims on its website that “Our members have gone on to companies such as Apollo, Blackstone, Bridgewater, Goldman Sachs, KKR, McKinsey, and other leading firms.”

The issue of grade inflation is most rampant in the humanities. The 2023 report from Yale found that the subject of economics doles out the lowest portion of A’s and A-’s, at 52.39 percent, followed closely by Mathematics and Psychology. On the other end of the spectrum of subjects are the History of Science and History of Medicine, in which A’s and A-’s constitute 92.37 percent of grades given. At roughly 85 percent stands Education Studies and Ethnicity, Race, & Migration.

This disparity can in part be attributed to the varying nature of assignments. “Most humanities classes seem to assign readings, whereas the STEM classes are based on problem-sets,” a Harvard freshman majoring in Applied Mathematics, Samuel Colchamiro, tells the Sun. The former allows for a more subjective method of grading than the latter. 

More lenient grading in humanities courses could reflect an effort to maintain student interest in those courses. “If you’re in a field like History, you’ve been watching for the last 20 years as enrollments decline in the face of STEM,” Ms. Jasanoff says. “If your class is understood to be the one in which everyone gets a C, that’s not going to be a good sales strategy, so to speak.”

An advocate for conservative education reform, Adam Kissel, throws blame on the injection of politics into the classroom. “Most of Harvard’s core courses in the humanities and social sciences are narrow, biased, frivolous, activist, or unsuited to the goals of general education,” he tells the Sun. As examples, he cites a core curriculum class at Harvard called “Anime as Global Popular Culture” and a history and literature seminar titled “Zombies, Witchcraft, and Uncanny Science.” 

“It’s no wonder Harvard students go elsewhere than to class for personal and intellectual development,” Mr. Kissel says. He is co-authoring a forthcoming book, “Slacking,” which asserts that “Ivy League universities can no longer be trusted to produce well-educated students.” 

Meanwhile, Harvard’s report found that students fear graduate teaching fellows will inflect political bias while grading their work. To get around that, some students configure their work to align with their instructors’ perceived politics, or otherwise enroll in classes that reinforce their preexisting opinions.

Yet at least at Harvard, the tide might be turning. The onslaught of national scrutiny of the Cambridge campus and other elite universities over the past year and a half has accelerated a movement to make academic excellence the priority in the classroom. 

Last spring, Harvard College moved to standardize grading across its general education program amid concerns that students treated some courses as Easy A’s, or what students refer to as “gems,” rather than genuine intellectual commitments. Then, in December, the college voted on a new rule that will make students who miss more than two weeks of class — even if opting to instead watch class recordings — be placed on involuntary leave beginning next year. Ms. Claybaugh said that “an education conducted over Zoom would not be worthy of the Harvard name.” 

Addressing concerns of teacher bias, the Classroom Social Compact Committee is urging the adoption of new rules to explicitly bar grading based on political beliefs. “Student speech, assignments, and exams can be evaluated by instructors as factually incorrect or poorly argued, for example — but a student’s status in a course, including their grades, will not be affected by their political or ethical point of view,” the proposed language reads.

As for Brinton, he graded his “gut” course mercifully out of deep concern for his students. “I’m proud of the fact that I rescued several people academically who didn’t deserve to go under,” he once explained to the Crimson. “My scholar’s conscience is clear.” Yet even Harvard’s most magnanimous professor demanded from his students an “unremitting pressure for intellectual precision,” the Crimson wrote.

Brinton showcased that rigor in his own work, which “furnished for his students a prime example of diligent historical scholarship presented in a graceful manner.” Even he might agree that A’s have become all too common today. “I think the humanities are pulling to the right a little bit now,” Mr. Solomon says, who serves on the board of the Harvard Republican Club and has felt “a vibe shift” on campus since President Trump was re-elected. “I think we’ll see grade deflation on the horizon.”