Sixty percent of grades awarded at Harvard are currently A’s, prompting the university to institute a cap limiting A grades to twenty percent of any given class. Neetu Arnold, education policy researcher at the Manhattan Institute, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to discuss why she believes that approach will not solve the underlying problem and to outline an alternative she has proposed: a second, inflation-adjusted GPA calculated alongside the traditional one.
Arnold said the data does not support the idea that today’s Harvard student is better prepared than a Harvard student of twenty years ago, and in some respects the opposite appears true. She cited reports of students entering top universities who struggle with full reading passages, and noted that professors have increasingly shifted toward grading based on attendance and classroom participation rather than demonstrated mastery of course material. She said Harvard’s flat cap on A grades is a blunt instrument that functions as a grading mandate, which tends to generate significant faculty resistance and gets universities stuck in the debating phase rather than producing actual reform.
Her alternative, which she has developed and termed the inflation-adjusted GPA, would add a second GPA figure to a student’s transcript calculated relative to the median grade in each class taken. She gave an illustrative example: a student who fills their schedule with classes known for lenient grading and earns straight A’s might show a traditional 4.0 GPA alongside an adjusted GPA of 2.7, with the gap between the two numbers signaling that the A’s earned do not necessarily reflect A-level mastery of difficult material. She said the system functions as a transparency measure rather than a grading mandate, since it does not require any professor to change how they grade. Instead, it creates an incentive structure: once students see that an easy class caps their adjusted GPA at a low ceiling regardless of the traditional grade received, high-achieving students will either avoid those classes or pressure professors to grade more rigorously, shifting grading culture through market-style incentives rather than top-down rules.
Proft pushed back by noting that the system still resembles a form of price control, comparing it to imposing artificial caps to manage inflation rather than addressing the underlying drivers. Arnold maintained that because the system does not mandate any specific grading curve and instead lets professors choose whether to adjust their standards in response to the incentive, it differs meaningfully from a hard mandate like Harvard’s flat twenty percent cap.
On the deeper question of whether grades retain any real meaning given documented declines in student preparation, Proft cited a University of California Berkeley math professor, Mina Aganagic, who said she has had to begin reviewing basic algebra including the fundamental concept of what an equals sign represents in an equation in order for students to follow her coursework, and who has now joined calls to reinstate the SAT as an admissions requirement given its track record as a predictive indicator. He also cited Berkeley history faculty who described cutting weekly reading assignments from one hundred pages to thirty-five, and reducing course reading lists from seven complete books to a handful of excerpts from seven books, with one professor warning that further reductions would raise serious questions about whether history as a discipline can continue to be meaningfully taught at the undergraduate level.
Arnold said this points to a separate but related problem rooted in admissions standards rather than grading policy alone. She said universities need to ensure they are admitting students who actually meet college readiness benchmarks, and that addressing grading transparency through mechanisms like the inflation-adjusted GPA and addressing admissions standards need to happen in parallel. The goal, she said, is restoring the basic principle that a grade should mean something specific and verifiable, rather than functioning as a credential that obscures rather than reveals what a student has actually learned.