On May 20, the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Science voted 458 to 201 to cap A grades at 20% per course starting in fall 2027. With this vote, the faculty of America’s oldest university admitted on record that their credentials have suffered massive devaluation. 66% percent of all grades awarded at Harvard in the 2024-2025 academic year were straight A’s, 84% fell in the A-range, and the average undergraduate GPA was a staggering 3.8.
Stanford’s numbers are more elusive. The university administration does not publish a centralized, open-access database of grade distributions, leaving the burden of transparency entirely to the discretion of individual departments.
This fragmented system serves an institutional purpose. In some quantitative sequences, like introductory math and computer science, professors routinely publish detailed exam averages and grade distribution graphs which allow students to compare their performance to the class. But in many humanities departments and small seminars, distributions are an administrative secret, leaving students with nothing but a final mark on Axess. This opacity exists because a uniform, institution-wide look at grade data would force Stanford to confront grade inflation it would rather keep plausibly deniable.
Almost everyone reading this benefits from inflation in the short term, including myself. The argument for grade reform at Stanford is an argument against the immediate self-interest of essentially every Stanford undergraduate. Yet the Faculty Senate exists to protect the long-term meaning of a Stanford degree, even at the expense of short-term self-interest from students currently earning it.
We can look to Princeton as a case study. From 2004 to 2014, Princeton attempted a 35% cap on A-range grades, flattening distributions and restoring a semblance of academic distinction. Yet, the faculty rescinded the policy in 2014. Critically, the ad hoc committee that reviewed it found no evidence the cap had measurably harmed graduate’s competitiveness for graduate school, professional school, fellowships or employment, which is a primary concern with the policy. The repeal rested almost entirely on psychological factors: survey data revealed a toxic spike in student anxiety, hyper-competitiveness and a feeling of being disadvantaged relative to comparable peers at other institutions.
This is why Stanford should move in tandem with Harvard. A single school that caps grades appears to be unilaterally disadvantaging their own students. When two of the country’s most prestigious programs cap grades together, that perception collapses among students, employers and graduate admissions. And once those two move, others are likely to follow, turning what looks like a penalty in isolation into the new benchmark for rigor.
When transcripts read like a uniform list of perfect accolades, they become white noise to graduate admissions committees and employers, forcing them to look past academic merit and rely on external proxies. This shift directly hurts equity. When grades are artificially flattened to all A’s, decision-makers default to unquantifiable factors swayed by family connections, expensive consultants and social capital. Under-resourced students rarely have access to these hidden backchannels. Restoring A-grade scarcity rescues our academic work from irrelevance, leveling the playing field by giving elite programs a meaningful, transparent metric centered strictly on classroom performance, not family wealth or connections.
The transition will, however, cause friction. Students playing catch-up with Stanford’s intense academic environment will find an uncompromising curve brutal at first, likely resulting in lower initial grades. That is a harsh reality, but a partial solution is to meet them with robust support, not to maintain a fraudulent system that patronizingly hides the preparation gap while leaving underlying inequalities completely untouched.
Philosophically, it makes sense that Stanford is institutionally against grade caps. We have long contrasted our culture against the sharp-elbowed, status-obsessed anxiety that often characterizes our Ivy League peers. A defense of the status quo is that our current grading system underpins the genuine, cross-disciplinary collaboration that defines the Farm. To introduce a hard cap, the argument goes, is to willingly infect Stanford with a zero-sum paranoia, trading our unique cultural sanity for the cold prestige of an artificial curve.
We can’t just wave this objection away. Princeton proved that capping grades increases student stress, and on a campus already struggling with student well-being, a policy that threatens to worsen mental health must be handled with immense gravity. A cap will absolutely cause more stress, and it risks eroding the collaborative warmth that makes Stanford a healthier place to learn than the infamous pressure-cookers of the East Coast.
However, the stress-free meritocracy reputation Stanford has built is not entirely true. Stanford already sorts its students aggressively: Phi Beta Kappa is restricted to a fixed percentage of the senior class, University Distinction is capped at the top 15% of graduates and many STEM courses are curved relative to peers. The competition is already here and cutoffs exist, but Stanford refuses to give students the transparency they need to navigate them.
In the status quo, we are forced to compete for fixed resources while blindfolded, never knowing our actual rank or how a given grade compares to the person sitting next to us in section. This opacity breeds a chronic, low-grade anxiety with no finish line, leaving a student who receives a B-plus to wonder whether that grade represents acceptable work or failure relative to their peers.
Transparent competition produces acute, bounded stress that a student can actually address. Knowing you are in the seventieth percentile of an organic chemistry class allows for rational decisions about effort allocation and post-grad expectations. A cap paired with published distributions replaces ambient paranoia with actionable information, and while the truth may be harder to digest for some, the unknown is far more corrosive.
An authentic normalization of grading requires a policy that cuts both ways. While grade inflation plagues the humanities and social sciences, the opposite is true in many STEM courses, where many STEM courses give out far fewer A grades than reasonable. The cap should actually function as a target. When implementing a cap, the university should simultaneously mandate that departments historically depressed by harsh, artificial curves elevate their allocation of top grades to meet that same standard. This would dismantle the internal double standard that punishes students for pursuing quantitative fields, ensuring equity across majors and preventing any single department from executing what is essentially a rogue academic purge.
A defensible Stanford policy should follow a deliberate roadmap that starts with immediate transparency, publicizing all course grade distributions on transcripts and then requiring the Faculty Senate to commission and publish a comprehensive study of current grade distributions before any cap is enacted so the final policy can be calibrated to Stanford-specific norms. Small seminars and independent resource courses must be exempted entirely since percentage caps in a ten-person class are statistically and practically nonsensical.
The window is open and Harvard has blinked. Stanford does not need instructions from Cambridge to protect the value of its own degree, but the faculty must decide whether the credentials we leave here with are worth defending.