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Harvard faculty votes to make it harder for undergrads to earn A's 83%
5/20/2026, 11:41:35 PM
BS Summary: This video contains 14 faulty reasoning types, including Hindsight Bias, Framing Effect, and Fundamental Attribution Error, with Optimism Bias as the most egregious example at 8.4% saturation with 49 hits. Analysis detected 343 faulty-reasoning hits from 582 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 75.3% and a BS Rank of 83% (2,953 of 16,813 videos). This video is worse (more manipulative) than 82.40% of the video peer group.
In a new vote today, this is a super interesting story.
Have you heard about this? Harvard.
Harvard's going to limit how many A's a student can get.
They're going to cap the number of students who can actually get an A.
This is the result of a referendum, a vote there, to limit it to just the top 20% of students.
This is going to start so fall 2027, not this September, but next September.
You may be be like, "Halle, what? Of course.
Only the best students can get an A.
We all know how school works, right?"
Well, professors at Harvard say so-called grade inflation kind of got carried away there.
Look at this, Harvard student paper reporting like 60% of students got an A last year, up from about a quarter two decades ago.
Valerie Castro joins us now.
Um professors that you're hearing from seem to think that all of these A grades ended up kind of hurting the value of you know, of of the students who are graduating from Harvard.
There's a question mark on that given sort of where we are in this moment of like elite universities and the value that these that these degrees have.
Yeah, Halle, the push for this was the belief that if so many people are getting A's, it sort of watered down what it meant to get an A.
So, the faculty members that voted for this are essentially saying that this will help students in the long run it when it comes to prospective employers, when it comes to graduate schools looking at these student applications.
So, it means that a student who gets an A at Harvard has received, quote, "a mark of extraordinary distinction."
Uh that's from a statement from the grading subcommittee that pushed for this proposal.
The Dean of undergraduate education said in a statement, "This is a consequential vote.
I it will, I believe, strengthen the academic culture of Harvard.
It will also, I hope, encourage other institutions to confront similar questions with the same level of rigor and courage."
And Halle, you had the numbers up there just a while ago.
458 faculty voting members said yes to this policy, about 200 said no.
This policy will be in place for the next 3 years, and at that point for it to change, it would have to undergo this faculty legislative measure again.
Halle. So, the Dean there talked about encouraging other institutions potentially.
Are other schools going to do this? Is any of that in the water?
So, according to some reporting from the Boston Globe, Princeton actually had a similar policy in place for about a decade.
It expired in 2014, and some students there felt that this actually hurt them when it came to comparing their transcripts to those of students from other Ivy League institutions.
Uh the Harvard Crimson was reporting on a survey that was conducted uh of about 800 students earlier in the year by the undergraduate uh association.
Nearly 85% of students polled opposed this proposed cap.
So, Hallie, we'll have to see how this plays out if any other schools indeed follow suit.
Hallie Jackson, thank you very much for that. Appreciate it.
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