While other schools weigh grading reforms, Princeton remains silent

Earlier this year, Dean of the College Michael Gordin told The Daily Princetonian twice that there were no active discussions regarding changes to the current undergraduate grading policy. Yet, outside the Orange Bubble, conversations about grading reform at Princeton’s peer have become increasingly active.

Over the last two decades, conversations among institutions of higher education about grade inflation and deflation have accelerated. Many universities increased scrutiny of their practices in the wake of President Donald Trump’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, sent in October 2025 to multiple institutions of higher education. Point five of the compact explicitly critiqued universities about their handling of grades and required signatories of it to directly address grade inflation. While the Compact was eventually offered to institutions of higher education across the country, Princeton was not in the original cohort of universities offered participation. 

“Each grade reflects the quality, breadth, and depth of the student’s achievement. Signatories acknowledge that a grade must not be inflated, or deflated, for any non-academic reason, but only rigorously reflect the demonstrated mastery of a subject that the grade purports to represent,” the compact read.

While most universities declined the compact, it still helped launch a national discussion regarding how institutions of higher education approach grade inflation — a conversation from which Princeton has mostly been absent. 

Harvard and Yale launch conversation, while Princeton stays silent

In 2001, Harvard came under the national spotlight for a doubling in the fraction of A’s received by undergraduates — from 23 percent to 49 percent — in a 15 year period. In 2004, Princeton implemented a nonbinding cap on A-range grades in courses at 35 percent. In 2014, the policy was rescinded, and individual departments have been left since to define their own standards.

Harvard and Yale were at the forefront of recent conversations around changing their grading policies. This May, the faculty of Harvard College voted 458 to 201 to limit A grades in undergraduate courses to 20 percent of the class size, effective Fall 2027. This was the first part of a plan, proposed in February, that would create a new internal ranking system that uses an average percentile rank metric to determine honors and awards. 

This report followed discourse generated by a report released by Harvard Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh almost a year ago, which revealed that more than 60 percent of grades given to Harvard undergraduates were As. Twenty years ago, only one-fourth of grades at Harvard were A’s.  

Claybaugh, who took office at Harvard in 2018, has made tackling grade caps a cornerstone of her tenure over the past year and a half. In her initial report, she pointed to the failed attempts of other elite institutions to fix their grading cultures. Most recently, she told Harvard Peer Advising Fellows that there is an ongoing proposal to enforce the new cap on A grades by converting all of a course’s A’s to A-minuses if professors do not grade under their limit. 

In December, a report distributed to Princeton faculty announced that two-thirds of grades awarded during the 2024-2025 academic year were A-pluses, A’s, or A-minuses. At a faculty meeting following the release of the report, Gordin explained that this was the highest percentage of A-plus and A grades awarded in the past 20 years, while also affirming that grading was ultimately left to the discretion of individual departments. Since then, there has been no public conversation about grading policy at Princeton, even in the wake of Yale’s notorious report examining the problem of declining trust in higher education. 

Yale’s report, while focusing more broadly on institutional governance and culture in the wake of the Trump administration’s targeting of university funding and DEI programs, also discussed how grade inflation has negatively impacted Yale and other institutions. 

Requested by Yale President Maurie McInnis and composed by a committee of 10 Yale professors, the report explained that 10 percent of grades in Yale College were an A or A- in 1963; that number increased almost eight-fold by the 2022–23 academic year. Further, the report conceded that the average student at Yale receives an A.

Shortly after the release of the report, some Yale faculty publicly lauded the Harvard faculty vote to limit the number of A grades. 

Princeton faculty, discussing the Yale report, appeared to remain indifferent about the effect of grade inflation on Princeton’s overarching image. 

Peer universities confront grade inflation

Most of Princeton’s other peer institutions are having conversations about grade inflation. Dartmouth College, Columbia University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, have formally addressed grade inflation.  

Between the release of the Yale report and Harvard’s May vote, Dartmouth’s Committee on Organization and Policy for the School of Arts and Sciences created the Ad Hoc Committee on Grading Practices and Assessment. Plans for this ad hoc committee began back in February, when the Committee on Organization and Policy began asking faculty for their initial thoughts on a new grading committee. 

This new ad hoc committee will release its first progress report during a winter 2027 faculty meeting. The committee will also submit a final report to the faculty, including any proposals requiring a faculty vote, by the end of this academic year. 

Dartmouth includes the median grade for a class on its students’ transcripts. Additionally, GPA cutoffs for honors awarded at Dartmouth have risen in the past decade. For the 2025-26 academic year were 3.97 for summa cum laude, 3.92 for magna cum laude, and 3.83 for cum laude.

At the same time as Dartmouth’s creation of their new committee, Columbia’s Committee on Instruction, which governs its curriculum, proposed weighing an A-plus grade the same as an A grade, decreasing the A-plus point value from 4.33 to 4.0. This would effectively turn the A-plus into a holistic recognition of a students’ work. Princeton decreased the weight of the A+ from a 4.3 to 4.0 in 2000.

MIT’s Task Force on the Undergraduate Academic Program (TFUAP) has released their final report for a recommended general curriculum for the school, which was the result of two years of research and discussions. One aspect of their report was addressing the problem of grade inflation.

Unlike other schools, however, the TFUAP clearly expressed that they “have not seen evidence that standards [of student work] are falling.” The report proposed an “institute-wide policy” as one solution, without going into detail.

Others barely join the conversation 

The University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, Duke University, and Stanford University all join Princeton in not undertaking public initiatives to combat grade inflation; however, many of these schools or their professors have at least acknowledged the national conversation. 

Responding to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s letter to UPenn proposing Trump’s Compact for Excellence in Higher Education last October, UPenn President J. Larry Jameson, in declining the compact, wrote, “We share concerns about grade inflation and believe there may be an opportunity to engage the higher education community to seek a broader solution.” Less than two weeks later, Daniel Hopkins, a political science professor at UPenn, published a guest opinion in The Daily Pennsylvanian calling for grade deflation to more easily identify the students who excel. 

Frank Bruni, a public policy professor at Duke, wrote an editorial in the New York Times calling for a decrease in grade inflation. Mirroring much of what Hopkins wrote in his opinion, Bruni ruminated on the fear of getting bad course reviews — which may cause “professional grief,” as he calls it — if he gave out poor grades to his students, who come in person to see him and ask for better ones. 

“They’re smart, motivated, self-protective denizens of a higher-education system in which so many professors dole out so many A’s that even an A- is a setback, and a grade-point average of 3.8 instead of a 3.9 can mean rejection from law and medical schools,” Bruni wrote in his opinion. “They’re just trying to keep their most deeply felt ambitions alive, and a B+ is a dagger in hope’s heart. Do I really want to wield it? And be the assassin of their dreams?”

At Princeton, the faculty are still skeptical about what a solution to grade inflation actually is. 

“There are things that are negative about grade inflation, or grade compression … everybody has the same grades; employers don’t love that — it’s very hard to award prizes, it’s very hard to award honors,” Gordin told the ‘Prince’ in May. “Those things are true, but it’s not clear what a solution would be and whether the cost of a solution is worth it.” 

For Princeton, an official conversation has yet to be had.

Luke Grippo is a head News editor for the ‘Prince.’ He is from South Jersey, and typically covers the state of higher education, University affairs, and state politics. He can be reached at luke.grippo[at]dailyprincetonian.com.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.