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It’s been about two months since the Harvard University faculty voted to cap the number of A’s, and the only thing that is clear is that there is no consensus about grades or grade inflation in higher education today. While I welcome the debate about whether this was an act of courage or a misguided effort that will do more harm than good, it’s time to do more than simply predict its possible outcomes. If this cap isn’t the bold solution we need—and I don’t think it is—what other alternatives might we consider? Here’s mine: The real problem with grades isn’t the number of A’s given. It’s the A–F grading system itself.
With an estimated 99 percent of our nation’s 4,000 degree-granting colleges and universities using some version of the A–F grading scale, one might assume broad consensus about its effectiveness and reliability. That was certainly my assumption when I first began grading student essays and assigning end-of-semester grades way back in 1982. I believed it was the best way of ensuring intellectual rigor. In fact, researchers and teachers alike have long identified its often-glaring weaknesses: how it favors easily recorded transcripts over meaningful feedback to students, how it often fails to differentiate between students who have made extraordinary progress and those who have made no progress at all, how it reinforces extrinsic rather than intrinsic motivation, and how it nurtures the very behaviors that limit deep learning, most notably perfectionism and fear of failure.
In more than 30 years of college teaching, I struggled to reconcile my assumption that grades were unavoidable with the realities of what I witnessed in my classroom. I tried various experiments with grades. I was inspired to allow more revisions of essays after a senior colleague shared that he allowed his students to retake exams, even multiple times. “Pat,” he explained, “I just want them to understand linguistics. I don’t care how many tries it takes.” I also created more opportunities for students to drop poor performances and increased the amount of ungraded work they did. Most of these experiments were at least partially successful, but none offered the solution I was really looking for.
Ironically, it was an experience completely outside the classroom that finally convinced me to break up with grades entirely. What changed? For the first time in my life, I started working with an athletic coach, and it was there in the gym that I experienced deep learning in an environment built on continuous feedback, individualized coaching, process and consistency, and intrinsic motivation—factors that I now know have been validated by voluminous research on excellence in human performance of all types. And as any athlete knows, this embracing of process and consistency and even failure isn’t a rejection of high standards. Quite the opposite. It’s a rejection of simplistic and artificial measures of excellence. As I soon discovered, there’s no gaming the system when facing a heavy deadlift.
While we in higher education continue to rely on an A–F grading scale that ignores everything researchers have learned about excellence in human performance of all types, entire sectors of our culture have moved well beyond such an outdated method. Business leaders, for example, would never dream of evaluating employees by assigning one of five letters. On the contrary, best practices for evaluating—and nurturing—excellence in the business world now focus on continuous qualitative feedback and individualized coaching.
And the business world’s increasing rejection of our fiercely held grade point averages reflects the fundamental failures of the A–F grading scale. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, use of GPA for screening applicants among employers has fallen from 73 percent in 2019 to 42 percent in 2025. Our A–F grading scale isn’t just a disservice to students; it’s also failing employers.
It wasn’t until I had the pleasure of serving as president of New College of Florida—at the time one of the handful of colleges that used narrative evaluations rather than grades—that I truly understood the benefits to students and employers alike of leaving behind the A–F grading scale. Unlike the A–F system, which creates incentives for students to perform up to the level of an A but not further, there was no upper limit on what students and faculty could aspire to at New College.
Without either this artificial ceiling or the risk of damaging their GPA, I saw students take intellectual risks far more often than I had witnessed at my previous institution: an art student who dived deeply into economics; a first-year student choosing (with faculty approval) an advanced course that was, perhaps, just a bit beyond their reach; seniors whose final capstone projects were as ambitious as any of the countless master’s theses I had evaluated. I also spoke with alumni—including business leaders with wildly successful start-ups—who credited New College’s lack of grades with their ability to embrace the entrepreneur’s willingness to fail.
And here’s what I didn’t see at New College: any student ever ask a professor how they could turn their B-plus into an A-minus. Without grades, the focus was always on the quality of the student’s work and their willingness to discover how good—or great—their work could be.
Was New College’s narrative evaluation system perfect? Of course not. Like any system, there was some unevenness in how thorough the narrative evaluations were, and it created labor-intensive (but not insurmountable) challenges when students were applying for certain jobs and fellowships. But it reminded me of a central fact about grades that higher education has sadly forgotten: Grading isn’t just a method of sorting students. Whatever our system is, it expresses what we believe about learning and human performance. By telling our students that we can assess their work with five letters of the alphabet, we tell them how little we believe in their potential. If we truly want to address the decades-long problems with higher education’s grading system, we need to be a lot bolder than simply reducing the number of A’s we award. Surely in this age of education reform, we can aim higher than that.
