Harvard Magazine. A report from the frontlines. Well worth reading.Last October, the FAS released a report that quantified the change: solid A’s made up 24 percent of final grades in the College in 2005, 40.3 percent in 2015, and 60.2 percent by the spring of 2025. (Eliminating non-letter grades like pass-fail from the calculation makes the problem even more stark: nearly two-thirds of all letter grades are currently A’s.)
One enterprising freshman, seeking assurance that his A was nigh, looked me up online and realized I was a resident tutor living in one of the Quad houses—a good distance from the freshman housing in the Yard. On the night before the final version of his paper was due, he knocked on my bedroom door well after midnight, covered in sweat. He had hoofed it all the way from the Square, draft in hand, hoping to convince me to check it for remaining deficiencies before he turned it in for real nine hours later.
In the 1970s, almost 30 percent of Harvard College first-year students planned to concentrate in the humanities. By 2022, according to the Crimson’s freshman survey, that number had fallen to 7 percent.