The Students Are Wrong. And That's Okay.
What the Harvard Crimson's student complaints about the grade cap actually reveal — and what the policy will do for student wellbeing that its opponents cannot see.
By Mark Lee · Raising Exceptional / Founder, IvyZen · 20+ years · 1,000+ students placed at top universities</span
The Harvard Crimson published a piece this week by staff writers Sebastian Connolly and Summer Rose reporting student reaction to the faculty's decision to cap A grades at 20% per course. Students warned the policy will fuel competition, narrow course selection, and disadvantage students from less-resourced backgrounds. Top Tier Admissions
I want to engage with these arguments seriously. Not because they are persuasive — they are not — but because they reveal something important about how students in high-achieving environments have learned to think about grades, standards, and their own education. And that learned thinking is itself part of the problem the cap is trying to solve.
Let me take each argument in turn.
The Competition Argument
Stephen Hall-Nunez, an incoming Harvard student, worried the cap could erode Harvard's collaborative STEM culture — that everybody was remarkably willing to help each other out, and that if you're competing for a limited number of A's, that might change. Top Tier Admissions
This is not an unreasonable concern. Princeton experimented with grade deflation in the early 2000s and eventually abandoned it, partly because of exactly the competitive dynamics Hall-Nunez describes. I take the concern seriously.
What I cannot take seriously is the implicit assumption underneath it — that the collaborative culture currently on display at Harvard requires inflation to survive. A culture of cooperation that only functions when the cost of cooperation is zero is not really a culture of cooperation. It is the absence of competition because competition was never necessary. When six in ten grades are A's, helping your classmate costs you nothing. Cooperation is easy when nothing is at stake.
Whether students at Harvard can maintain genuine intellectual community under conditions of genuine standards is an interesting question. Assuming they cannot is a significant underestimate of the people they are.
The Course Selection Argument
Dayana Rangel, an incoming freshman, said the cap would influence her course selection by possibly making her reconsider taking harder classes. Riley Cullinan added that the cap would discourage people from taking electives in fields they aren't already good at — which kind of undermines the whole idea of a liberal arts education. Top Tier Admissions
There is something real here. A student who avoids unfamiliar subjects because the grading environment is more demanding is a student whose intellectual life is being driven by GPA calculation. That would be unfortunate.
But notice what the concern reveals. If the primary filter through which a student decides what to study is the likelihood of receiving a top grade, the liberal arts education is already undermined — not by the cap, but by the student's existing relationship to learning. The cap did not create that relationship. It is making it more visible, more consequential, and therefore more uncomfortable to maintain.
The student who takes courses only in subjects where she is already excellent is not pursuing a liberal arts education. She is pursuing a credential. Harvard's cap does not prevent intellectual exploration. It makes intellectual exploration cost something. Which is precisely what it has always been supposed to cost, and what the inflation era quietly made unnecessary.
The Social Justice Argument — And Why It Is Its Own Injustice
This is where I need to slow down. Because this argument is being made sincerely. And because it is, sincerely or not, the most intellectually dishonest argument in the entire debate — and the one most likely to cause real damage if it goes unchallenged.
The claim, as stated, is that the grade cap will disadvantage students from less-resourced backgrounds. The implicit logic is that students who come from public schools, from first-generation college families, from lower-income households, require the protection of an inflated grading system to compete.
Read that logic carefully. It is saying that students from less-resourced backgrounds cannot meet genuine academic standards. It is saying that without the cushion of inflated grades, these students will fall behind. It is saying that the appropriate response to educational inequality is not to address the inequality — not better schools, better preparation, better support — but to lower the standard so that the gap between the prepared and the underprepared is concealed rather than closed.
This is not a social justice argument. It is an argument that produces social injustice while wearing social justice language. And the distinction matters enormously.
A study presented at Harvard's own Graduate School of Education in February 2026 by economist Jeffrey Denning of the University of Texas found that grade inflation is actually harming students — leading not only to worse academic outcomes but also reducing their employment prospects and future earnings. For a typical high school class, the researchers estimated grade inflation can reduce the group's future earnings by about $213,000 — roughly $150 a year for each letter grade quietly inflated. BrilliantfutureccScienceDirect
Who are the students most harmed by that earnings reduction? Not the students whose family wealth insulates them from the labor market consequences of a degraded credential. Not the students with extensive alumni networks and family connections that substitute for institutional credentialing when the credential proves hollow. The students most harmed by grade inflation's long-term economic damage are the ones for whom the credential is most economically essential — first-generation students, low-income students, the students the social justice argument claims to be defending.
There is a further and more damaging mechanism. A 2026 working paper from the Becker Friedman Institute found that parents place significantly more weight on grades than standardized test scores. When grades are high but test scores are low, parents do not invest in additional academic support — the high grade crowds out the response the low test score would have otherwise triggered. Pathivy
Think about what this means in practice. The student from a less-resourced background who receives an inflated A is being told, by that grade, that she is performing at a level she may not actually have reached. Her parents, trusting the signal, do not seek additional support. The gap between her preparation and the preparation of her more-resourced peers — a gap that honest grading would have made visible and addressable — is concealed. She arrives at the next stage of education or the labor market with a credential that overstates her preparation, without the foundational skills she needed and was never told she lacked.
Grade inflation did not protect her. It delayed the reckoning while removing the opportunity to address the underlying gap. The students who can absorb that delayed reckoning — who have family resources, professional networks, and economic cushions that make credential inflation survivable — are not the students from less-resourced backgrounds. They are the students who least need the protection the social justice argument claims to offer.
I want to say this as directly as I can. The argument that Harvard's grade cap disadvantages poor students is the argument that poor students need to be protected from honest information about where they stand. I cannot think of a more condescending position available in this debate. And I cannot think of one more reliably guaranteed to produce, over time, the inequality it claims to oppose.
The Slippery Slope Nobody Is Discussing
Jonathan Haidt has argued, across The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation, that institutions responsible for young people's development have made a series of decisions over the past two decades that prioritized comfort over genuine challenge — and that each decision made the next one more necessary. Students raised in protected environments become less capable of tolerating genuine difficulty and therefore require more protection. The protection produces the fragility. The fragility justifies more protection. The cycle accelerates.
Harvard's grade cap is an attempt to interrupt this cycle at the institutional level. The students opposing it are, without fully realizing it, arguing for its continuation.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported in 2024 that the average reading score in 12th grade was ten points lower than in 1992. Only 35% of students were considered prepared for college-level reading. Math scores also declined. Meanwhile, grades in English rose from 47% A's in 2010 to 56% in 2022. The EDU Ledger
Preparation going down. Grades going up. The signal and the thing it is supposed to signal moving in opposite directions for fifteen years. This is not a Harvard problem. It is a systemic problem that runs from the kindergarten classroom through the graduate school, and it is most damaging at precisely the junctures where honest information matters most — where a student needs to know whether they are prepared for the next level before they attempt it.
The gaps between the lowest and highest achieving students have widened significantly in both math and reading between 2005 and 2024. The EDU Ledger
This is the inequality the social justice argument does not address. Not the inequality between students competing for a limited number of A grades inside a Harvard seminar. The inequality between students who are genuinely prepared for the academic environment they are entering and students who have been protected from the knowledge that they are not. Grade inflation produced the first kind of inequality by making high grades universally available. It did nothing about the second kind — the kind that actually determines life outcomes.
A Harvard A that means something is worth more to a first-generation student than a Harvard A that means nothing. Because the first-generation student cannot substitute family networks for the credential when the credential proves hollow. Only one side of this debate is actually making the pro-equity argument. It is the side the students are opposing.
What the Students Cannot See Yet: The Psychological Case for the Cap
The students opposing this policy argue, in various ways, that lower grades will be bad for their wellbeing. That the cap will increase stress. That the stakes of every course will become uncomfortably high.
They are wrong. And understanding why they are wrong is the most important thing in this entire conversation.
When Harvard's initial grade inflation report was released in November, one freshman called it soul-crushing. She said she was crying all day, skipping classes, sobbing in bed, because she felt like she tried so hard in her classes and her grades weren't even the best. College Transitions
Sit with this for a moment. This is a student at Harvard — admitted from roughly 57,000 applicants, in the top fraction of a percent of students in the country — who is crying in bed because her grades, in a system where 60% of grades are A's, are not the best. She is not failing. She is not struggling in any meaningful academic sense. She is suffering because the system she is operating in has made a grade that is genuinely excellent feel like a disappointment.
This is the psychological consequence of grade inflation that is entirely absent from the student protest movement. And it is the opposite of the consequence they are worried about.
When you inflate grades — when you make A's the default rather than the distinction — you do not make students feel better about their performance. You raise the floor of what acceptable feels like until no achievable outcome is genuinely satisfying. The anxiety does not decrease when standards fall. It migrates. From the anxiety of possibly failing to the anxiety of possibly not being the best in a system where almost everyone is succeeding. The perfectionist's worst nightmare is not a system with high standards. It is a system with no legible standard at all — a system where you can work very hard and receive an excellent grade and still feel, with some justification, that it tells you nothing about where you actually stand.
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's Self-Determination Theory identifie`s competence as one of three fundamental psychological needs. Not the performance of competence. Genuine competence — the felt sense of effectiveness that comes from meeting real challenges through real effort. This distinction is not semantic. It is the difference between a student who knows what she knows and a student who has learned to perform knowing without the underlying architecture of genuine understanding.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has added youth in high-achieving schools to their list of at-risk groups — alongside youth living in poverty, recent immigrants, and children with incarcerated parents. Students in high-achieving schools have shown elevated rates of anxiety and depression, related in part to academic pressures for high performance, competition, and school climate. nih
This is a remarkable finding and it is almost never cited in discussions of grade inflation. The students most at risk for anxiety and depression are not the ones in under-resourced schools where standards are low. They are the students in high-achieving schools where standards are simultaneously high in rhetoric and low in practice — where the pressure to perform is maximal and the informational content of the performance is minimal. This is the psychological condition that grade inflation produces. It is not a side effect. It is the predictable consequence of a system that asks students to care enormously about outcomes that mean progressively less.
Ned Johnson, co-author of The Self-Driven Child, has documented this pattern across tens of thousands of hours of direct work with high-performing students. Even high-performing kids arrive acutely stressed and lacking motivation. Many complain they have no control over their lives. Some stumble in high school or hit college and unravel. The students who unravel are not the ones who faced genuine standards and fell short. They are the ones who were scaffolded through environments where genuine standards were absent — who arrived at a moment of genuine evaluation without the psychological infrastructure that genuine challenge builds. aol
The freshman crying in bed over her grades is suffering not because Harvard's cap has arrived. She is suffering because she arrived at Harvard without the relationship with genuine challenge that would have made the normal difficulty of an elite education psychologically manageable. She is the product of a system — in her high school, in her tutoring, in the culture surrounding her application — that protected her from difficulty at the precise developmental moments when engaging with difficulty would have built the resilience she now lacks.
Haidt's core argument in The Anxious Generation is that the generation now entering university was systematically deprived, during childhood and adolescence, of the unsupervised, genuinely risky, genuinely challenging experiences through which previous generations developed the psychological tools for adult life. Grade inflation is the academic version of that deprivation — the removal of genuine challenge from the one environment specifically designed to provide it, in the name of student wellbeing, producing the precise wellbeing outcomes it was intended to prevent.
Harvard's grade cap will not immediately fix this. The students currently enrolled were prepared in the pre-cap environment. They bring with them the psychological expectations of a system in which a grade was supposed to tell them they were excellent and instead told them only that they had completed the work. Adjusting those expectations will be uncomfortable. Some of that discomfort will be misattributed to the cap rather than recognized as the symptom of the inflated system the cap is replacing.
But the students who arrive at Harvard in 2030 — prepared by families and schools that have understood what the cap means and adjusted accordingly, who have encountered genuine standards early enough to develop a genuine relationship with challenge — those students will be different. Not smarter. Not more diligent. Psychologically more capable of doing what Harvard is supposed to require. Which is to say: genuinely capable of meeting a standard that means something, and of feeling, in the meeting of it, what genuine academic achievement actually feels like from the inside.
Stricter graders tend to be better at raising students' test scores in math, reading, and other academic subjects. The student who has been genuinely graded has not just a better credential. She has a better relationship with her own competence. She knows what she knows. She has the experience of meeting a genuine standard through her own effort — which is the only experience that produces the felt sense of mastery that psychological wellbeing requires and that no amount of inflated grading can substitute for. Brilliantfuturecc
The student opposing the cap because she fears it will increase her stress is asking the wrong question. The question is not whether the cap will be uncomfortable. It will be, in the short term, for exactly the students who most need what it is designed to produce. The question is what kind of discomfort it will be. The productive discomfort of genuine challenge that builds something real. Or the hollow discomfort of performing for a standard that has no genuine content and therefore cannot be genuinely met.
The freshman crying in bed over her A-minus was experiencing the second kind.
Harvard's faculty voted 458 to 201 to give their students a chance to experience the first kind instead.
That was the right vote. And in ten years, when the students currently opposing it have had time to live inside a system where their achievements mean something — where an A tells them, and their employers, and their graduate schools, something real about what they have actually done — many of them will know it was the right vote.
The ones who don't will be the ones who are still, somehow, not quite satisfied with the grade.
Raising Exceptional is a newsletter for parents of high-achieving students — about the psychology underneath the performance.
© Raising Exceptional · IvyZen · 20+ years · 1,000+ students placed at top universities · Seoul
Commentary-Raising Exceptional | Analysis
The Students Are Wrong. And That's Okay.
What the Harvard Crimson's student complaints about the grade cap actually reveal — and what the policy will do for student wellbeing that its opponents cannot see.
By Mark Lee · Raising Exceptional / Founder, IvyZen · 20+ years · 1,000+ students placed at top universities</span
The Harvard Crimson published a piece this week by staff writers Sebastian Connolly and Summer Rose reporting student reaction to the faculty's decision to cap A grades at 20% per course. Students warned the policy will fuel competition, narrow course selection, and disadvantage students from less-resourced backgrounds. Top Tier Admissions
I want to engage with these arguments seriously. Not because they are persuasive — they are not — but because they reveal something important about how students in high-achieving environments have learned to think about grades, standards, and their own education. And that learned thinking is itself part of the problem the cap is trying to solve.
Let me take each argument in turn.
The Competition Argument
Stephen Hall-Nunez, an incoming Harvard student, worried the cap could erode Harvard's collaborative STEM culture — that everybody was remarkably willing to help each other out, and that if you're competing for a limited number of A's, that might change. Top Tier Admissions
This is not an unreasonable concern. Princeton experimented with grade deflation in the early 2000s and eventually abandoned it, partly because of exactly the competitive dynamics Hall-Nunez describes. I take the concern seriously.
What I cannot take seriously is the implicit assumption underneath it — that the collaborative culture currently on display at Harvard requires inflation to survive. A culture of cooperation that only functions when the cost of cooperation is zero is not really a culture of cooperation. It is the absence of competition because competition was never necessary. When six in ten grades are A's, helping your classmate costs you nothing. Cooperation is easy when nothing is at stake.
Whether students at Harvard can maintain genuine intellectual community under conditions of genuine standards is an interesting question. Assuming they cannot is a significant underestimate of the people they are.
The Course Selection Argument
Dayana Rangel, an incoming freshman, said the cap would influence her course selection by possibly making her reconsider taking harder classes. Riley Cullinan added that the cap would discourage people from taking electives in fields they aren't already good at — which kind of undermines the whole idea of a liberal arts education. Top Tier Admissions
There is something real here. A student who avoids unfamiliar subjects because the grading environment is more demanding is a student whose intellectual life is being driven by GPA calculation. That would be unfortunate.
But notice what the concern reveals. If the primary filter through which a student decides what to study is the likelihood of receiving a top grade, the liberal arts education is already undermined — not by the cap, but by the student's existing relationship to learning. The cap did not create that relationship. It is making it more visible, more consequential, and therefore more uncomfortable to maintain.
The student who takes courses only in subjects where she is already excellent is not pursuing a liberal arts education. She is pursuing a credential. Harvard's cap does not prevent intellectual exploration. It makes intellectual exploration cost something. Which is precisely what it has always been supposed to cost, and what the inflation era quietly made unnecessary.
The Social Justice Argument — And Why It Is Its Own Injustice
This is where I need to slow down. Because this argument is being made sincerely. And because it is, sincerely or not, the most intellectually dishonest argument in the entire debate — and the one most likely to cause real damage if it goes unchallenged.
The claim, as stated, is that the grade cap will disadvantage students from less-resourced backgrounds. The implicit logic is that students who come from public schools, from first-generation college families, from lower-income households, require the protection of an inflated grading system to compete.
Read that logic carefully. It is saying that students from less-resourced backgrounds cannot meet genuine academic standards. It is saying that without the cushion of inflated grades, these students will fall behind. It is saying that the appropriate response to educational inequality is not to address the inequality — not better schools, better preparation, better support — but to lower the standard so that the gap between the prepared and the underprepared is concealed rather than closed.
This is not a social justice argument. It is an argument that produces social injustice while wearing social justice language. And the distinction matters enormously.
A study presented at Harvard's own Graduate School of Education in February 2026 by economist Jeffrey Denning of the University of Texas found that grade inflation is actually harming students — leading not only to worse academic outcomes but also reducing their employment prospects and future earnings. For a typical high school class, the researchers estimated grade inflation can reduce the group's future earnings by about $213,000 — roughly $150 a year for each letter grade quietly inflated. BrilliantfutureccScienceDirect
Who are the students most harmed by that earnings reduction? Not the students whose family wealth insulates them from the labor market consequences of a degraded credential. Not the students with extensive alumni networks and family connections that substitute for institutional credentialing when the credential proves hollow. The students most harmed by grade inflation's long-term economic damage are the ones for whom the credential is most economically essential — first-generation students, low-income students, the students the social justice argument claims to be defending.
There is a further and more damaging mechanism. A 2026 working paper from the Becker Friedman Institute found that parents place significantly more weight on grades than standardized test scores. When grades are high but test scores are low, parents do not invest in additional academic support — the high grade crowds out the response the low test score would have otherwise triggered. Pathivy
Think about what this means in practice. The student from a less-resourced background who receives an inflated A is being told, by that grade, that she is performing at a level she may not actually have reached. Her parents, trusting the signal, do not seek additional support. The gap between her preparation and the preparation of her more-resourced peers — a gap that honest grading would have made visible and addressable — is concealed. She arrives at the next stage of education or the labor market with a credential that overstates her preparation, without the foundational skills she needed and was never told she lacked.
Grade inflation did not protect her. It delayed the reckoning while removing the opportunity to address the underlying gap. The students who can absorb that delayed reckoning — who have family resources, professional networks, and economic cushions that make credential inflation survivable — are not the students from less-resourced backgrounds. They are the students who least need the protection the social justice argument claims to offer.
I want to say this as directly as I can. The argument that Harvard's grade cap disadvantages poor students is the argument that poor students need to be protected from honest information about where they stand. I cannot think of a more condescending position available in this debate. And I cannot think of one more reliably guaranteed to produce, over time, the inequality it claims to oppose.
The Slippery Slope Nobody Is Discussing
Jonathan Haidt has argued, across The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation, that institutions responsible for young people's development have made a series of decisions over the past two decades that prioritized comfort over genuine challenge — and that each decision made the next one more necessary. Students raised in protected environments become less capable of tolerating genuine difficulty and therefore require more protection. The protection produces the fragility. The fragility justifies more protection. The cycle accelerates.
Harvard's grade cap is an attempt to interrupt this cycle at the institutional level. The students opposing it are, without fully realizing it, arguing for its continuation.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported in 2024 that the average reading score in 12th grade was ten points lower than in 1992. Only 35% of students were considered prepared for college-level reading. Math scores also declined. Meanwhile, grades in English rose from 47% A's in 2010 to 56% in 2022. The EDU Ledger
Preparation going down. Grades going up. The signal and the thing it is supposed to signal moving in opposite directions for fifteen years. This is not a Harvard problem. It is a systemic problem that runs from the kindergarten classroom through the graduate school, and it is most damaging at precisely the junctures where honest information matters most — where a student needs to know whether they are prepared for the next level before they attempt it.
The gaps between the lowest and highest achieving students have widened significantly in both math and reading between 2005 and 2024. The EDU Ledger
This is the inequality the social justice argument does not address. Not the inequality between students competing for a limited number of A grades inside a Harvard seminar. The inequality between students who are genuinely prepared for the academic environment they are entering and students who have been protected from the knowledge that they are not. Grade inflation produced the first kind of inequality by making high grades universally available. It did nothing about the second kind — the kind that actually determines life outcomes.
A Harvard A that means something is worth more to a first-generation student than a Harvard A that means nothing. Because the first-generation student cannot substitute family networks for the credential when the credential proves hollow. Only one side of this debate is actually making the pro-equity argument. It is the side the students are opposing.
What the Students Cannot See Yet: The Psychological Case for the Cap
The students opposing this policy argue, in various ways, that lower grades will be bad for their wellbeing. That the cap will increase stress. That the stakes of every course will become uncomfortably high.
They are wrong. And understanding why they are wrong is the most important thing in this entire conversation.
When Harvard's initial grade inflation report was released in November, one freshman called it soul-crushing. She said she was crying all day, skipping classes, sobbing in bed, because she felt like she tried so hard in her classes and her grades weren't even the best. College Transitions
Sit with this for a moment. This is a student at Harvard — admitted from roughly 57,000 applicants, in the top fraction of a percent of students in the country — who is crying in bed because her grades, in a system where 60% of grades are A's, are not the best. She is not failing. She is not struggling in any meaningful academic sense. She is suffering because the system she is operating in has made a grade that is genuinely excellent feel like a disappointment.
This is the psychological consequence of grade inflation that is entirely absent from the student protest movement. And it is the opposite of the consequence they are worried about.
When you inflate grades — when you make A's the default rather than the distinction — you do not make students feel better about their performance. You raise the floor of what acceptable feels like until no achievable outcome is genuinely satisfying. The anxiety does not decrease when standards fall. It migrates. From the anxiety of possibly failing to the anxiety of possibly not being the best in a system where almost everyone is succeeding. The perfectionist's worst nightmare is not a system with high standards. It is a system with no legible standard at all — a system where you can work very hard and receive an excellent grade and still feel, with some justification, that it tells you nothing about where you actually stand.
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's Self-Determination Theory identifie`s competence as one of three fundamental psychological needs. Not the performance of competence. Genuine competence — the felt sense of effectiveness that comes from meeting real challenges through real effort. This distinction is not semantic. It is the difference between a student who knows what she knows and a student who has learned to perform knowing without the underlying architecture of genuine understanding.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has added youth in high-achieving schools to their list of at-risk groups — alongside youth living in poverty, recent immigrants, and children with incarcerated parents. Students in high-achieving schools have shown elevated rates of anxiety and depression, related in part to academic pressures for high performance, competition, and school climate. nih
This is a remarkable finding and it is almost never cited in discussions of grade inflation. The students most at risk for anxiety and depression are not the ones in under-resourced schools where standards are low. They are the students in high-achieving schools where standards are simultaneously high in rhetoric and low in practice — where the pressure to perform is maximal and the informational content of the performance is minimal. This is the psychological condition that grade inflation produces. It is not a side effect. It is the predictable consequence of a system that asks students to care enormously about outcomes that mean progressively less.
Ned Johnson, co-author of The Self-Driven Child, has documented this pattern across tens of thousands of hours of direct work with high-performing students. Even high-performing kids arrive acutely stressed and lacking motivation. Many complain they have no control over their lives. Some stumble in high school or hit college and unravel. The students who unravel are not the ones who faced genuine standards and fell short. They are the ones who were scaffolded through environments where genuine standards were absent — who arrived at a moment of genuine evaluation without the psychological infrastructure that genuine challenge builds. aol
The freshman crying in bed over her grades is suffering not because Harvard's cap has arrived. She is suffering because she arrived at Harvard without the relationship with genuine challenge that would have made the normal difficulty of an elite education psychologically manageable. She is the product of a system — in her high school, in her tutoring, in the culture surrounding her application — that protected her from difficulty at the precise developmental moments when engaging with difficulty would have built the resilience she now lacks.
Haidt's core argument in The Anxious Generation is that the generation now entering university was systematically deprived, during childhood and adolescence, of the unsupervised, genuinely risky, genuinely challenging experiences through which previous generations developed the psychological tools for adult life. Grade inflation is the academic version of that deprivation — the removal of genuine challenge from the one environment specifically designed to provide it, in the name of student wellbeing, producing the precise wellbeing outcomes it was intended to prevent.
Harvard's grade cap will not immediately fix this. The students currently enrolled were prepared in the pre-cap environment. They bring with them the psychological expectations of a system in which a grade was supposed to tell them they were excellent and instead told them only that they had completed the work. Adjusting those expectations will be uncomfortable. Some of that discomfort will be misattributed to the cap rather than recognized as the symptom of the inflated system the cap is replacing.
But the students who arrive at Harvard in 2030 — prepared by families and schools that have understood what the cap means and adjusted accordingly, who have encountered genuine standards early enough to develop a genuine relationship with challenge — those students will be different. Not smarter. Not more diligent. Psychologically more capable of doing what Harvard is supposed to require. Which is to say: genuinely capable of meeting a standard that means something, and of feeling, in the meeting of it, what genuine academic achievement actually feels like from the inside.
Stricter graders tend to be better at raising students' test scores in math, reading, and other academic subjects. The student who has been genuinely graded has not just a better credential. She has a better relationship with her own competence. She knows what she knows. She has the experience of meeting a genuine standard through her own effort — which is the only experience that produces the felt sense of mastery that psychological wellbeing requires and that no amount of inflated grading can substitute for. Brilliantfuturecc
The student opposing the cap because she fears it will increase her stress is asking the wrong question. The question is not whether the cap will be uncomfortable. It will be, in the short term, for exactly the students who most need what it is designed to produce. The question is what kind of discomfort it will be. The productive discomfort of genuine challenge that builds something real. Or the hollow discomfort of performing for a standard that has no genuine content and therefore cannot be genuinely met.
The freshman crying in bed over her A-minus was experiencing the second kind.
Harvard's faculty voted 458 to 201 to give their students a chance to experience the first kind instead.
That was the right vote. And in ten years, when the students currently opposing it have had time to live inside a system where their achievements mean something — where an A tells them, and their employers, and their graduate schools, something real about what they have actually done — many of them will know it was the right vote.
The ones who don't will be the ones who are still, somehow, not quite satisfied with the grade.
Raising Exceptional is a newsletter for parents of high-achieving students — about the psychology underneath the performance.
© Raising Exceptional · IvyZen · 20+ years · 1,000+ students placed at top universities · Seoul
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