As other Ivy Leagues rein in grade inflation, Penn is weighing whether it should

Efforts to curb grade inflation are gaining traction across the Ivy League. At Penn, the conversation is just getting started.

Harvard University faculty voted in May to cap A grades at roughly 20%, while other peer institutions have formed committees to examine the issue. While Penn administrators have identified grade inflation as an area of potential concern, the University has yet to announce an investigative body or outline a specific policy direction.

Penn President Larry Jameson described the issue as a “worthy” topic for faculty members to “discuss and assess” in an August interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian.

“I think it’s almost self-evident that if you take grade inflation to an extreme, it’s not particularly meaningful,” Jameson said at the time. “On the other hand, I don’t see the value in just creating an artificial construct when I want to assess students based upon their competency, and I can imagine a small, specialized class where the only students who have chosen to take it have extraordinary expertise.”

According to Jameson, the Provost’s Office has taken preliminary steps to assess its grading policies in collaboration with undergraduate deans. He clarified, however, that “there’s certainly no decision we’ve made at this point.”

A spokesperson for the Provost’s Office explained that their team has been “working with the four undergraduate Schools to assess whether any changes would help to advance our shared goal of continuing to support the success and wellbeing of Penn students.”

That process includes “hearing the perspectives of many members of the Penn community about grading policies,” the spokesperson wrote.

Jameson also acknowledged grade inflation in his October 2025 letter rejecting the White House’s preferential funding compact, which asked universities to “commit to grade integrity” among other priorities.

While Jameson emphasized his disagreement with many of the document’s points, he wrote that Penn shares “concerns about grade inflation” and could imagine “an opportunity to engage the higher education community to seek a broader solution.”

Nearly a year later, Penn has not made any formal announcements related to an institutional grading policy.

The Faculty Senate, which represents standing faculty across campus and can make policy recommendations to Penn’s administration, has not yet discussed the topic.

According to neurology professor and Faculty Senate Chair Roy Hamilton, there are several issues “currently competing” for the “time and attention” of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee. The fact that grade inflation has not yet hit its agenda, Hamilton added, “should not be interpreted as an implicit judgment about its importance.”

Political science professor Daniel Hopkins said grade inflation “has ostensibly been a problem for decades,” tracing back to the Vietnam War era. The trend has only intensified over time, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Professors, not just at Penn, were trying to be understanding of the wide range of situations that students found themselves in,” Hopkins said of teaching during the pandemic. “COVID-19 was the latest of a ratcheting up where it feels like grades essentially only go up.”

He added that the pressure grade inflation creates negatively impacts both faculty members and students. For him, one purpose of grades is to “signal to students where they’re relatively stronger or relatively weaker.”

“I think it makes it harder for professors to send clear, consistent signals about what kind of work is really high quality,” Hopkins said. “I worry a little bit that, at Penn, our de facto system of grading has defaulted to not entirely a pass/fail system, but just one where professors no longer can send the kind of broader range of signals about how a student is doing.”

A solution similar to Harvard’s grade cap “could work at Penn,” Hopkins argued.

History professor Brent Cebul said that “structural pressure” leads faculty members to inflate grades. Penn’s non-tenured faculty members depend on student course evaluations, which Cebul explained “often have a lot to do with how students feel they’re doing in a class.” He also noted how grading impacts enrollment, another metric considered in the review of a faculty member’s performance.

“It’s a very hard position, especially when you’re untenured or in a contingent position, and that is the majority of teachers in the College,” he said. “These are precisely the people who cannot afford to have angry student evaluations. They will lose their jobs, full stop.”

While Harvard is the only Ivy League school that has enacted grading reform, other universities are set to announce policy recommendations in the near future.

Yale University’s standing committee on Teaching, Learning, and Advising will report its recommendations for addressing grade inflation in November. Dartmouth College formed a committee to address grade inflation in May, which is slated to release a progress report in early 2027 and publish any final proposals by the end of the academic year.

A committee at Columbia University has considered decreasing the weight of A-pluses for grade point average to be the same as A’s. Penn already calculates A-pluses as a 4.0.

Substantial grade inflation discussions have been largely absent at Princeton University, Cornell University, and Brown University.

Princeton previously implemented a nonbinding grade limit, but later rescinded it.

Cornell discontinued including median grades on transcripts in 2023, a measure that had originally been intended to reduce grade inflation but may have instead perpetuated it, according to the school’s faculty. Brown President Christina Paxson said in March that she was not concerned about grade inflation.

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