The Problem with 4.0 GPAs + Teachers that Give Them
Consider this the graduation edition issue.
If didn’t hear about The Day I Almost Stepped on a Pigeon, no worries, I bring you stories relevant to those graduating high school or a university…
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A student in front of you signed up for art class despite a lack of talent and nothing guiding her except an appreciation of aesthetics. Thirty years later she remembers the professor leaning over a charcoal sketch of an onion with scraggly roots and saying, I believe those roots. They’ve got rootyness. She cannot remember what grade she got. That’s because what she remember is the beautiful images and strange interpretations and museums she made a note to hit when financially flush.
That memory belongs to Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene, who spoke of it last week in an Atlantic article arguing that his university lost the conditions that make those moments possible (link).
66% of Harvard grades are now flat A’s.
84% are A’s or A-minuses. In 2025, the prize for top GPA produced a 55-way tie.
Greene serves on the committee that wants to cap A’s at roughly 33% across undergraduate courses. Before you troll him, hear the argument:
Grade inflation is about more than numbers. Putting a perfect GPA in reach of so many students perversely deters them from taking classes that could threaten it. It is as if students start college with a shiny new car and hope to go four years without a scratch. Who would dare go off-road? If educators want to revive academic risk-taking, engagement, and inquisitiveness on college campuses, then we should liberate our students from the tyranny of the impeccable transcript.
Greene is right AND he is missing the bigger fish.
Because this is about money inflation. The kid who cannot afford college arrives on scholarship, and the scholarship comes shackled to a GPA, which means the philosophy elective she has been dreaming about since orientation reveals itself, somewhere around week two of registration, as a luxury good she cannot afford. One B-minus and the aid package wobbles like a Jenga tower somebody just sneezed on.
I had the opposite problem and gift. My advisor at Cornell suggested I take a class on race and racism, years before anti-racism became a phrase people shouted about on cable television, and I was terrified to speak in that room. I sat in the back, listening to classmates describe experiences I only read about, and I learned more in a semester than most of my prior schooling combined (on sociology). The transcript shows lackluster participation. The transcript is correct while failing to capture the influence it had on me.
Friends of mine, harder working and smarter, passed on classes like that one because they could not risk grade slippage. They were the first in their families to go to college, the scholarship was the bridge to their wealthy future, and the bridge had a weight limit measured in tenths of a grade point. Greene wants Harvard students liberated from the tyranny of the impeccable transcript. Fine. Now do the kid at the state school whose tuition gets revoked at a 3.49!
What the science says about kids seeking perfect grades
When students orient toward performance goals (getting the A) rather than mastery goals (understanding the material, developing taste), intrinsic motivation empties out like a bathtub with the drain pulled. A recent study on what scholars call self-objectification in education shows that students dominated by performance goals perceive themselves as instruments, tools for producing a number on a page that someone else will sort them by (that godforsaken AI algorithm taking the place of a company’s HR officer). The college student spends six hours memorizing for an algebra exam she finds boring without ever once asking whether the subject is interesting, because the question is tangential to the grade maximization problem.
William Perry, a Harvard developmental psychologist, quotes a student, “I cannot afford to get interested in this course because I have to get a good grade.” That sentence is 50 years old. The problem is an enduring one.
A textbook tragedy of the commons
Greene frames this as a problem of student psychology, which is to say loss aversion, risk avoidance, and an unwillingness to scratch shiny new Tesla cars. Any economist worth her tenure case will tell you the optimal policy is a tax on A’s.
Look at the incentive structure professors are operating inside. Departments and administrators lean heavily on student evaluations when making decisions about hiring, retention, and tenure, which means junior faculty figure out within their first semester that the professor who grades honestly gets evaluations that read like Yelp reviews of a restaurant that gave somebody food poisoning, while the professor who hands out A’s like Halloween candy gets called inspiring, transformational, and life-changing. Multiply this dynamic across every department in every university and what you get is a slow, distributed surrender to be an unearned A grade Pez Dispenser on demand. Hard to push for academic rigor (or even basic fairness) when you are the only one doing so.
This is what a race to the bottom looks like in a societal structure. Nobody sat down and decided to lower the standard. Everyone responded rationally to the gradient in front of them that suggested to point down.
A plea for each of the people making this worse
There are several villains in this story, and I am refusing the temptation to pick one and pin everything on him. Each of you gets a blurb.
To the parent who asks about the GPA before asking about the class content: You are training your child to be a transcript with a person attached, and that child will graduate technically successful albeit hollow. They know you care more about how they look publicly than your claim that foremost you want them to be happy.
To the dean who weighs student evaluations more heavily than what students learn when determining professor pay raises : You built the incentive structure that produces the grades you keep complaining about in your annual report, and the junior faculty you hired last year are responding by making the university worse. If you want rigor, stop punishing the professors who deliver it.
To the scholarship office that locks aid to a 3.5 GPA: You are asking the poorest students on your campus to make the safest course selections available to them, which guarantees they graduate with the narrowest education in their graduating class, and you are calling this arrangement meritocracy when it is the opposite in every meaningful sense.
To the student treating college like a four year exercise in damage control: The class you avoid because it might lower your GPA is the class you might still remember 20 years later and use. The A you are protecting will appear on a job application that an AI algorithm will scan for before ignoring follow-up emails. You are better off investing in an X factor that separates you from the pack. Grades no longer offer differntiation. Go off-road as the Robert Frost poem asks of you…
To my colleagues, and me, who pad grades to keep evaluations friendly: We are stealing from our students. They came to us to find out what they could do, and we are telling them, falsely, that what they did was excellent, and they will discover the truth in their real jobs soon when they get criticized fairly for sloppy crappy [INSERT WHATEVER IT IS THEY DO FOR A LIVING]. Better they discover it now, in our classrooms, with us still in the room to help them improve.
What a B+ plus gets you
I tell my students this on the first day of Psychology 417…Never receiving criticism is harmful as it prevents you from being the type of trainee for what you do after graduation. It is what happens to the team that never loses a game during a soft regular season schedule, walks into the playoffs, and discovers in the first half that their skills and habits are ill-suited for the task.
A B-plus on a transcript is often an indication that you went somewhere unfamiliar and explored something outwardly and thus learned inwardly. Employers are starting to figure this out, which is why a Harvard law-school dean now describes the Harvard transcript as “almost useless.”
When everyone is excellent, nobody is.
When everyone is creative, nobody is.
Greene wants to liberate students from the tyranny of the impeccable transcript, and I want to go further. Tax the A. Fund the scholarship that rewards exploration. Stop using student evaluations as a weapon against professors trying to teach critical thinking. Tell your kid that the B+ from the hard professor is worth more than the A from the easy one, and mean it (and do not penalize them).
Take the class that intrigues you even if it leads to the less than stellar grade.
Keep getting issues at
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Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.