Authored by Micaiah Bilger via The College Fix,
Two thirds of faculty vote to approve cap on A grades for undergrads...
Harvard University faculty gave an emphatic “yes” to capping A grades in a vote Wednesday amid concerns about grade inflation and academic rigor at the prestigious institution.
Approximately 70 percent voted to approve the 20-percent cap on As in undergraduate courses, The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, reports. Nearly 700 professors participated in the vote. The measure will go into effect in the fall of 2027.
Harvard psychology Professor Steven Pinker praised the decision in an X post Wednesday, calling it “a big step in combatting the grade inflation that has been dumbing down our courses, conveying the wrong message to students, and making universities a national laughingstock.”
Another professor, political scientist Max Abrams at Northeastern University noted the impact of the decision on other higher education institutions.
Harvard isn’t just some university. Many universities look to Harvard to inform their own decisions. I am strongly in favor of Harvard’s moves to reduce grade inflation. When everyone gets an A there is no signal. pic.twitter.com/Tpb4enuADA
— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) May 20, 2026Other scholars called for their Ivy League institutions to follow Harvard’s lead.
Along with limiting As, the faculty also approved a measure by a large majority “to use average percentile rankings, rather than GPA, to determine internal awards and honors,” according to The Crimson.
A third measure within the proposal did not pass. It would have allowed professors “to petition to opt out of the A cap” if the grading for their course is on an “unsatisfactory, satisfactory, and satisfactory-plus basis,” the report states:
When the proposal was first introduced in February, its architects pitched the A cap and percentile-ranking system as paired reforms: the ranking system would prevent students from avoiding larger or more difficult courses in search of better grades under the cap.
After pushback, the subcommittee separated the measures into distinct votes, delayed implementation by a year to fall 2027, and added a “satisfactory-plus” designation for courses that chose to opt out of the system.
In the weeks before the vote, some faculty also pushed for a more complicated alternative to the“20 percent plus four” formula that would have tightened limits in smaller courses. But that amendment failed to make it onto the final ballot after faculty favored the original formula in a preliminary poll.
All three proposals came from a Harvard faculty committee in response to a report that found 60 percent of all undergraduate grades are now As – a 35 percent increase compared to 20 years ago.
In a statement after the vote Wednesday, the committee said the change will help restore integrity to the institution.
“This matters for our students above all,” they stated. “A Harvard A grade will now tell them, as well as employers and graduate schools, something real about what a student has achieved. An A will once again be what Harvard’s guidelines have long said it is: a mark of extraordinary distinction.”
Despite widespread concerns about grade inflation, Harvard students overwhelmingly opposed the cap, American Council of Trustees and Alumni fellow Steve McGuire pointed out on X.
Now get rid of student course evaluations. pic.twitter.com/2xql1bW49U
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) May 20, 2026One petition launched by a freshman claimed that the grading reforms would be “racially harmful,” The College Fix reported in April.
Concerns about grade inflation have arisen at other institutions as well, including Yale and Columbia universities and Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Additionally, some professors say they are under pressure not to fail students.
Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 13:40Authored by Carl Henegan and Tom Jefferson via The Brownstone Institute,
There is a peculiar arithmetic that governs modern health reporting, one that has very little to do with actual risk. Hans Rosling captured it neatly during the 2009 swine flu episode, when he calculated a “news-to-death ratio” of 8,176-to-1. In other words, for every death attributed to swine flu, there were over eight thousand news stories. Tuberculosis, by contrast, received less than 0.1 news stories per death over the same period.
If that sounds absurd, it is, and yet very little has changed.
Take the current hantavirus scare. A cruise ship, the MV Hondius, sits off Cape Verde. There are 7 cases in total (2 confirmed, 5 suspected) and 3 deaths, including a Dutch couple and a German national. Passengers have been confined to their cabins while evacuations and disinfection efforts are organised. It is, undeniably, a dramatic story: a floating Petri dish, a whiff of quarantine, and a hint of the exotic.
In the past week alone, there have been at least 10 to 15 unique news stories, generating hundreds of articles. For a disease that, in normal times, struggles to attract even a single weekly mention, this represents a surge bordering on the hysterical.
And yet it is worth stepping back for a moment and asking, what are we actually looking at?
Hantavirus is a rare disease. In the United States, which diligently tracks such cases, there have been 890 laboratory-confirmed instances since 1993. In the UK, the situation is even less clear: from 2012 to early 2025, only 11 domestically acquired symptomatic cases have been recorded. Surprisingly, nine of these cases were not linked to cruise ships or exotic travel, but rather to a more mundane source—exposure to “pet fancy rats” or rodents bred as reptile feed.
This is not a pathogen ready to spread through the Home Counties. However, the rarity is not the issue; visibility is.
Diseases that afflict the poor, quietly and persistently, rarely command attention. Tuberculosis killed 1.23 million people globally in 2024. Over a million deaths every year, largely concentrated in less affluent parts of the world. It is one of the most lethal infectious diseases known to medicine, and yet it barely registers in the Western news cycle.
Why? Because TB is familiar, it is slow; It lacks narrative flair, and it does not trap well-heeled passengers in their cabins while helicopters circle overhead.
If you want coverage, you need something else entirely. You need novelty, uncertainty, and above all, proximity to affluence. A cruise ship outbreak ticks every box: a disease with a balcony suite.
This is the uncomfortable truth behind Rosling’s ratio: the media does not report risk, it reports drama. And drama requires context that audiences can imagine themselves in.
A rodent-borne virus in some remote rural setting barely registers. Put that very same virus aboard a cruise ship with buffet queues, balcony cabins, and a passenger list that looks uncomfortably like the readership, and suddenly it becomes headline news.
The result is a profound distortion of public perception. We are invited to worry about the improbable while ignoring the inevitable and reality. A handful of hantavirus cases generates dozens of headlines; a million tuberculosis deaths pass with barely a murmur.
If we were to apply Rosling’s lens to the present moment, the imbalance would be obvious. Three deaths linked to a suspected hantavirus cluster have produced hundreds of reports in a matter of days. Meanwhile, tuberculosis continues its relentless toll with scarcely a fraction of that attention.
The modern “news-to-death ratio” may not be precisely 8,176-to-1, but the underlying pattern remains intact.
The lesson here isn’t truly about hantavirus; instead, it’s about how we collectively determine what is significant.
Diseases associated with poverty—those that are endemic, predictable, and devastating—often fail to attract media attention because they don’t instill fear in the right audience or in the right way. No one is interested in the thousands of cholera deaths that are too remote, too ordinary, and lack the dramatic impact that draws interest. What commands attention are diseases that puncture our sense of safety, the kind that can slip past the gangway and make themselves at home on a cruise ship.
This post was written by two old geezers who live in a world where risk is misread, priorities are skewed, and the arithmetic of attention bears little resemblance to the arithmetic of death.
Republished from the authors’ Substack
Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 13:00