alt Hacker NewsThe framing that a 20% A cap distinguishes "extraordinary" from "merely strong" work is self-defeating. It measures performance relative to a single cohort, not against any absolute standard of mastery. If 40% of a class genuinely does exceptional work, 20% get mislabeled as mediocre. If it's a weak year and only 5% are truly exceptional, 15% get a free ride. The signal is still noise ... with artificial scarcity bolted on.
Actual grade meaning would require criterion-referenced assessment: define what mastery looks like, grade against that standard, and let the distribution fall where it may across years and cohorts. That's hard and unsexy, so instead we get an administrative quota that launders the appearance of rigor while the underlying problem, that Harvard's admissions process selects heavily for wealth and legacy, goes untouched.
Harvard A's will now tell employers that a learner beat ~80% of a nepotism-filtered, endowment-curated cohort in a single semester. That's a relative rank, not a measure of exceptional work.
I think comparison within a cohort is likely more valuable and more tractable than ranking between members of different cohorts and/or ranking between cohorts.
An employer is looking to screen two recent harvard grads by GPA, not really between a new grad and a 5/10 year ago grad. GPA may not actually be a predictive metric within a cohort, but it's measurable and capping the A grades likely offers more precision in comparison; even if that precision is not an indicator of anything useful.
I do agree that an absolute standard of mastery would also be nice... But the diploma is supposed to indicate acceptable mastery.