#克观国际##nyt# Enough Duke students attain a near-perfect or perfect cumulative G.P.A. of 4.0 that last May, seniors needed at least a 3.947 to land in the top 20 to 25 percent of their class in the university’s college of arts and sciences and graduate cum laude (“with honors”) or higher. (At Duke, as at most schools, an A is worth 4.0; an A–, 3.7; a B+, 3.3.) Assuming a Duke student took a common allotment of 32 courses over four years, the student could afford only two B+ grades if the other 30 were A’s and only five A– grades if the other 27 were A’s.

Duke isn’t an outlier. According to a May article by Sarah Rivas in The Yale Daily News, Yale College students needed at least a 3.91 G.P.A. to graduate with some form of Latin honors (cum laude, magna cum laude, summa cum laude), which distinguished the top 30 percent of the class. The article also noted that a 2023 report by a Yale economics professor showed that more than 75 percent of the grades routinely given to Yale College students were either A or A–.

Harvard’s cornucopia of A’s prompted a recent vote by its faculty to limit the number of A’s in a given course to 20 percent of the students, with an allowance of as many as four additional A’s. That’s not so strict: In a seminar of, say, 15 students, nearly half the class — or seven students — could still get A’s, and the other eight could still receive grades of A–, for which there’s no limit. But in a lecture course of 100, only 24 students could get an A.