Issue 10 — Penn’s Culture of Optimizing for Easy Undermines Learning

Last week, The Daily Pennsylvanian published a piece titled “Five easy classes to take next semester.” It lists courses with average difficulty ratings below 1.5 out of 4, among the least challenging in the undergraduate course catalog. 

Although the list of classes is lighthearted, it reveals a deeper trend: students are optimizing their course load for ease, not learning.

Pursuit of academic excellence, one of Penn’s purported key values, requires students to seek out learning opportunities and strive to challenge themselves. As Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1745, “No gains without pains.” Difficult experiences are the ones that help students grow, not the effortless ones. 

Yet that principle fades away when students stop focusing on learning and instead hunt for an easy A. Changing this culture won’t happen overnight, but Penn’s administration should at least acknowledge and evaluate the problem as a first step.

Undergraduate culture at Penn is rife with pressure to earn only A grades. Across the Ivy League, the expectation of high grades couples with an ultra-competitive attitude to drive this pressure.

About 80% of grades awarded at Harvard College are As or A-s, compared to 25% in 2025, according to a report released by the school. At Yale, 82% of grades awarded in the 2021-2022 school year were in the A range. At Penn, in 2024, 87% of seniors self-reported that their overall college GPA was in this same range. 

The pressure to keep up with peers’ inflated GPAs is enormous. The feeling is especially potent at Penn, where 95% of seniors classify the undergraduate environment as moderately or very competitive.

This breeds an environment ripe for students to select for easy classes. Taking one “light” class isn’t the issue. The problem arises when the university’s culture prizes the hunt for As over the pursuit of learning, and education itself starts to lose its purpose.

As GPAs have skyrocketed across elite schools, so have the stakes for maintaining strong grades. Graduate school admissions and job applications expect these inflated ratings. 

For the Class of 2027, the median undergraduate GPA for the incoming class at every Tier 14 law school was 3.89 or above, including a 3.96 for Yale, 3.95 for Harvard, 3.94 for UChicago, and 3.93 for Penn Carey Law. The expectations are similar for medical school, with Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine’s median enrolled GPA at 3.97, Johns Hopkins’ at 3.94, and NYU Langone’s at a staggering 3.98.

Prospective employers add to the pressure. Top investment bank and consulting firm recruiting timelines begin during the first or second semester of sophomore year, often selecting their summer internship class, and effectively future hires, when students only have three semesters of grades. This condensed timeline encourages students to seek out GPA boosters, looking for classes that will pad their average and not monopolize the time they want to spend on recruiting.

Penn students acutely feel the pressure of managing their classes with other responsibilities. 65% of Penn graduating seniors report that balancing their academic, extracurricular, and personal commitments is moderately or very stressful. 

Selecting for minimum effort in classes may appear as a manageable way to squash this stress, but it undermines students’ educations and degrades the value of a Penn degree.

Consequences of this culture extend beyond Locust Walk. The value of a college degree, especially one from an elite university like Penn, is being questioned by the American public (as seen in the message sent to Penn alumni in today’s hack targeting the Graduate School of Education) and the federal government alike.

49% of American adults think that a four-year college degree is less important today than it was 20 years ago to earn a well-paying job. 23% have little or no confidence in our higher education system. 

The rise of AI only sharpens that skepticism, challenging what we teach and how. The growth of AI threatens to upend both the education system itself and the job market for which it is preparing students.

The federal government shares this distrust. The Compact for Academic Excellence, which Penn declined to sign, flagged grade inflation, a problem even President Larry Jameson noted in his reply to the Department of Education. He wrote, “We share concerns about grade inflation and believe there may be an opportunity to engage the higher education community to seek a broader solution.”

Jameson’s acknowledgement is important. It signals that some leaders at Penn know that the problem runs deep, permeating formal grading practices and informal culture across the university.

Changing an institution’s culture is difficult, but it’s possible. Reform should start at the top. Similar to what we wrote recently, Penn’s leadership could build on Jameson’s statement by convening peer institutions to design practical reform. The coalition could attack the problem as a united front, focusing on grading transparency, normalized GPA reporting, or shared standards for academic rigor.

At Penn, initiatives designed to improve the university’s future, like Penn Forward, could work with the Undergraduate Assembly and other student groups, collaborating to shift norms on campus. This may include celebrating professors who reward intellectual risk taking and highlighting classes with uniquely thought provoking materials. 

Penn’s leadership needs to leverage the tools at its disposal to begin enacting change, upholding excellence, and living by Benjamin Franklin’s belief of “no gains without pains.” 

For Penn and American higher education to defend their value against skepticism, automation, and political scrutiny alike, they must reaffirm that challenge, not comfort, promotes excellence. 

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