Harvard is worried about going soft. Specifically, about grade inflation, the name for giving ever higher marks to ever more students. According to an “Update on Grading and Workload” from the school’s office of undergraduate education, released last week to faculty and students, this trend has reached a catastrophic threshold. Twenty years ago, 25 percent of the grades given to Harvard undergrads were A’s. Now it’s more than 60 percent.

For all those students, though, the mere release of this document could be taken as its own catastrophe. “The whole entire day, I was crying,” one freshman told The Harvard Crimson. “It just felt soul-crushing.” One of her classmates warned that stricter standards would take a toll on students’ mental health—“I was looking forward to being fulfilled by my studies,” she said, “rather than being killed by them”—even as the report itself observed that deference to mental-health concerns has made the problem worse. A member of the men’s lacrosse team lamented that the findings failed to account for “how many hours we’re putting into our team, our bodies, and then also school.”

As a professor at another elite private university, who has been teaching undergraduates for more than 20 years, I have surely been guilty of inflating grades. I have also endured the confusing wrath of students who seem to think we professors are ruining their lives by awarding only 60 percent of each class with A’s. The spectacle unfolding at Harvard is more visible, but the condition that underlies it is widespread and chronic.

Read: The perverse consequences of the easy A

On the surface, grade inflation might seem simple to address: Just reestablish, in clear terms, that the baseline mark for showing up is not an A, but something lower; then give special credit only to the students who demonstrate their mastery and achievement. But it’s not so easy. Grade inflation has become a strange and wicked problem on campus—and it’s one without a single cause or an obvious solution.

If the culture of grading h