He was a strong advocate of capping the proportion of Harvard students graduating with honors at 60 percent, a decision implemented in 2002 for the Class of 2005.

But since Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 released data in February indicating that A-range grades were rising again—up to 47.8 percent last year from 46.4 percent the previous year—Summers has been less vocal about confronting the issue.

“I wish it weren’t so,” Summers said at the time. “We need to think about what to do about this.”

In an interview last week, Summers said that despite his concern about grade inflation, the University is not considering a hard cap on grades and he would not support such a plan.

“I think, at least in a Harvard context, simple grade cap proposals run into the difficulty that sometimes courses are taught at two different levels, and it seems unfair for there to be the same grade distribution in the more accelerated and less accelerated versions of the course,” he said. “And what one wants to do is apply some overall pressure against grade inflation without the excessively rigid structure that a fixed curve for all courses provides.”

But Associate Dean of the College Jeffrey Wolcowitz wrote in e-mail yesterday that addressing grade inflation was not part of the mandate of the ongoing curricular review.

“Grade inflation was not taken up in the curricular review process, hence no recommendations appear in the report,” he said.

Gross wrote in an e-mail yesterday that he discussed the Princeton proposal and the issue of grade inflation at the last meeting of the Educational Policy Committee, the body that advises Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby on educational policy.

“There was no clear sense from the meeting of what we should do on grades, although a few faculty have spoken to me about it,” he wrote.

Kirby did not respond to repeated requests for comment yesterday.

In an interview on April 9, he said he would welcome any recommendations on how to reduce grade inflation.

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.