Letters to the Editor

Internet has not made students smarter

I write with regard to Eric Harkleroad '03's extended essay on the illusion of grade inflation in the Princeton community.

Now perhaps I am simply an old codger with an overly cheery view of his days in college. After all, the computer on which I composed my papers more than a decade ago was much slower than the Dell in front of me at the moment. Perhaps its speed and power have left me confused. And it could be that the dusty smell of the old volumes in the library stacks I roamed in the late 1980s has finally gone to my head. If so, please forgive the babblings of an old man.

Harkleroad is a regular Harold Hill, championing the rise of the golden age of the Internet as the explanation for the rise of grades over the past few decades. Students, he argues, are simply getting smarter. Now I do not question that the Internet is an important tool. I myself find it very useful for shopping and checking baseball scores. But rather than improving the quality of students' work, I (and many of my colleagues) believe that the Internet has had a negative effect on such work. For many students "research" has come to mean a couple of hours surfing on the Internet. Information may be more accessible on the net, but that accessibility comes largely at the expense of depth of knowledge. The contention that grades have risen because advances in technology have made students more savvy is incomplete at best. I offer a competing explanation.

As Harkleroad reminds us, inflation can occur when the intrinsic value that people place on goods (here grades) increase. Even when I was a college student — back in the days when Paula Abdul and Milli Vanilli topped the charts — our obsession with grades was a vocation. This obsession, I think, is the driving force behind the increase in grades over the last few decades. My professors bemoaned the fact that students seemed more interested in getting good grades than they did in learning how to think. Judging from my discussion with colleagues at other schools, if anything, this trend has worsened over the last 10 years.

As with a great many things, I could be wrong about this demand-side theory of grade inflation. Perhaps someday Harkleroad will engage in a similar intellectual dispute with a younger student who can devote even more time than he to the serious tasks of thinking and learning. Until that day, though, I would bet that the bull market on As and A+s will continue. Adam J. Berinsky Assistant Professor of Politics