What is a grade?

"There's been a lot of talk about grade inflation lately."

How many times have we heard this? How many times has this sentence or a similar one appeared in The Daily Princetonian? How many unsuccessful efforts have there been in recent years to curtail grade inflation without a consensus on whether grade inflation even exists?

In a community that's supposedly devoted to pursuing truth of all kinds, we spend a great deal of time focusing on grade inflation. Yet, as a community of scholars, grades shouldn't be all that important if they are simply a way of establishing an order among students. They should be assigned in whatever manner is deemed fair but then not mentioned or considered further. Here, we have turned the study of grades — how they should be distributed and who should receive which ones — into a discipline and — what's more — an obsession.

We'll never reach a conclusion, though, because no one really knows what grade inflation is. As a community we don't even have a consensus about what grades are. We know the letters, the system, the fact that an A is on the whole preferable to a C, but will any two people here at Princeton give you the same definition of what a grade is?

In reality an A can mean a few things: You're really smart, you're a hard worker or you're lucky. If people simply have to meet one of the criteria, chances are that everyone will get lucky, and isn't it great that they'll all get As?

But what does this mean? Say Joe got an A in math. Is Joe a mathematical genius? Did Joe do all his problem sets in a timely manner and earn better-than-average grades on class examinations? Did everyone in Joe's class get an A?

The last question seems to be the crux of the issue in grade inflation. We don't think everyone should get an A, or at least a pretty large element of the University community doesn't think so. Yet, what is an A? How can anyone be sure that the whole class shouldn't get an A when no one has ever really articulated what an A is?

But why, as a scholarly community, do we assign grades, anyway? Do they have any relevance to the intellect? Do they do anything to enhance our learning or structure our community? On top of that, think about what the existence of grades less than an A implies. Suppose that an A in a course implies that the student who earned the grade mastered all the material in the class. This means that most of the students (assuming there isn't massive "grade inflation" leading to everyone getting As) don't know all the material. Shouldn't our responsibility as a community of scholars be to make sure students learn all the material? Learning should be a journey, but if one step isn't completed correctly, a student shouldn't move on to another segment. Yet, by awarding a grade less than an A, we recognize that he or she is doing just that.

If you do recognize that grades don't serve any scholarly purpose, then they are only a compromise with the real word: Graduate school admissions committees and investment banks think that whoever got the higher grade in philosophy classes would be the best employee or student. We make distinctions about students in one sphere that are inevitably translated to a completely irrelevant one. Thus we facilitate the perpetuation of untrue, illogical methods, which is the last thing we should do as students and followers of truth.

In other words, don't complain about grade inflation until you can pretty well explain what a grade should be. Aileen Ann Nielsen is from Upper Black Eddy, Penn. She can be reached at anielsen@princeton.edu.