A failing grade for the P/D/F policy

According to the Undergraduate Announcement, "the intent of the pass/D/fail option is to encourage exploration and experimentation in curricular areas in which the student may have had little or no previous experience." In short, the option serves as sort a golden parachute for students who might decide to sky-dive above completely unknown academic territory.

Yet, a few of the policy's features significantly weaken the usefulness of this option.

First, the Undergraduate Announcement points out that "any pass/D/fail election that is rescinded between the end of the fifth and ninth weeks of the term counts toward the total budget of four courses." The folly of this aspect of the plan is twofold.

For starters, students who take challenging or adventurous courses using the P/D/F option only to receive A's on the midterm should not then be penalized by having to forfeit the opportunity to reuse their P/D/F later. If the engineer takes a class on Henry James and then receives a good grade, why shouldn't she be able to reap the rewards of her risk without retribution? In punishing any student who rescinds a P/D/F option by also counting it as one of four P/D/F courses, the administration is actually discouraging the same academic risk-taking the policy is supposed to encourage.

Second, it is bizarre that students must decide to rescind the P/D/F option by the ninth week of class. The same logic as before applies - if a student is successful on the final and receives an A in the class, why not allow the student to reap the rewards of risk-taking and hard work? Students should be allowed to rescind their P/D/F at any time before the beginning of the next semester without it counting against their overall four-P/D/F quota.

In part, the policy is designed to prevent students from simply using the P/D/F option to sleep through the course. The administration seems to have fixated so deeply on this concern, however, that it ended up devising a policy that encourages the type of behavior that it sought to discourage. By prohibiting students from rescinding their P/D/F option after the ninth week, they encourage students not to study for the final. After all, if a student were to do well, it would not matter.

Moreover, why institute the "four times only" rule anyway? I suppose the rule of four is, in and of itself, not necessarily a bad policy. Certainly, it forces students to act judiciously and prohibits them from simply passing through Princeton without allowing faculty members a good whack at them first.

There are, however, some downsides to this route. Most notably, it limits the number of times that a student might dare to venture outside his or her comfort zone to explore the far reaches of the academic galaxy. For an administration intent on pushing students to explore less popular majors, this seems a bit of a low number. Take me, the dreaded undecided freshman, for example. Suppose I decide to try an anthropology course to test the subject as a potential major and by week three I decide that it is not my cup of tea. The P/D/F option could serve as a useful escape hatch - yet the rule of four unnecessarily limits the number of times I can safely explore the academic world.

My major quibble, however, is not so much that the P/D/F quota is too low, so much as that any number is unnecessary. Princeton students are notoriously career-oriented and the vast majority of us recognize the realities of the real world - we know that no prospective employer or graduate school admissions officer will look highly on a P grade point average. Why not simply let students be as adventurous as they wish, knowing that their own concerns about the future will keep them in check? This system seems to have worked with success at Brown.

I am well aware that I am not the first student to criticize the P/D/F policy; for many years now there seems to have been a consensus that it is not really fulfilling its purpose. It's now time for the USG to make clear to the administration that this policy is not serving the student body. Let's hope that when Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel's Committee on the Course of Study meets this semester to revise the P/D/F policy, they finally devise one that meets the needs of the undergraduate community.

Adam Bradlow is a freshman in Wilson College from Potomac, Md. He can be reached at abradlow@princeton.edu.