This freshman may also pick up some clues about grade deflation during his first semester. In addition to the brochure on the grading policy in his Frist mailbox, there are also the constant complaints from upperclassmen. With all of these signals, it's pretty easy to start blaming grade deflation for less-than-stellar grades. This freshman will soon wise up. Next time he takes a class, he may take stock after midterms. If it looks like the road to an A- is an uphill climb, he'll have no incentive to work extremely hard when he can work much less and get a B+. In other words, someone may not work to his full potential if he thinks that grade deflation will affect his chances of getting a desired grade.
This kind of thinking may seem self-defeating, but it actually makes sense to a rational student aware of the results of grade deflation. The current grading policy, in place for four years now, has been mulled over in these pages for just as long. By now, we all know that it's a battle between lofty administrative goals to raise standards and job seeking students. After all, we all get that brochure titled "Grading at Princeton," and it does address some student concerns while promoting the objective of holding students to "high and consistent standards."
While students can appreciate the administration's transparency, close examination of the grading brochure only indicates that there's abundant evidence that the number of A grades has gone down. It has decreased across many disciplines. The average GPA has also declined. At first, this all seems to suggest that grade deflation is achieving its intended purpose of reducing the number of high grades. There is, however, scant evidence that the total schema for grading has become more challenging. While the overall average GPA is lower, it's unclear whether this is because standards for every grade have risen or simply because As have been replaced with Bs, creating a new grading system where Bs are a default. It doesn't matter if there are fewer As if this only means that more people get Bs. Now, people who do A- work will get B-range grades as well as people who do B-range work.
Professor Elizabeth Bogan's ECO 101: Introduction to Macroeconomics class may be one case in point. While Bogan has not changed her aim that 50 percent of her students receive a B+ or above, the percentage of students taking ECO 101 receiving an A- fell from 16 percent from 1998-2004 to 14 percent from 2004-2008. Meanwhile, the number of B+s rose from 18.75 percent to 21 percent. But the percentage of students receiving grades below B- has remained the same. While I admire Bogan's policy for its consistency, I'm concerned about how this policy has interacted with the administration's grading policy. Grade deflation has not lowered the median grade, but instead has shifted some A- grades to B+s. Even though the spirit of the grade deflation policy is to hold students to higher standards, it still allows professors to hold their median grades at the same place.
We know how grade deflation has impacted A- grades. But more data is required to ascertain exactly how the grading policy has affected grades across the board. Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel explained to me in an e-mail, "We only distribute data with respect to the percentage of A grades." It's unclear whether data on the percentage of lower grades is collected and not distributed or whether it's simply not collected in the first place.
It wouldn't surprise me if data isn't collected since the administration has shown more dedication to merely lowering the percentage of As than to changing the entire grading system. This undermines the stated purpose of the grading policy, which is to hold students to a higher standard so that we may produce our highest-quality work.
There are other ways of attaining this objective. Instead of the administration saying that professors should hold students to higher standards by issuing guidelines, professors should really just hold students to higher standards. But if the current grading guidelines do nothing but lower the number of As, giving students incentive to do less than their best work, maybe it's time for the policy to be re-examined.
Cindy Hong is a Wilson School major from Princeton, N.J. She can be reached at cindyh@princeton.edu.
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