Editorial: Postponing the P/D/F

Allowing students the option of taking classes P/D/F is a valuable method of encouraging students to explore subjects with which they may be unfamiliar and thereby expand the scope of their Princeton education. Because of the policy, students can sign up for courses outside of their areas of expertise, knowing that they are insulated from severe damage to their GPA in case a course proves too difficult to handle.

Setting the deadline to elect the P/D/F option at the end of the fifth week of the semester, however, limits the policy’s effectiveness. A substantial number of courses do not provide students any feedback on the quality of their work before the seventh week of the semester, when they may receive grades on a midterm exam or paper. This means that, by the University deadline for changing grading options to P/D/F, many students simply do not have enough information about how well they are likely to do in a class to decide on a grading option. As a result, the P/D/F option often does not serve as a safety net for students who seek to challenge themselves by taking an unusual course but do not want to waste one of their P/D/F options.

Instead, many students choose to P/D/F a class early in the semester and thereby remove the incentive that grades usually provide to work hard and invest themselves in that class. Often, students taking a class P/D/F are less engaged with the course material than their classmates, leading some faculty members to stop offering the P/D/F option in their courses.

Extending the deadline to at least the seventh week of the semester would help alleviate this problem. If students could take into consideration their performance on the midterm when deciding what grading option to select for a particular course, then they would have an incentive to stay engaged throughout the first half of the semester, do their best on the midterm and then decide if a particular course is challenging enough that they wish to P/D/F it. This policy change, then, would both reduce the number of people who fail to invest themselves in classes they are taking P/D/F and enable students to make better, more informed choices about which classes to take P/D/F.

The USG’s proposed change would benefit the academic experience of Princeton students and increase the utility of the P/D/F to students and professors alike.

Nassau Hall should implement this proposal.