Today’s majority concedes that the grading policy is designed to reflect the quality of one individual’s work relative to the Princeton student body as a whole. There is no objective definition of an A; there is an arbitrary convention that the University creates. The key is to ensure that the convention is uniform and consistent, and a quantitative percentage is the most effective way of doing so.
The majority agrees that faculty and department chairs should attempt to achieve uniformity. Of course, the faculty and department chairs have already done so — they did pass grade deflation, after all — but the majority does not even suggest how uniformity might be achieved without a consistent percentage target. The only plausible extant alternative — simply instructing the faculty to grade “rigorously” but letting professors and departments decide what “rigor” means within each class — would be clearly ineffective. Different professors have different understandings of “rigor,” so grading standards would vary widely across courses. Furthermore, such a loose standard would be interpreted differently by different departments. Such inconsistency would create perverse incentives to select classes with generous professors, unjustly penalize students who take classes with ungenerous professors and make it difficult to compare the performance of students enrolled in different courses.
Grade deflation, by contrast, removes this vagueness by defining a uniform standard: A-level work is produced by the top 35 percent of the student body. This percentage should not be interpreted as a quota for any particular class. To the extent the majority is correct in alleging that some professors have interpreted it as such, resulting in deserving students being denied As and in detrimental competition within the classroom, we call upon the administration to honor its pledge to correct misunderstandings of the policy. We acknowledge that grade deflation may have some negative consequences, and we agree the administration must continue studying its effects. Nonetheless, we believe that ensuring uniformity is sufficiently important to justify those consequences. The majority should either suggest how uniformity might be achieved in the absence of grade deflation or explain why uniformity is inessential to the grading policy.
— Shivani Radhakrishnan ’11 and Jonathan Sarnoff ’ 12
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