Grade Inflation
Princeton, the place where I spent my formative college years, recently instituted a unversity-wide policy whereby professors can award no more than 35% of A- grades or above. As much as I hate to admit it, I think this is a good and long-overdue measure to curb grade inflation. One professor, John Fleming disagreed in a recent newspaper article, saying:
"Everybody tells us that we take nothing but geniuses into the freshman class. It seems odd to me that these geniuses would get here and suddenly only a third of them would be A students."
The logic of this argument seems clearly flawed to me. It's like saying that because everyone at the Olympics is a superb athlete, all of the competitors should get gold medals. The point of having a grading system is not to rank students according to some national standard. It's to compare their work to that of their fellow students. I know first-hand that while most Princeton students are very smart, there is a fairly wide range of ability level and a very wide range of effort level within the student body. I know that getting a B or (gasp) C can be traumatic for an "organization kid"; but unless grades actually reflect differences, it's just not worth having an evaluative system at all.
Speaking of which, Yale Law School's famed system of honors/pass/low pass/fail is pretty much akin to the system at places like Princeton pre-grade infation. It effectively has become a system of "A's" and "non A's", since Low Passes and Fails are all but extinct. Because that system has been the main source of my relatively stress-free life over the past two years, I'm going to be completely hypocritical and say I hope Yale doesn't follow Princeton's lead (and my advice).
"Everybody tells us that we take nothing but geniuses into the freshman class. It seems odd to me that these geniuses would get here and suddenly only a third of them would be A students."
The logic of this argument seems clearly flawed to me. It's like saying that because everyone at the Olympics is a superb athlete, all of the competitors should get gold medals. The point of having a grading system is not to rank students according to some national standard. It's to compare their work to that of their fellow students. I know first-hand that while most Princeton students are very smart, there is a fairly wide range of ability level and a very wide range of effort level within the student body. I know that getting a B or (gasp) C can be traumatic for an "organization kid"; but unless grades actually reflect differences, it's just not worth having an evaluative system at all.
Speaking of which, Yale Law School's famed system of honors/pass/low pass/fail is pretty much akin to the system at places like Princeton pre-grade infation. It effectively has become a system of "A's" and "non A's", since Low Passes and Fails are all but extinct. Because that system has been the main source of my relatively stress-free life over the past two years, I'm going to be completely hypocritical and say I hope Yale doesn't follow Princeton's lead (and my advice).
posted by From on High at 11:41 PM
3 Comments:
Lindsey makes a good point; however, it seems that almost all of the grade inflation problems at Princeton were occurring in humanities/social science courses. Professors in the sciences typically ahdere to more of a bell curve system and are usually successful at designing tests that yield a fairly wide distribution of scores. Nonetheless, I agree that in cases where more than 35% of students get all or almost all of the questions right, then A's should not be limited to a set quota. At the same time, perhaps that would be an indication of a teacher whose tests are too easy.
Yeah people who took science courses always got screwed, no matter what university they attended. My friend and I have nearly identicle LSATS, identicle grades in the philosophy department and I assuming we both received glowing recommendations. But she also had a science major, where as my second major was another humanities subject. So despite her two degrees, in of which she had a near 4.0, she still got screwed terms of law school admissions because of a comparatively lower gpa in the science classes.
What I don't understand is why admissions offices don't take that into consideration...
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