Do grades at Princeton accurately reflect student performance?

Grade inflation, a perennial source of controversy on college campuses, made headlines again last year when The Boston Globe discovered that Harvard had awarded honors to 91 percent of seniors graduating in the class of 2001. Yale and Princeton were second and third in the Ivy League with 51 percent and 44 percent, respectively, The Globe reported at the time.

Although grade inflation continues to remain at least a perceptual problem, Princeton has taken steps over the years to combat grade inflation. The University distributes reports to faculty members about grading patterns and decided three years ago to assign an A+ grade the same weight as an A grade.

"I believe that grades do serve an allocation function," says economics lecturer Elizabeth Bogan. "Grades are a real signal and therefore ideally, one would like that system to be consistent across the different disciplines."

Elisa Cheung '05, an operations research and financial engineering major who took Bogan's ECO 102 last semester, said she was satisfied with the grade she received.

"I felt that the grading was pretty reasonable. [Bogan] made it pretty clear at the beginning how the grading system would be," Cheung said in an email.

The semester Cheung took the course, Bogan said 65 students received grades in the A range, 92 students were in the B range, and 22 students were in the C and D range. No students received the grade of F, Bogan said.

"Our department is very conscientious about not grade inflating, although you will still see some difference between 20 years ago and today," she explained.

She attributed the difference in grade distribution to the fact that more students are now going to graduate school.

"The problem is if graduate schools don't look carefully at the quality of education someone is actually getting."

"So if some departments grade more leniently than other departments," Bogan continued, "then students who major in the 'easier' departments look like they are relatively better students in the eyes of graduate admission people."

Operations research and financial engineering professor William Massey, who has had experience as a graduate admissions officer before he came to Princeton, explained that "for admission into graduate school, we broke the GPA down into smaller pieces. If the student was applying for a fellowship in sciences then we only looked at the grades in that major."

Dries Darius GS, also in operations research and financial engineering, said he believed Princeton students "are unwilling to accept lower grades" and the result which is grade inflation is "the student's fault."

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Darius also maintained that contrary to what is commonly thought, students are not smarter than their college peers twenty years ago, saying that SAT scores have not increased since then.

In the humanities, grading is more subjective, French professor Thomas Trezise explained. A.B. subjects are harder to grade because it is more difficult to differentiate a B+ paper from an A paper.

Cheung, the student who was in Bogan's class, echoed this feeling. "I feel as though the writing seminar I took in my freshman fall semester was graded more harshly than other classes I've taken at Princeton."

Engineering courses and social science courses, which are more specific and comprise an objective kind of material, make it easier to accurately grade students and also to differentiate between them by means of regular problem sets and quizzes.

Electrical engineering professor Vincent Poor teaches a course for both A.B. and B.S.E. students, ELE 391: "The Wireless Revolution" in addition to standard engineering courses.

"There is a distinction in my grading between those two kinds of courses," Poor explained. "In mainstream engineering courses the grades tend to spread out a bit more, you see more A+'s, but you also see more lower grades. But in my ELE 391 course, the grades tend to fall in a narrower range."

He attributes the difference to the nature of the material in those two types of courses.

With regards to the ELE 391 class, Poor said, "it is a very broad course and there are many different kinds of content and there are a lot of different ways in which a students can excel."

"It is harder to give an A+ but it is also harder to give a C-," Poor added.

Mathematics professor Jordan Ellenberg said that while grade inflation was a valid worry, there are several misconceptions about the problem.

It is wrong to think that if only 6 grades — A+ to B- — are now being used instead of 11 grades — A+ through F — then there is a loss in discriminatory power. Unless such claims are empirically verified, they are then simply hypotheses.

For example, under certain circumstances, a grade system with six grades might have the same discriminating power as a system with more than six grades. The issue should be analyzed empirically to determine how many grades the system requires to distinguish students fairly from one another is ample and also to flag the apparition of grade inflation, whenever it occurs.

Ellenberg said, however, that Ivy League outsiders are often under the impression that getting into schools like Princeton is the hard part, and that once in, students have an easy time of it.