Grades may not be inflated

The concept of the "communications revolution" until recently remained fairly abstract to me, but all that has changed with the electronic edition of the Daily Princetonian. I have frequently found that my columns, written as they are for an audience with specifically Princetonian connections and interests, escape their assumed boundaries, usually through the intermediation of "bloggers" suffering from a "leisure problem," to garner email responses from all over the country, and sometimes the world.

Some of these responses are of course more welcome than others. For example, I didn't much enjoy the actual death threats I got in response to certain columns I wrote about Islamic terrorism shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks; but at least they were more stimulating than just another snotty review of my ideas about Petrarch's use of Augustine. The large majority are actually affirmative and encouraging, and they frequently suggest topics I might address in a column, sometimes helpfully including the ideas or even the very words I should use in doing so.

One recurrent suggestion is "grade inflation." As it happens our Dean has recently sent us a dauntingly statistical memo on this subject, and I have also seen from two of my most thoughtful faculty friends, Professors Hollander and Howarth, private musings worthy of wide circulation. But what decides the issue for me is an email from a friend of Princeton at the Waksman Foundation for Microbiology, who directs my attention to a commercial website (pickaprof.com) that apparently specializes in identifying professors likely to give you a good grade. I haven't been able to get more than a blank screen from the website, but I have read an article about it from the Times (March 24, 2003). Well, all this has set me to thinking, and I have found myself pulled in an unexpected direction. It nearly kills me to change my mind, especially in public; but I'm not sure we have a huge "grade inflation problem."

I can say unequivocally that I think it is an appalling idea for students to pick their professors on the basis of being able to expect high grades from them. But I am not sure that it is a vastly better idea for professors to pick their students in the expectation of being able to give them low grades. Whenever in the past I have bemoaned real or imagined shortcomings in undergraduate "intellectuality," possibly casting a doubtful glance in the direction of this or that group, I have been shouted down by administrators assuring me that every undergraduate at Princeton is, from the purely academic point of view, entirely qualified to be here. I have more than once heard admissions officers boast, or perhaps bemoan, that it would be easy to fill the entering class exclusively with high school valedictorians. I don't much doubt any of this. Its truth has largely been confirmed by my own empirical experience over many years. All our propaganda touts the remarkable quality of our students. With an eye on a possible future column, I have begun studying President Tilghman's public vocabulary for describing things Princetonian, and I conclude that her ordinary adjective of choice is "extraordinary." So I am left with the question of why our extraordinary students should all of a sudden start getting Cs? Is it not possible that there are a few extraordinary places — such as Alice's Wonderland, Lake Wobegon, and Princeton, where it is simply the truth that "everybody has won, and all must have prizes?"

Forget the students for a moment, and turn your attention to the Princeton faculty. Is our Dean, President, or Provost willing to declare publicly that most professors at Princeton cannot be placed in the top category of ability and performance, that most of us are in fact "C" professors? What would happen to a recommendation before the Committee of Three that began, "We nominate Prof. X for appointment at Princeton because on the basis of demonstrated mediocrity he is likely to perform at an adequate level, plus or minus a three percent margin of error?" The truth of the matter is that we think all Princeton faculty are excellent, and we are very nearly right. And many, many Princeton undergraduates are "A" students.

If the idea is to "send a message," there are after all many semiotic systems besides A-D or Pass/Fail. We faculty have just received notification of our pay raises for next year. I am happy to discover that at the age of sixty-seven, on the verge of retirement, with forty years' experience in the classroom, and nearly thirty of them in rank, I can finally with the naked eye see not too far ahead of me the average salary of all Princeton professors of rank of all ages, manifestations of devotion to duty, and levels of experience. That's the kind of news that might wound one's pride or damage one's morale were it not cushioned by the rhetorical bubble-wrap of "extraordinary" and "distinguished" or on a really good day like this one "extraordinarily distinguished." John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.