Grade deflation: Good progress, uneven process

At Monday's faculty meeting, Dean of the College Nancy Weiss Malkiel offered the University community its first glimpse of the results of the grade deflation policy adopted by the faculty in April 2004. The empirical data is encouraging, as the University as a whole seems to have made about half the progress required to meet the goal of awarding A-range grades to 35 percent of the students in undergraduate courses — 40.9 percent of students received A's for their coursework last year, compared with 46.0 percent the year before. As a board, we continue to support the administration's general objective of restoring credibility and consistent meaning to academic marks by establishing University-wide guidelines and expectations.

We continue to have concerns about the logistical implementation of the policy, however. In particular, we worry that the laissez-faire approach favored by the administration — in which each department has been encouraged to chart its own course to the grading targets — may lead to uneven results, particularly during the current period of transition.

At the faculty meeting, Malkiel suggested that the administration will be collecting feedback from various departments about "best practices" to distribute these collegial suggestions to other departments having trouble meeting their goals. It strikes us as unfortunate that such best practices are only being identified now, during the third semester of this experiment. Had the administration taken this step earlier, students in various disciplines might not have been exposed to the strikingly different strategies developed by each department so far.

Moreover, the administration has still refrained from offering grading data on a department-by-department basis. Instead, data has been released about broad disciplines like "social science" and "engineering." In the long run, if most departments are in compliance with the new grading standards, such specific data would likely not be necessary. But during the current transitionary period, it would be useful — for both students and those who rely on University transcripts — to have some context in which to place individual marks, as there could be quite a bit of variability within these broad categories. There would be no cost in releasing more specific data — only increased transparency in this evolving process.

Ultimately, once Princeton is done deflating grades its students will be better off, as their marks will more accurately and more uniformly reflect the quality of their efforts. However, the University must still make a concerted effort to smooth the road to that worthy goal. Though the transitionary period will be too short to have a significant impact on the University as a whole, it will surely have an impact on the students who endure it. For that reason, the administration should proceed deliberately and with caution as it continues to implement the new grading standards.