At two, grading policy confronts growing pains

Correction appended

Soon after electrical engineering professor Ed Zschau '61 submitted final grades for his fall semester course, he wrote an email to his class explaining why he hadn't been able to give all the students the grades he thought they deserved.

"I think that the overall performance of your class was the best of the sixteen classes that I have had the privilege of working with over the past eight years," Zschau, who teaches ELE 491: High-Tech Entrepreneurship, said in his message. "You were prepared and engaged for our classroom conversations, and your written work and the research and analysis underlying it was impressive."

But Zschau, in his view, could assign A's, A pluses and A minuses to just more than a third of the students in his class, not all of those whom he thought should be given A's.

For many students, Zschau's email only confirms what Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel said should never happen after the implementation of the administration's new grading plan. "No faculty member should fail to give an A to a student who deserves it," Malkiel told the faculty on April 26, 2004, when the proposal was approved.

The policy, implemented in September 2004, states that "Princeton's new expectations posit a common grading standard for every academic department and program, under which A's (A plus, A, A minus) shall account for less than 35 percent of the grades given in undergraduate courses and less than 55 percent of the grades given in junior and senior independent work."

Nearly two years later, Malkiel, who has become the public face of the University's fight against grade inflation — and thus the target of many students' frustrations — stands by her statement. "I wish faculty wouldn't say things like that," she said of Zschau's email in a recent interview. Such comments, she said, undermine the success of the policy in reducing grade inflation.

Zschau declined to comment for this story.

Malkiel said she has been approached by students whose professors told classes they would like to give more A's than they can under the policy. "Where incidents were called to my attention last year, and there were a handful," Malkiel said she took action on them, talking to involved professors and department chairs.

She cited a specific example. "Last year, in an advanced seminar, a faculty member, in an email, I think, [wrote], 'I've been anguishing about my grades. If it had been last year I would have given you all A's or a large number of A's but this year I can't.' " After a student told her about the email, Malkiel spoke to the professor, who ultimately gave students the grades they "deserved" rather than the ones initially implied in the email, she said.

"So, if there are what I would describe as egregious situations where the messages that students are getting are simply inconsistent with what we've said the policy is meant to be, if somebody would tell me about them, I'll do something about it," she said. "I'll do something about it by talking to the department chair and talking to the faculty member and trying to sort out what's really going on."

Malkiel also suggested, however, that faculty members may make comments to students to prevent them from complaining about their grades, shifting blame instead to the policy — and her. "Sometimes faculty will make their points in a ... somewhat clumsy fashion," blaming low grades on the policy "as a way of saying 'don't bring me complaints about your grades,' " she said.

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Blame, should there be any, should not be placed on her or the administration, Malkiel said. "Let's be clear, first of all: this is not the administration's policy, this is the faculty's policy," she said. "It was adopted by the faculty in April of 2004 by a two-to-one margin at a very well-attended faculty meeting ... What I'm doing on behalf of the faculty is trying to help implement it." Though some faculty members, like Zschau, believe they have been unable to award their students the grades they deserved, a survey of the faculty shows that belief to be in the minority. Even though they believe grades have been deflated, the vast majority of faculty said students are awarded the grades they deserve.

The survey, conducted by The Daily Princetonian in early March, shows that 87 percent of faculty members believe that "A-quality work" receives an A-range grade in their classes. Eighty percent of faculty said that they think grades have been deflated since the policy's implementation in September 2005. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 7 percentage points and a sample size of 162.

University data confirms that grades in undergraduate courses are falling. The Faculty Committee on Grading's September report on the policy's implementation revealed that in its first year, the policy had lowered or kept steady the percentage of A's across the board in each of the University's academic divisions — humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering — as well as in undergraduate courses overall.

In the 2004–2005 academic year, 40.9 percent of grades given to undergraduates were A's, compared to 46 percent in 2003–2004 and 47.9 in 2002–2003.

In the humanities, grades fell most dramatically. During the year before the policy was implemented, 56.2 percent of the grades in undergraduate courses were A's. But in 2004–2005, A's constituted 45.5 percent of the grades students received.

In the social sciences, A's fell from 42.5 percent to 38.4 percent, and in engineering, A's dropped from 48 percent of all grades to 43.2 percent last year. In the natural sciences, the division closest to the 35 percent limit before the policy, A's accounted for 36.4 percent of grades, about the same as in recent years.

And though a majority of the faculty remains in favor of the policy, there is still sizeable opposition to it. Without regard to how they voted in 2004, 66 percent of those who responded to the survey would vote in favor of the policy if a vote were held today, while 29 percent said they would vote against it. Five percent of those who responded to the question said they had "no opinion."

The 'Prince' survey included space for faculty members to comment on what they thought of the policy and its implementation. Though faculty were encouraged to comment on the record or to provide as much identifying information as possible, most commented anonymously. In justifying opposition to the grade inflation policy, some faculty argued that they should be able to assign grades as they see fit, rewarding students who work hard or who have good ideas with A's. "For the most part, we give such good grades because we have such good students," one faculty member wrote in the survey. "If we have a quota on student grades, then we ought to have a similar quota on student evaluations of faculty. (That is, neither represents good sense.)"

The questions of whether students get A grades for "A-quality work" and of what exactly constitutes A-quality work are problematic, several professors said in written statements and in interviews. "Giving A's to 'A-quality work' assumes that 'A-quality work' is something absolute," a natural sciences faculty member wrote. "A grading system is a ranking system."

Operations Research and Financial Engineering department chair Robert Vanderbei said "A-quality work" is "not a defined concept ... nor is it definable." From generation to generation, notions of what kind of work merits an A change. For his mother's generation "an A means perfect and only perfect," while for him A's were "certainly ... given out for less-than-perfect work," he said. "Today it means roughly work in the top third of the class."

Some faculty members have always restricted the number of A's they've given, often to levels far below the University's guidelines.

A faculty member in the natural sciences said he has taught a large introductory course for many years and has, by nature, given less than 35 percent of his students A's, "so [the grade inflation] policy didn't require me to change anything," he wrote in the free-response section of the survey. He noted that higher grades in the historically least-deflated division might help attract a few more students to major in the natural sciences.

History professor Stephen Kotkin said that in the last decade, he has given A grades to about 10 percent of his upper-level course, HIS 362: The Soviet Empire. "In my view 'A' quality work was receiving an 'A' grade," he wrote in an email. "I would have to inflate to get to the deflationary percentage suggested by the Dean of the College."

"I deeply dislike grades and questions about grades," Kotkin added. "I would be happy to abolish letter grades entirely and move to a system of awarding three designations: honors, pass, fail."

In tomorrow's paper: Departments and the challenge of implementating the policy.

Correction

This original version of this article misstated the implementation date of the grading policy. It was September 2004. One of the illustrations attached to this story also contained errors: 44.2 percent of faculty members said they are awarding fewer A-range grades, while 4.1 percent said they had no opinion.