In April 2004, Whig-Clio hosted a forum at which Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel answered questions from an anxious student body about the proposed grading policy. But Alex Lenahan '07, then a freshman, wrote an email to Whig-Clio officers telling them he didn't have any questions to ask.
"I read the policy and I understood it all right," Lenahan recalled in a recent interview. "I didn't have questions; I had comments."
In the end, the event was advertised as a questions and comments session, and Lenahan was able to share his thoughts on the proposal.
Now USG president, Lenahan is fond of this story, and the anecdote is a telling one. The USG, whose first purpose, according to its constitution, is "to serve as the representative of the undergraduates of Princeton University," is in a rare and frustrating position.
The group is charged with representing student opinion on what is, by all accounts, an important issue to them — former USG president Leslie-Bernard Joseph '06 called the policy "one of the few things that students have actually paid attention to for more than a week" — but the student government lacks any official decision-making ability in the matter.
This situation reflects a reality that student government has tried to face for the two years since the policy's implementation: the new grading policy's existence is determined solely by faculty vote, not by student opinion. It is a challenge that three USG presidents have tried to tackle or are trying to tackle, and no one has yet determined how to overcome it.
Inception
Matt Margolin '05 was barely two months into his term as president of the USG in April 2004 when he learned of a proposed change to grading standards at Princeton. The policy, Margolin recalled in a recent interview, was "very much a surprise."
"It was presented as, 'Here's the policy as it would be if the faculty voted for it,' " Margolin, now a member of the University Board of Trustees, said. "The initial meeting was, [Malkiel] wanted advice on what was the best way for her to inform students."
It was not the first time that the possibility of a policy aimed at combating grade inflation had been suggested. Former USG president David Ascher '99 remembers a similar chain of events during his time as head of the group, when the Faculty Committee on Examinations and Standing released a report calling for fewer A-range grades.
"I can tell you that students were extremely concerned and the student government issued a response the next day," Ascher, who now works at the consulting firm McKinsey, said in an interview this week. "I actually remember drafting it in the middle of the night."
Ultimately, the policy was killed by "a combination of faculty opposition and student opposition," Ascher said. "The upshot was that the committee on examinations and standing said 'We'll continue to think about it.' "
Five years later, the announcement of an impending vote on a new grading policy similarly provoked what Margolin described as "immediate panic" among students.
"We wanted the administration to understand the personal fears that students had; it was a very real fear to think that one might not get into grad school or get a job because his grades would go down," he said.
But Margolin opted to tackle the issue by working on multiple fronts. "I don't think it was only our job to go against it, but to explain it to everybody because the shock factor was so high," he said.
Ultimately, the USG's major response was an "open assembly [for] students to come and put together a letter [about the policy], and we hand-delivered it to all 800 faculty members," Margolin said, noting he was heartened to hear professors refer to the letter during their deliberations.
Some students, however, wanted to see more drastic action.
"I had people criticize me for not having a student sit-in where people would sit around Nassau Hall and bang pots and pans," Margolin said. "When I was the president, [fighting grade deflation] was a big lofty goal. Since then, it has become a bunch of nitty-gritty things."
The first year
The following year, a new administration headed by Leslie-Bernard Joseph took the reins at the USG. But despite the Joseph administration's aggressive stance against grade deflation, little action was taken.
The USG had initially intended to present a report on grade deflation with both anecdotal and statistical evidence to the faculty. Anecdotes, but no statistics, were collected, and the report was never finished.
"My biggest failure was not realizing the person that I thought was working on the grade report didn't do anything," Joseph said, declining to specifically name the individual.
Former USG academics chair Robert Wai Wong '06 was one of the two USG members charged with writing the report. He said that though the report was never "a formal report ready to be released," the USG task force did present the anecdotes it collected to the Faculty Committee on Examinations and Standing.
"I'll be honest: in that first year, it was difficult to do much of anything," he said. "There was so little known about how much [the policy] affected students. Right when we came into office, we had just finished the first semester under the new policy."
Former USG undergraduate life chair and presidential candidate Tom Brown '07, who was also in charge of writing the report, agreed that last fall was too soon to assess the effects, but also admitted that less action was taken than he would have liked.
"The delay [in writing the report] until fall of this academic year was because there was a concern that we didn't have enough data," he said. "The fact of the matter is that this is something that got lost in the shuffle."
"[The issue] didn't get the attention it deserved from pretty much anybody," he said.
Now, Joseph says he regrets delegating the report to others. "I wish I personally wrote the report," he said, adding that his biggest personal accomplishment regarding the grading policy was editing the letter to graduate schools and employers that accompanies students' transcripts explaining the purpose behind the policy.
The future
How much attention will grade deflation get from the Lenahan administration? Like all USG officers interviewed for this article, Lenahan is concerned about the policy's implementation. Indeed, he listed the new grading policy first on a list of issues on his presidential campaign website, under a section called "What I'll Do As President."
Lenahan worries that, among other things, some professors still don't understand the policy fully, or that the policy is being implemented on a precept-by-precept basis.
Lenahan thinks that students will combat this with their comments on the Student Course Guide website, which he said will "help show students who's implementing this in the most fair and reasonable way possible."
Caitlin Sullivan '07, the current academics chair, said she, like Joseph before her, wants to write a report on grade deflation. "The next step for the USG is to publish a document that is both a retrospective analysis of how grade deflation is playing out at Princeton and a prospective recommendation of where the USG should be going," she said.
"Students, especially elected upperclassmen in each department, also have the opportunity to vocalize concerns to their department chair," she added. "They can say, 'Here are our concerns and here's the feedback we need' to their department, especially since that's the scale it's being implemented on."
Lenahan doesn't plan to stop at monitoring the policy's implementation, however.
"We want to restart the conversation on the policy itself," he said. "We would start out by sending out a survey to undergraduates on the subject of the policy. There aren't specific numbers about what students think of the policy, and I think it's important to have."
But after the survey? "We have a few different ideas about where to go from there, but first I want to see where people really stand on the issue and what the reaction to [the policy] is," Lenahan said. "That will inform where we're going to go with this."
Lenahan said he hopes the survey will "shift the debate to the policy itself, with an eye to the future of Princeton. With such a drastic and hastily-made change, at some point in the future there should be a revote on the issue. Hopefully, while I'm president we'll at the very least be able to move things in that direction."
For her part, Malkiel sees roles for the USG other than opposing the policy. "Helping to make sure that the implementation is as effective and responsible as possible seems to me to be a really important role, but I think campaigning against it is frankly not going to be productive," she said in a recent interview.
In order to get the policy repealed, the USG would have to convince faculty members to vote the policy down in another vote. Faculty opinion on the issue, however, has hardly budged, according to data from a survey conducted by The Daily Princetonian.
The vast majority of faculty members who voted against the policy — 82 percent — would still vote it down tomorrow, and an even larger percentage of faculty who voted for the policy — 94.5 percent — would vote to uphold it in its current form.
Overall, nearly two-thirds of faculty, knowing what they now know about the policy, said they would support it in a revote. The survey, which has a sample size of 162, has a margin of error of plus or minus seven percentage points.
Malkiel is confident that the policy will not be overturned in the near future. "I have not seen a situation where the faculty in its wisdom arrives at a statement of policy and practice and then, in a very short time, reverses itself," she said. "Just haven't seen it. I don't expect it."
But Ascher, the former USG president, said that shouldn't stop students from trying.
"Students and faculty are allies in the world of university politics," he said. "Faculty have students' best interests in mind and they can often act together and be a powerful force. It's not a question of lobbying them so much as laying out [students'] arguments in front of them."
"This is the power that students have that, going forward, they need to be aware of," he said.
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