Malkiel defends grade deflation at Whig-Clio debate

Malkiel said the policy was motivated by “fairness” and a desire “to give signals about when you’re doing ordinary work and when you’re really excelling.”

“Nobody in this faculty, nobody in this administration, had any interest in putting Princeton students in jeopardy,” she said.

Dan Rauch ’10 and Zayn Siddique ’11 argued against the policy at the debate, while Dan May '11 and Jonathan Sarnoff ’12 spoke in support of grade deflation. Rauch, Siddique and Sarnoff are all members of The Daily Princetonian Editorial Board.

Rauch and Siddique faulted the policy for forcing professors to grade on a quota basis and putting Princeton students at an inherent competitive disadvantage. The policy, Rauch said, means that University students are at a disadvantage when applying for fellowship programs and graduate schools that have inflexible GPA cutoffs for applicants.

Sarnoff and May, on the other hand, said the policy confers benefits, including giving grades added meaning and imposing parity across departments. They also praised the administration’s efforts to track the policy’s impact on students, inform institutions and programs to which students apply of Princeton’s grading policy, and persuade other elite institutions to adopt similar policies.

“Employers and graduate schools recognize that GPAs do not mean the same thing when they are awarded by different schools,” Sarnoff said.

Though the policy encourages faculty to give a maximum of 35 percent A-range grades, Malkiel said, “I don’t believe we’re ever going to hit 35 percent.”

Only 39.7 percent of undergraduate grades given last year were A-pluses, As or A-minuses, Malkiel announced at a September staff meeting. Last year marked the first time A-range grades were given at a percentage below what Malkiel called the “symbolic barrier” of 40 percent.

The total percentage of undergraduate As fell from 40.6 percent for the period between September 2004 and June 2007 to 40.4 percent for the period between September 2005 and June 2008.

“It seems like a quota, especially to junior faculty members, people who’ve just arrived,” Rauch said. “Even if you had the status quo grading … there’s still an incentive for everyone to work hard.”

Malkiel said she has received e-mails from students who claim to be disadvantaged by low GPAs. She cited a particular instance of one student who had a 3.49 GPA and needed a 3.5 to apply for a job.

“I said: ‘A 3.49 rounds to a 3.5. No one said you have to use two decimal places,’ ” Malkiel told the audience.

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Following the formal debate, audience members were invited to ask questions of Malkiel and the debaters or to express their own views on the policy.

During his floor speech, Brendan Carroll ’11 compared grading on a different standard compared to other institutions to “forcing us to wear a sandwich board saying, ‘Watch out, I’m speaking a different language.’ ” Carroll is also a columnist for the ‘Prince.’

Though periodic efforts have been made to convince other elite institutions to adopt similar programs, none has followed Princeton’s lead. Malkiel said two Ivy League schools had recently asked for materials from Princeton regarding the policy and asked her to speak to their faculties, but she declined to identify the schools in question.

While the percent of A-level grades has been falling at Princeton, grades have been steadily on the rise at other schools. A-level grades made up more than half of all grades given at Harvard and Dartmouth in 2007. According to gradeinflation.com — a grading data site compiled by Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke professor and grade inflation expert — the average GPA at Princeton was a 3.28 in 2008, versus Yale’s 3.51.

The grade deflation debate began in 1998, when the faculty Committee on Examinations and Standing released a report tracking grading patterns at Princeton from 1974 to 1998. The report revealed a steady rise in undergraduate grades and asked faculty to take “collective responsibility for halting grade inflation and grade compression at Princeton.” In 2004, Malkiel proposed the current grade deflation policy on behalf of the Committee on Examinations, and it was voted into effect by the faculty in April.

Though the resolution at Wednesday's Whig-Clio debate against the policy passed by a vote of 61-9, Malkiel said her opinion was unchanged.