The case for grade translation

We talk about grade deflation all the time. It’s just what we do as Princeton students. And if any opinion unifies the Princeton student body, it’s that the policy is, on balance, detrimental despite its good intentions. That said, as Will Harrel noted in his column on Tuesday (“A defense of grade deflation”), the question of increasing awareness and mitigating the post-Princeton effects of grade deflation is paramount.

To be sure, if employers, graduate schools and the general public aren’t made familiar with the Princeton language of grades, students will inevitably be adversely affected. Though Harrel cites marginal increases in employment statistics to defend grade deflation, broad knowledge of Princeton’s grading policy still remains fairly limited. The administration’s response to this claim has been to send out letters to numerous employers attempting to explain the University’s grading policy and familiarize the general public with the Princeton language of grades. The problem with this effort is twofold. First, it doesn’t guarantee that employers and — more importantly — interviewers will read the letter. Second, the letter still attempts to represent the Princeton language of grades in the rest-of-the-Ivy-League language of grades. We students are thus stuck at a conundrum — we’re Spanish speakers trying to communicate haphazardly in English, causing our words to lose definition.

Ideally, we would have a system that incentivized us to learn more and hurt us less in the long run. We arguably get the former in our current system but don’t see too much of the latter. So how do we rectify this system, while maintaining the high standards that usually force us to work harder and learn more than our other Ivy League counterparts? The answer isn’t inflation—it’s translation.

A grade-translation system would work as such: Instead of giving students conventional 4.0-system GPAs for their academic work, students would receive GPAs in terms capped at any other number — we invite the administration to pick anything, from 5 to 100. As before, letter grades would be assigned on a deflated basis, but the manner in which they would be delivered numerically to employers would be different. Since the translated grades are on a completely different numerical scale than our current grades, employers will be forced to read the administration’s pamphlets describing Princeton’s grading policies, causing them to look beyond a student’s headline GPA when analyzing that applicant. Grade translation is therefore the efficacious publicity campaign the administration has long sought — the system that allows the school to maintain deflation and harm students minimally post-graduation.

Examples of grade translation abound. Though MIT has no institutional grade-deflation policy, MIT’s sheer class difficulty forces students to endure de facto deflated grades. To reflect the added rigor of its classes, MIT uses a five-point GPA system. Similarly, Phillips Academy, Andover, one of New England’s best preparatory high schools, uses a six-point system in lieu of letter grades, granting a 6 only for the most exceptional work. As Andover notes that there’s no true letter-grade equivalent to 6.0-scale grades, Andover forces college admission officers to look beyond traditional metrics and acknowledge the school’s exceptional rigor.

Naturally, grade translation will have its problems. Most notably, some employers could calculate a GPA by looking at the student’s transcript. Such problems could be resolved with the complete abandonment of the letter-grade system, as Phillips Academy has. Additionally, translated grades could be confusing at first, especially given our comfort-level with the 4.0 system. Such confusion, however, is precisely what we want: We want employers and schools to not be deceived by their understanding of our system. We want to force them to struggle with our system, to read our pamphlet and to understand that we Princetonians are held to exceptionally high standards.

Inasmuch as translating Spanish to English is no substitute for speaking Spanish, translating Princeton grades to Harvard-Yale grades fails to adequately represent our grades. Just as Spanish conveys thoughts that can never be expressed in English, we need a Princetonian GPA to convey grading standards that could never be expressed in the languages of any of our peer schools.

Adi Rajagopalan is a freshman from Glastonbury, Conn. He can be reached at atarajagop@princeton.edu.