Grade inflation is making you miserable

The following is a guest contribution and reflects the authors’ views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.

You took four classes this semester and now the grades are in. The first three come back A-range. Relief. But the last one makes you wince. 

It’s a week later and you’re still thinking about that B+. You hoped it would be an A-. It should have been an A-. You try to put it out of your mind. But you can’t.

On some level, you know something isn’t right. How can a single letter cause so much angst when even graduate admissions deans have admitted — among themselves and increasingly in public — that they have stopped trusting it? When so many employers skip it and focus on the rest of your résumé, or on who recommended you?

And yet the B+ is still in your head. Your friend’s A- in the same class is still in your head. The difference between those grades could be a single multiple choice question, or even the subjective style of your final essay.

Two-thirds of grades at Princeton are now in the A-range, and the share keeps rising. The standard view is that this is fine, or at most a minor concern, because anything else would just stress students out.

But maybe grade inflation is the thing actually stressing you out. Because over time, grade inflation defines failure as anything less than the best possible outcome. And even in the best case scenario, you’re still left with the same result as everyone else. 

So you search for other ways to distinguish yourself. The right student club. The right summer job. The right professor’s good opinion. It’s a search without end that follows you outside the classroom, into the dining hall, and onto your phone, scrolling LinkedIn at 1 a.m.

Imagine a place where this wasn’t so. Where student clubs were not for résumés but just for fun. Where you and a friend could walk out of class comparing what you got back — a C+ for you, a B for her — and you both shrug and head to lunch. Not because the grades don’t matter, but because neither of you has been forced into a world where your career prospects — where your very sense of self — is defined by the chasm between an A- and a B+.

Yes, it sounds like a fantasy. But suspend your disbelief just a moment more.

Imagine getting an A a few weeks later in a class that asked something hard of you, feeling good about it for an evening, and then going to a party. Imagine a graduate admissions officer who sees a B from Princeton and thinks: strong. Or one who looks past a C- because that one grade — that one class, that one professor you couldn’t figure out — is the least interesting part of who you are.

Imagine spending most of your hours learning, rather than auditioning for roles you’re not even sure you want. This is not the university we live in. But it is the one we can have, if only we could want it.

Princeton tried something in 2004. The school encouraged (but did not require) classes to cap A-range grades at 35 percent, held the line for a decade, and reversed course in 2014. The official narrative is that the experiment failed.

We would put it differently. The instinct was right; the design was wrong. The policy preserved the very features that were producing the misery: hard cliffs between letters, arbitrary cutoffs, single-question swings between an A- and a B+. It also had only a modest impact on average GPA, which continued to creep up. It was small enough to be invisible to outsiders but large enough to feel punitive to students — students who knew their peers at Yale and Harvard were not subject to it.

The 2004 reform asked students to pay a price the world did not even notice; that’s reform that should be undone. But the lesson of 2004 is not that the world we want is impossible to build. It is that the design has to be unmistakable from the outside.

There are designs that meet this test. The simplest is to report the percentile alongside the letter grade on the transcript. Percentiles cannot be inflated, and small differences are reflected as appropriately small. There is no A-/B+ cliff. Harvard and Yale are both considering this. Princeton should too.

A more substantial step is to normalize course or departmental means to a common figure — such as a 3.0 — and let variation return naturally around that baseline. Make a B+ in English mean the same thing as a B+ in economics.

A grading system built on these designs is not just a more honest record. It is a different kind of place. The arbitrary razor-thin distinctions with seemingly massive career implications — and the anxieties that come with it — they all fade away because we decided to stop tolerating them.

If you are an undergraduate at Princeton, you want this because everything we just described is your life. You’ve been cornered into a world where one slip — one multiple choice question — can produce real and absurd consequences. You bear all the cost of a system that we, the faculty, did not just design poorly, but did not design at all. This is not the world you want. You want to be challenged, get honest feedback, and move on.

If you are a faculty member, you want this because every semester, you must weigh the benefit of providing that honest feedback against the cost of disadvantaging your students, because they’ll be compared to peers who only get As. You are all but forced to assign an A for completing the work, an A- because all A’s look suspicious, and maybe — maybe — a B+ if you can’t think of a good reason not to. But you don’t want to be forced into that choice. You just want to teach the subject you love.

And if you are University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83, you want this because the academy is defined by standards of its own making. Grading, more than any other practice, has become something else. The institution’s most public statement of the student-teacher discourse is now driven mostly by the pressure to keep pace with grade inflation at peer schools. In no other domain has the institution let so central a practice drift so far from anything it would design on its own.

The 2004 experiment is not a cautionary tale. It is proof that this institution has the nerve to lead. The lesson of its reversal is not that the goal was wrong; it is that the design has to be unmistakable from the outside, and enforceable from within. That is a problem that Princeton — its students, its faculty, and its president — can solve together.

Sarath Sanga is a professor of law at Yale Law School. You can reach him at sarath.sanga[at]yale.edu.

Owen Zidar is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton. You can reach him at ozidar[at]princeton.edu.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.