This Board not only recommends a move away from requiring standardized testing for the 2020–21 admissions cycle, but urges a permanent shift beyond the coronavirus pandemic.
As I think of the thousands of black people mourning loved ones now, I doubt pointing to institutional disregard and devaluation provides them with any solace. But by addressing and changing those systemic patterns, we can help prevent others from enduring the same treatment.
It’s high time to stop using GPAs as a rigid measure of undergraduates’ talents.
This public health crisis has required us to ask all Princeton undergraduates to do a difficult thing: to complete their semesters online, and, in the case of our seniors, to forgo experiences that they had anticipated throughout their time here.
We hesitated to write you because we feel you've done an outstanding job leading the University, and with the gravity of the pandemic backdrop, because you obviously are facing many unforeseen and serious challenges every day. However, we feel compelled to reach out to you on this issue because we feel strongly that Princeton has made the wrong decision on not permitting its students to withdraw and come back next spring.
We, the Princeton University AASA E-Board, strongly believe that unity and community is the need of this hour of crisis. As such, we cannot sit idly and watch as racist attacks continue to threaten and divide our country.
Teaching styles, grading disparities, high school backgrounds, and departmental politics all play roles in who’s crowned Old Nassau’s top students. I will explore each of these factors in depth for subsequent columns. But first, I’ll give a brief overview of who at Princeton is winning the nine prestigious academic awards to show why their results are so baffling.
Like it or not, grades are a way by which society evaluates us, but Princeton can alleviate the burden in this unusual semester by giving us the full ability, through an extended PDF deadline, to choose which grades we reveal while navigating the challenges of online learning.
As we eventually negotiate the aftermath of this crisis, this data should be a moment of reckoning that motivates reparative and preventative measures to support the health of people of color, pandemic or not.
This year, when we are all restricted from leaving our homes and passing through the threshold of our doorways into the world, let us stand up despite our isolation, anxiety and despair, and open our doors and our hearts with singing.
The responsibility is sole and simple, and that is to vote for Joe Biden. It is not only your duty as an American, but also your duty to the future.
In an effort to comprehend the exponential growth and the resulting large numbers associated with coronavirus, I have furnished some heuristic analogies that I hope will help display the full expanse of the disease more concretely. If we take the time to comprehend the intuition-defying numbers of confirmed and new cases of the coronavirus, these numbers, while terribly disheartening, should become more manageable.
We must remember that the crisis we face is societal, not biological. Its solution lies not in moral principles, but in political struggle.
The compromises we need to make aren’t always optimal. But ultimately, by living the way we are now and through the sacrifices that others are making, we can keep things bright for the future.
Adopting the universal PDF measure will demonstrate Princeton’s commitment to not just creating smart leaders, but empathetic leaders, who prioritize their communities and vulnerable populations in times of need.
Columnist Julia Chaffers argues that the current government response to coronavirus in the United States prioritizes profits over lives.
Editorial Assistant Kate Lee discusses the rise of journalism’s importance amid the coronavirus crisis.
Structural change requires collective action: action that is possible only if we all take responsibility for our choices and for making better ones.
Three months before I planned on having these thoughts (i.e. at graduation), I am having them: will our friendships survive?
With examinations, the pressures of job applications or graduate schools, and our own internal wills to maintain high GPAs looming over each semester, we often forget that learning can be fun. The coronavirus, while wreaking havoc in almost all aspects of our lives, can — if we make the most of the opportunity it has provided us — bring back the joys associated with being curious.
