<p>In all honesty, is it so bad that it would cause you to consider going to another university?</p>
<p>Thanks for the answers.</p>
<p>I absolutely love Princeton. But to be honest, I'm scared of the grading system. Even though I get great grades now, I cant imagine getting low B's and C's in college. Especially being pre-med.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/856568-suggestions-incoming-2014-re-grade-deflation.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/856568-suggestions-incoming-2014-re-grade-deflation.html</a></p>
<p>Idiot=SEARCH < SEARCH< SEARCH</p>
<p>For pre-med, I suggest Stanford…</p>
<p>But if you love Princeton, it definitely isn’t a big enough factor to deter you from coming. We do okay with lower GPA’s, as you can see from Ptongrad’s post in the link above.</p>
<p>In today (Sunday) New York Times there is an article about grade deflation at Princeton</p>
<p>[At</a> Princeton University, Grumbling About Grade Deflation - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/education/31princeton.html?emc=eta1]At”>http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/education/31princeton.html?emc=eta1)</p>
<p>^They messed up our mean GPA! It’s 3.28! 3.39 is our median GPA!</p>
<p>I had no idea the NYTimes employed writers who are as bad as those at the dailyprincetonian.</p>
<p>Unlike that silly article, what is at stake with grade deflation is not when some employer compares a Princeton degree to someone at a community college. In fact, most of the positions on tigertracks (career listings) are Princeton/Ivy only. What is at stake is that compared to similar institutions like Harvard and Yale, grade deflation hurts. No matter what our toolbag of a dean thinks, psychologically any employer is going to be inclined to favor an applicant with a higher gpa (ie a 3.8 from Yale over a 3.5 at Princeton), just like an employer will pick a 3.5 from Princeton over a 4.0 from random x state. </p>
<p>People just think that way and maybe it will change in the future, but until then, a lot of Princeton kids are getting screwed over. Applying this cap to classes like biochem pretty much kills off 60% of premeds just like that. In my case, I have a 3.44 and believe me when I say there are a lot of jobs with a 3.5 GPA cutoff that does not give a damn about grade deflation.</p>
<p>So for prospective students, grade deflation really is quite bad especially if you’re going for a career that requires a strong gpa- law/med/hedge funds etc. While I don’t recommend you jump ship to a state school, if you have the option of another top school- take that instead. </p>
<p>My dream of being a doctor pretty much fizzled when 35% of my biochem class beat me in the final. To make matters worse- my mom still has my Harvard acceptance letter framed on the wall just to remind me everytime I go home.</p>
<p>^ You seriously just scared me away from Princeton. I want to go to this school for a million reasons, and grade deflation is the only negative thing about it in my opinon. But I, too, am going into pre-med. Is it really so bad that it’ll ruin your chances of getting into top medical schools? I mean, I’m very smart, but probably not as smart as many Princeton pre-meds. And I do work incredibly hard. Is it not even possible for a pre-med to maintain a 3.5+ GPA unless you’re exceptionally brilliant in the sciences?</p>
<p>Insomniac, there’s no reason to be scared. Anywhere you go, you’ll find the competition tough in the sciences. Pre-med is serious business everywhere.</p>
<p>Crackberry (I’m one too by the way) I’m sorry to hear of your concerns and I’d be very confident that you’re not out of the running for medical school. I hope you’ve read the other thread on this subject that has numbers that should reassure you: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/856568-suggestions-incoming-2014-re-grade-deflation.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/856568-suggestions-incoming-2014-re-grade-deflation.html</a> Remember also that the numbers I quote there are averages and not “cutoffs”.</p>
<p>I need, however, to correct a false impression you are leaving. In fact, since the beginning of the change in the grading policy there has been almost no effect on grading in the sciences. In the natural sciences, the average grade dropped .02 on a 4.0 scale between the fall of 2005 and the spring of 2008. Engineering and science courses have always had lower grades and this is true at all of Princeton’s peers as well. Our Yale friends will attest to that: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064028552-post14.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064028552-post14.html</a> </p>
<p>The change has mainly occurred in the humanities and social science courses and this was another reason for the faculty’s decision to look more closely at grade distributions. Was it fair, the faculty asked themselves, that students in the humanities and social sciences should be graded differently from students in the hard sciences and engineering? </p>
<p>Finally, remember that this policy change (though defended by Dean Malkiel who has necessarily become the spokesperson for the policy because of her position) was actually passed by a vote of the faculty of the university. This was not an administrative decision forced upon the professors. The professors themselves voted for it by a fairly large margin.</p>
<p>I also think the comments by the Stanford Law School admissions officer and the Goldman Sachs folks in the NYT article are representative of how the top tier grad schools and employers view Princeton applicants.</p>
<p>PS. I’m sure pre-med students at Harvard feel the same way you do about the difficulty and tough grading in their science courses.</p>
<p>PPS. I never framed my Harvard undergraduate acceptance letter!</p>
<p>Why is everyone afraid of grade deflation? It’s much better than inflation. I would not want to go to a school where everyone gets A’s.</p>
<p>Is it possible that Princeton University faculty hold their students to a higher standard because they want this group of motivated “A+” students to stretch themselves beyond their comfort zone? Happens to law students nationwide during their first year of law school during which many straight “A”, high standardized test scorers struggle learning in a new paradigm. Maybe earning an Ivy League degree means something special after all–at least from Princeton University.
As an aside, I know several current Princeton students whose Princeton GPAs are higher than their prep school GPAs–although none of the three are pre-med to my knowledge.</p>
<p>@grouptheory: I like grade deflation in theory, and I totally understand why Princeton would implement it. My only reserves are because pre-med is already insanely competitive, and it doesn’t help when Princeton deflates grades while its competitors do not. That being said, PtonGrad’s post does reassure me a bit.</p>
<p>“@grouptheory: I like grade deflation in theory, and I totally understand why Princeton would implement it. My only reserves are because pre-med is already insanely competitive, and it doesn’t help when Princeton deflates grades while its competitors do not. That being said, PtonGrad’s post does reassure me a bit.”</p>
<p>Go against the Nash equilibrium.</p>
<p>^We’re getting hurt by going against the Nash equilibrium. Harvard and Yale are better off, we’re worse off.</p>
<p>^^grade deflation impacts pre-meds less than pre-laws. MOL already was at the 35% A range group-- and physics actually had to inflate itself to meet 35% As. The main difference was in the humanities, where you once might have had an A- but now got a B+. Outside of the intro classes though, I didn’t see much evidence of grade deflation (the percentage of As in the 100 and 200 level classes are often <35 since the departments want to reward students taking upper level classes).</p>
<p>^^There are many of us pre-meds (myself included) who aren’t majoring in the natural sciences…</p>
<p>You know Pgrad- you are infinitely more competent at explaining grade deflation than Dean I-will-sneer-at-you-from-my-perch Malkiel. I don’t know how much in the loop you are still with what goes on here- but these statistics often fail to capture how over the last 4 years my experience at Princeton has changed and how different it is compared to my brother ('04). Most of the statistics that say that GD has not much of an effect, like that one on law schools pretty much is statistically meaningless without comparisons and controls for effects. Charter’s 07 president wrote on the comments board and explained it pretty well. </p>
<p>Fundamentally people at Princeton are going to have to ask themselves, am I better than a two-thirds of my peers? This is PRINCETON. Maybe there are as many as 20% of people like football players and such but to beat 65% of princeton students is not an easy task.</p>
<p>Philosophically I’m sure it sounds great. The theory of it does sound good. In practice? life really sucks; especially when I am reminded I could be at Harvard, studying just as hard as I do and know that when I do good work, I am rewarded for it.</p>
<p>FYI- even though my great dream of being a doctor fizzled, I am however going to be working at Goldman next year so it’s not like my life is coming to an end. I will promise however, I will do my best to cause the next financial crisis.</p>
<p>
Oh no! Princeton is raising a generation of bitter, vengeful bankers! God help us all! :p</p>
<p>For the record, I don’t think grade deflation was really that big of a deal. Obviously I would prefer my GPA to be as high as possible but from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t seem as though Princeton’s place wrt to jobs or grad schools has really changed all that much. Also, I vaguely remember a Daily Prince article a little while back that compared the median GPA of '08 and '03 and the former was only .05 lower than the latter. Engineering/sciences have always been tougher graders than the humanities and I would think that is why the average Princeton GPA tends to be lower than that of Yale/Harvard (which proportionally have fewer hard sciences/engineering students).</p>
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<p>Please tell me this is not actually, literally true. If this is really true, she is really hurting you right now by doing that. </p>
<p>You turned down Harvard for Princecton for reasons that made sense to you at that time…and are probably still valid today. There is no point second-guessing that decision. Just move on. Good luck!</p>
<p>PS: I once hired a Princeton grad with rather low grades and a transcript with several B’s and C’s. She went on to do great things and is now a rising star as a young surgeon.</p>
<p>Grade deflation is not new at Princeton, especially in the hard sciences and engineering. I graduated from Princeton in 1978, and at that time Princeton was notorious for handing out lower grades and fewer honors at graduation than Harvard and Yale. At Princeton, honors at graduation are strictly departmental they are based on ones grades in departmental courses, and in departmental independent work, including the infamous senior thesis. For those in the hard sciences and engineering, grades were largely based on an objective assessment of ones knowledge of the material. The wonderful thing about Princeton is that it is a small university with the atmosphere of a small liberal arts college but in the sciences and engineering, the academic rigor is comparable to that at MIT or Caltech.</p>
<p>When I interviewed at Yale Medical School, one of my faculty interviewers made a snide comment that the largest groups of Yale medical students were from Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. He stated that this was not due to bias on the part of Yale, but rather because they are the best students. When I left the interview, I ran into a friend of mine from Princeton who was a first-year medical student at Yale. When I recounted the interviewers comments, my friend said, The admissions people and faculty here are clueless about the fact that Princeton hands out lower grades and fewer honors at graduation than Harvard, Yale, and Stanford.</p>
<p>Ironically, after being accepted by my first choice medical school (the University of Pennsylvania), I again encountered grade deflation. I was a Biochemistry major, but was performing my senior thesis in the lab of a Biology professor. My thesis experiment bombed, and I received a B minus for my thesis grade. I learned that I would be graduating without honors. The word was then passed to me and to one of my classmates working in another lab, that we had been just below the cutoff for departmental honors. We were told that other labs and thesis advisors had been somewhat more generous in grading theses, so more of their students had been graduating magna cum laude and summa cum laude. The two of us were so close to the cut-off for departmental honors, that if we exercised our right to request a second reader, and our grades were simply changed from a B minus to a B, we would graduate cum laude.</p>
<p>I went to my thesis advisor, and asked him how he felt about this. I told him I was not challenging his judgment, but merely had been told that different grading standards existed in the Biology and Biochemistry departments. He encouraged me to request a second reader, as the same thing had happened to him when he graduated from Amherst. When I went to my departmental representative, Dr. Arnold Levine (later President of Rockefeller University), a few days before graduation, as soon as I made my request, he told me, Given how close we are to commencement, I cant say if you will be listed as graduating with honors in the commencement program but it will be on your diploma. As it happened, I was listed in the program as well.</p>
<p>As further confirmation of how rigorous the standards in the sciences were at Princeton, I should note that after barely graduating cum laude, and without a Phi Beta Kappa key, just before I graduated from Penn Medical School, I was one of eight students called in to take a special examination just before graduation. We were told that we were among the highest ranking students in the class, we would all receive an award at graduation, and that the winner of the examination would win the Spencer Morris prize (highest honor at graduation), and receive an award equal to one years tuition. I didnt win the highest honor, but I was in the top eight and I was also elected to Alpha Omega Alpha (the medical equivalent of Phi Beta Kappa). So if I was able to graduate that highly ranked in my class at a top medical school, after barely graduating from Princeton with departmental honors in Biochemistry, that should give you some indication of how rigorous the grading was in the hard sciences and engineering. I would certainly not grade classes in the sciences on a curve one can objectively determine a students mastery of the material, and if everyone masters very difficult material, they all deserve good grades however a rigorous and objective approach to grading is not a new thing at Princeton, and it did not prevent me and my friends from gaining admission to outstanding graduate and professional schools.</p>