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<p>I personally know about grade deflation because I have a few friends at Princeton, but stuff like this is pretty much common knowledge on CC. People spend a lot of time on here, and * a lot* of this time is spent talking about HYP/Ivies/T25’s, so the topic of grade deflation at Princeton comes up frequently, especially with current students like you chiming in quite often.</p>
<p>I was not burned out from high school. My senior year was chill, and I arrived at Princeton with a newfound vigor and determination to excel. Also, I do not have helicopter parents. The stress was caused by myself. My expectations were set by myself. Those who do have helicopter parents tend to “rebel” against their parents when they arrive at Princeton. There is a difference between someone else pushing you, and you wanting something for yourself. If I had helicopter parents, the fear of my parents getting angry with me would be trivial compared to the distress I feel when I am unhappy with myself on campus. After all, what could they do? Ban me from Princeton or disown me? Remember that I was the one who wanted to transfer at one time.</p>
<p>About grade inflation/deflation,
People look at the “statistics” and yes, 35% of people are “allowed” A’s in classes at Princeton. I am appalled that people try to interpret this in different contexts. Of course, in some circumstances, this would appear to be inflated. In high school, I was used to some classes where the top 10% received A’s. I thought this 10% system was fine in high school obviously because I was in the top 10%. Same with my state college. </p>
<p>But honestly, when you lump together a freshman class in which all students come from the top of high schools everywhere, and only give 35% of them A’s, the struggle begins. Out of a freshman seminar of 12 people, say 4 are given A’s. With normal standards, this is reasonable, perhaps even a bit lenient. But the bottom 8 of those twelve people at Princeton are not your average Joes that you would find in your high school classroom or in a “normal” college, which “normal” high schools feed into. It wouldn’t be shocking that every student in that seminar had a 2300 or above on his/her SATs.</p>
<p>The problem I think people have with grade deflation is that they think it isn’t flexible, as in there is a strict 35% cap on A/A- grades in each individual class, which is entirely not true. In my writing seminar of 12, 6 people got at least an A-. In large lecture classes, there is normally some curve that sets aside a certain number of A grades (as there is at any top university in the country), but it doesn’t work that way in small seminars, so there shouldn’t be any examples of five-person classes where only one A is given out unless only one student does work worthy of an A. The 35% figure is normally just a target for the department as a whole, which means large intro classes tend to give fewer than 35% A grades while smaller departmental classes tend to give out better grades.</p>
<p>For, one, realize this appeared in the main little chatbox on the homepage. I was not trying hate on Princeton parents. You seem to take it personal that I said that compaq makes a point that may describe a portion (small) of the parents. And I also have friends there so I do understand the grade deflation. Imagine having a friend that in the humanities that has to deal with that. It sucks. I recognize the issue you bring up, Tiger w/people being top students in HS and As being arbitrarily capped. I don’t think they have limits on B grades do they? So in theory, they could just give the remainder of the class a B+ correct? Just as the B-school example I cite could choose to give the bottom 20% a C+ as opposed to allowing lower grades to be distributed (I’ve been told this happens). </p>
<p>Anyway, I used those terms simply because I only partially agree w/what compaq said and I didn’t want to step on any toes. The only reason I chime in is because these issues (except deflation, okay, it can be argued that BU, Georgia Tech, JHU, and Reed have it) are relevant to other schools, whether in top 20 or top 25, top 45, or w/e. I said “elite” schools. That doesn’t necessarily limit it to the top 25 and I realize this. I’m just saying that Compaq’s statement has some truth in it though it by and large isn’t. I recognize that there is great diversity in parents as there are students, but to suggest that the parents that compaq mentions don’t exist is crap. Also, to simply call it “caring about the students’ academics” in the case that compaq describes is an understatement. That’s the point I was making. I didn’t attempt to generalize. I’m just saying that it “does” happen and it may be more intense than normal w/some parents at more elite colleges. Also, when I say I’ve “heard”, it’s because some of my friends have described their sentiments to me, therefore it is more like I’ve been “told”, perhaps I should have made that clear. This isn’t something I got from some rumor mill. And admittedly, my parents are nowhere near fitting that description and I have many friends whose parents don’t fit it either. </p>
<p>My parents (and most of my friends’) are more like Tiger’s honestly. By the way, Tiger, I agree about the rebellion portion. Students w/tougher parents do tend to rebel, however, that doesn’t mean it (the HPs) isn’t annoying or influential. One example is where one of my friends is LGBT (came out in college) and they have threatened to stop paying for college unless he “changes”. Needless to say, this makes for a very difficult situation. I had another friend who didn’t do so hot frosh year, and his parents essentially forced him to transfer out for a year to improve his grades and then transfer him back in (I really don’t understand this. Why so desperate to have them return when they were more successful at the state school?). Also, I wasn’t saying that the burnt out students is you. It’s just that is another thing, like the helicopter parent, that happens (perhaps more often than the HPs). Some of my friends have chosen easier frosh classes based upon the logic that “they worked so hard in HS and need to take it really easy for at least one semester.” Would it really be a far cry to say that it (not necessarily the taking easy courses b/c of it, but some students indeed being somewhat worn down by the HS experience) happens at Princeton at all (where many had to fight tooth and nail to gain admission whether it be academics, ECs, or whatever. It was extremely difficult)? Is it really that much different?</p>
<p>Actually, don’t bother answering it. Lefthandofdog is right, It really doesn’t matter. You should just realize that you’ll do well next year, and expect to rise to the challenge (it definitely won’t be easy, but you have experience now). You said that your frosh year ended on a positive note, so hopefully your next years will continue that way for the most part. I don’t need to go to Princeton to understand and hope for that. Your story is inspiring and rings true to the freshman experiences of many college students. Most of them got through it. Seems you will as well.</p>
<p>The “35% A’s” limit is for the entire department, not necessarily individual classes. The 35% includes both A’s and A-'s, so receiving straight A’s like many did in high school would require being in the top 15%-20% of all your classes. This is an unreasonable goal, because making the top 30% is difficult enough for many. I’ll provide some grade-distributions of classes that I’ve taken my freshmen year.</p>
<p>For MAT 202 (Linear Algebra) Spring 2011:
A … 70 >= R > 49.5 … (31 students) 13.8%
A- … 49.5 >= R > 46 … (27) 12%
B+ … 46 >= R > 41.5 … (31) 13.8%
B … 41.5 >= R > 35 … (46) 20.4%
B- … 35 >= R > 31.5 … (28) 12.4%
C+ … 31.5 >= R > 28 … (20) 8.89%
C … 28 >= R > 22 … (24) 10.7%
C- … 22 >= R > 19 … (9) 4%
D … 19 >= R > 15 … (4) 1.78%
F … 15 >= R … (5) 2.22%</p>
<p>As you can see, less than 35% received an A-range grade. This is a huge class too, so there will be nearly 200 disappointed kids not receiving their accustomed A. It’s rather intimidating when you’re sitting in the auditorium waiting for finals to be handed out. You look at the 200+ kids around you and accept the harsh truth that for every 7 of you, only 1 will receive an A. </p>
<p>For NEU 259, a core requirement for the Neuroscience Certificate, the professor emailed us:
"Final grades for the course have also been compiled and are now available. This was a tough course – most of you got B grades (54% of the class, including B+ and B-). In all there are 31% A grades, including two A+s, and no Fs. "</p>
<p>Once again, less than 35% A’s with the majority being B’s. This is a huge class with over 100 students (maybe around 150), but there will always be one or two spectacular students in classes who break test curves and receive well-deserved A+'s.</p>
<p>Lastly, MOL 214 is the biology requirement for medical school. I guess it has a reputation of being cut-throat and competitive because it’s full of pre-meds, but I personally disagree about this stereotype based on my experience. Anyways, the grade distribution was posted as a bar graph but I’ve translated it into forum-friendly numbers:</p>
<p>A/A-: 75 students (27.1%)
B+/B/B-: 142 (51.3%)<br>
C+/C/C-: 49 (17.7%)
D: 9 (3.25%)
F: 2 (0.722%)</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, less than 35% A’s again with majority being B’s, and this class is full of ambitious, GPA-conscious pre-meds. I can look for more grade-distributions of other courses I’ve taken my freshmen year, but three should be enough. </p>
<p>In summary, the intro courses that incoming freshmen take are probably hit the hardest by grade deflation. However, the examples I provided are all math/science courses which may have preset curves that naturally produce <35% A’s without adjusting for deflation. Getting below an A shouldn’t be a disappointment; in fact, getting a B means you’re part of the majority of the brilliant kids at Princeton. Things will get better because if intro courses are below the departmental 35% cap, then higher level courses will have to make up for it by granting over 35% A’s (which seems reasonable because higher level courses may only ~20 students in the class). </p>
<p>And lastly, FightTheTide11 must have been in a Writing Seminar full of amazing writers or taught by a lenient professor. Six out of 12 students receiving at least an A- is very generous based on my experience and the stories of others. I’m pretty confident that in reality, the majority of grades in Writing Seminar are B’s, especially with the subjective natural of essay grading. So receiving a B in Writing Seminar is perfectly normal as well.</p>
<p>As a west coast parent of a rising senior, I can certainly attest to the difficulty and depression an overachieving high school student experiences when they hit the Princeton campus. We have worried EVERY year about the mental state of our son. That said, when our son became a junior, suddenly everything became a little better. Our son became realistic about his expectations, and seemed more relaxed about his accomplishments. In my opinion, the reason Princeton does not accept transfer students ( did not know this until after the first year) is that NOONE could transfer from another university and be able to handle the rigor of Princeton. That said, I truly believe our son has become a true renaissance scholar. He is a math major that speaks 3 foreign languages, whose writing knocks me over like a feather, and who has had summer internships in London working in the field of neuroscience for the past two summers. Best of all, he has remained a humble, wonderful human being. Many times we felt Princeton was exactly the wrong place for him to be. Now that he has “survived” his time at Princeton and will graduate next spring, we couldn’t be more in awe of his accomplishments. Students, please take heart, it IS worth it, and I guarantee your parents are just as proud as we are about our sons work at Princeton.</p>
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<p>Princeton sounds like a great place and scary one at the same time. I wonder why “an overachieving high school student”, presumably with a 2350+/- SAT, straight-As in HS, 12-18 APs all 5s, AND many time-consuming ECs/work, struggles so hard freshmen year. Is that the HS preps (APs included) are too shallow? Didn’t learn how to study in HS even though being “an overachieving” student? Picked too hard courses in freshmen year? Or something else?</p>
<p>This is an informative thread for prospective students. The OP will do fine.</p>
<p>I was a professor at Princeton before the grade inflation measures, and also lived in a residential college for freshmen and sophomores for many years there. We staff members fully expected many, many first-semester students to be struggling at about the midterm point. It had less to do with the grades they were receiving, and much to do with the fact that the first time most of them were among genuine intellectual peers. Students come in with completely unrealistic estimates of their abilities, based on their success in high school. And they ARE extraordinary students compared to most people, so their inflated sense of themselves is not surprising. But Princeton isn’t full of most people.</p>
<p>As a student, I had much the same experience at another Ivy League school. Yes, I was smart. No, I was not as smart as I thought I was. I quickly found out which areas I was really talented in, and which areas I was only good enough in to get an A in a high school course. There is a big difference.</p>
<p>The experience of failure is not, repeat not, a bad thing. It is part of becoming a sensible and compassionate adult.</p>
<p>I now teach at another excellent, highly selective school, a little less prestigious than Princeton, and I see freshman students here having exactly the same adjustment issues. This is not a Princeton issue. It is a growing-up-and-learning-about-the-real-world issue.</p>
<p>The vast majority of students at elite schools eventually figure out how to be successful there. The graduation rates are very high. “Successful” does not necessarily mean graduating as valedictorian and it should not mean constantly comparing one’s accomplishment against some external metric. That’s part of the lesson as well.</p>
<p>^ Professor knows the best. This is really helpful.</p>
<p>This is a question mainly for the OP, or I guess anyone else who knows. What sort of help is available to students at an elite school like Princeton? Do students have the option of seeing a counselor to help deal with stress, anxiety, or depression they may face? I guess my biggest fear about a pressure-cooker school like Princeton is that I would feel like I was drowning with no way to get the help I might need.</p>
<p>there are a lot of places you can ask for help. theres the mcgraw tutoring center in frist, many small peer tutoring groups, study groups, and there are always counselors that are available to talk about any problems you might have, whether they are social or academic-related. i personally feel that forming your own study groups for classes and asking your friends worked really well. everyone around you have so much to offer, both intellectually and emotionally. finding the right friend group will really help you with any problems you might encounter at princeton, or any other school for that matter</p>
<p>Yes, there are many places where you can get help and counseling. Getting help never occurred to me because I did not see it as an option at the time. I was used to being the tutor and the “mentor”. At that time, I didn’t see how getting help would change my situation because I couldn’t see past my grades and academic performance. Sure, I could go talk to a mental health counselor, but I constantly felt like I was time pressed to keep studying for classes. I was anxious all the time.</p>
<p>After reading through this thread, I felt it was necessary to make an account and post. Everyone who goes to Princeton, or any other top school for that matter, is used to being the best of the best. A lot of us went through HS with ease and never came across rigorous challenges in our lives. Princeton will challenge you no matter how prepared you think you are. I can guarantee you that everybody has their own pile of **** that they deal with. Like some other posters in the thread have said, going to college is a time to grow and develop as a person. Going into my junior year, I’ve certainly had quite the rollercoaster with some aspects of my life but I’ve grown to become a much better person because of it. Regardless of where you go to school, it will never be all sunshine and rainbows. You will make mistakes. Princeton students are by no means perfect. What really matters is that you learn from those mistakes and move forward.</p>
<p>I’m going into my junior year in the fall, so I’ve completed half of my Princeton career. Within those two years, I think I’ve matured more than I could have ever imagined. I certainly had quite the wake up call last year with some aspects of my life, but hey, we all cross that bridge at some point. I just want to put it out there, that for any Princeton student or prospective student that by no means are you perfect nor are you expected to be perfect. Regardless of where you go to school or what you do in life, remember that. I can assure you it will make accepting who you are, what you can do, and what you’ve accomplished much easier.</p>
<p>At first I thought the thread was about time spent at a frat house. (ZING!)</p>
<p>But in all seriousness, are all classes harder in general or do you think humanity majors have it easier than STEM majors?</p>
<p>Sent from my LG-P509 using CC App</p>
<p>It depends on what you mean by “harder.” </p>
<p>If you’re looking for the classes that are hardest to pass, they’re probably all either STEM classes or high-level art/foreign language/music classes, i.e. classes that require a certain skill, whether it be quantitative or artistic, that would prevent students without that skill from passing the class. For example, I might be able to scrape by in intro painting, but I wouldn’t stand a chance in upper-level painting; many others wouldn’t stand a chance in physics 205 (a.k.a “death mech”) even after completing physics 103, the prerequisite class. This should not be surprising. I present these in comparison to English or history classes, where one can pass the course by doing the required readings, learning the material, and writing papers that meet certain requirements (something nearly anyone at Princeton is capable of doing as long as he/she commits to doing the work).</p>
<p>If by harder, you mean harder to get an A grade given that you can pass the class and are willing to take it, everything probably levels out considerably, but not completely. There might be more math majors who have the capability to earn an A in Victorian literature than English majors who can get an A in differential geometry, but I don’t know too many math majors who would take Victorian literature. Earning an A in a humanities class indicates an outstanding performance (mostly in writing) within the context of that class, while earning an A in a STEM class also indicates a similarly outstanding performance in that class. And while some will state that an outstanding performance in a humanities class is easier to achieve than one in a physics class (since quantitative students are sometimes viewed as “smarter” by others, likely because quantitative studens have the capabilities to succeed in STEM classes that qualitative types might not have, and since qualitative “smarts” are harder to define), earning an A requires a very high level of work regardless of the subject material.</p>
<p>And if by harder, you mean heaviest workload, it really varies by class. There are some classes where one might skate by without doing a whole lot of the readings, but these are not common. Also, just like at nearly every school, there are some classes for each distribution requirement that are quite easy to pass (and have affectionate nicknames like stars for stoners, shake and bake, clapping for credit, etc.), but not more than maybe one or two per distribution area.</p>
<p>In short, classes here are hard, which is how they ought to be. And if they aren’t, there are other ways to challenge yourself.</p>
<p>I have to say, the school you are describing doesn’t sound all that much like the place where my kids have gone to school. They tell me mostly about their friends, their clubs, their clans, the fun they have had. I have heard of some kids who suffer, not to discount what you’ve gone through, but it also sounds like an enormous amount of fun is being had.</p>
<p>I’ve heard many stories similar to this… which kind of scared me when I wanted to apply to Princeton. Hopefully it’ll be different when I go this fall.</p>
<p>WB, are you going on any of the pre-orientation trips like OA or CA? They’re a great way to get a jump start on your life at Princeton.</p>
<p>I have to say, as a parent, that my child’s experience has been wonderful. Not perfect, but no major problems of the sort others have described here. Princeton wasn’t even her first choice -she wanted a LAC and was wait listed at her top choice. So she went into P with some trepidation and maybe a little regret. She has a fantastic, caring, funny, interesting, hardworking group of friends who are taking advantage of the many things Princeton offers. As she just said “each year gets better” and freshman year was fine and she’s never voiced any desire to transfer. She did use the McGraw center and had a classmate help her through calc and is doing just fine as far as grades go. It’s not high school, but then you’ve already done that, so why would you want a repeat of that experience?</p>
<p>I’m sure you’ll find you way and it’s natural to be apprehensive. I thin if you reread the OP you’ll see it’s really balanced. There are students who don’t have an initially bad time, just as there are some for whom the place just doesn’t work, but there can’t be too many because most do graduate.</p>
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<p>Yes, definitely.</p>