<p>Grade deflation definitely exists at Princeton. That is an absolute truth because even Princeton itself says so. However, most of the grade deflation tends to be in humanities classes, but I can't help but wonder if those competitive science classes are affected by grade deflation. I know that science departments have the lowest grades (overall) out of any department, but do professors grade harshly and does grade deflation really cause science majors to be competitive with their classmates and stressed all the time?</p>
<p>The point of grade deflation was to curb the inflation happening in the humanities. The sciences haven’t been impacted because their grading distributions already adhered to the 35% A “cap.” While I haven’t taken any sci/math classes yet, I have quite a few engineer friends. They’re always working together on problem sets and lab reports, so from what I can tell, it’s not particularly cutthroat.</p>
<p>I haven’t experienced any such competitiveness in the sciences. I’ve taken intro math and physics as well as COS and despite the “caps,” people are more than willing to help each other out and my biggest resources for help in those classes were students who I was theoretically “competing” with. The sciences all curve anyway – if they didn’t we’d be in trouble, since tests are designed so that averages are often near 50 or 60%! – and I don’t think grade inflation has changed the way professors curve courses.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s worse in smaller courses where you’re competing with specific students rather than a giant pool of people, but I don’t think so (especially since smaller, high-level courses dole out more A’s anyway). Generally people are more than willing to collaborate, not compete.</p>
<p>I was a chemistry major, and grade deflation was active all four of my years. I can say that none of us really thought about it. There was no competition at all because of it. We still worked together on our problem sets. It’s actually much better in the higher level classes since the policy is department-wide and not class-by-class. Since the intro classes give fewer A’s, they can afford to be more lenient in the smaller upper-level classes. And grad classes aren’t affected by the policy either.</p>
<p>When classes are hard, people work together. So for example, in math classes with really hard psets, everyone works together to try and solve the problems. If someone figures out how to do a problem, then they explain it to everyone else. The goal is for everyone to understand all the problems in the problem set (without staying up super late). I think pretty much all courses which are problem set based are like this (although if the problem sets are easy, people won’t work together as much).</p>
<p>This may be kind of off topic…but</p>
<p>Do Woodrow Wilson majors experience the worst Grade Deflation? </p>
<p>I read on a forum that this was the case…</p>
<p>GPAs are supposed to be roughly equal across all departments. Before the deflation policy was instituted the humanities were reportedly more inflated than the STEM majors. Now things are more normalized across the board.</p>
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<p>I’ve never heard that expressed as either fact or urban myth.</p>