Princeton's Progress

Parents Forum
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<p>Yes, true, Marite; I should have used the word "arrives" rather than "enrolls." But I am attempting to make another point here. Let me offer another example: I see on the H website a huge amount of very specific information for students applying to law school and graduate schools. P has a pre-health advising office, but not a pre-law one, and its residential colleges don't have the pre-law tutors that offer support and information in the H houses; P's students work through the career office. H isn't usually known for being supportive, but it actually looks pretty darn supportive of ambitious students, from where I sit. P's current deflationary crusade has been explained as a way of helping law schools and big fellowships more easily recognize P's top students. Translation: a way to improve P's record in professional school admissions and fellowship awards against Harvard's. I believe that, rather than imposing a very arbitrary and bizarre system on P's faculty and students as it is doing now, taking a lesson from H and doing more to support students applying for these programs would be a more effective -- and appropriate -- way to accomplish that goal. </p>

<p>I am all for high standards and lots of challenge. But if a student performs, he or she should be rewarded, regardless of the percentages.</p>

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<p>Could Princeton's success at grad and professional school admissions possibly get any better? Princeton students form a large portion of the population at all of the top schools as it is.</p>

<p>Deflating grades will have no effect on the very "best” students, who will remain comfortably in the top 10 or 15% on gpa. But those the next tier down will suffer. How much remains to be seen. To an extent, P is counting on its reputation to ensure that grad schools, employers, and awards committees recognize that a slightly lower gpa going forward means the same level of accomplishment. The potential problem is that this requires someone to pay attention. Will med schools, law schools, etc get over the mindset of "why should we take a 3.7 from Princeton when we can get a 3.8 from (some other top 10 college)"? To put it another way, will the committees conclude that Princeton's gpa standards were comparable to HY before the change, and are more stringent now? Or will they simply assume that after the change, an A from Princeton = an A from HY, thus penalizing the P students? Once the public attention dies down, how many people will remember that, a few years ago, P reduced the % A's? How many will look at a profile of grade distributions, showing fewer A's at P, and think that it is after all P, not H or Y, so fewer A's should b expected?</p>

<p>H's reduction in the % of students who graduate with honors is much less significant, and more strategic. The 90% honors figure was made to be embarrassing by publicity, so they cut it. However, most students apply to the next step long before honors are determined, so this has no effect on grad/prof admission, awards, or first jobs. H was able to announce higher standards without disadvantaging its students. </p>

<p>With the admissions standards at HYP, nearly all the students should have excellent gpa’s, and graduate with honors. Take away a few super athletes and rich legacies, and everyone else is honors material. If you fill a school with outstanding students, then the grades and honors should reflect the fact that you have a school full of outstanding students. Given how little grades actually tell you about a student]s performance or potential, why play these games? </p>

<p>If you really want to challenge the over emphasis on tiny distinctions in gpa, then switch to a Reed-like approach to evaluation. People would notice that, and they could not forget it after a few years.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
I am all for high standards and lots of challenge. But if a student performs, he or she should be rewarded, regardless of the percentages.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I totally agree, and as a matter of principle, not strategy.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
H's reduction in the % of students who graduate with honors is much less significant, and more strategic. The 90% honors figure was made to be embarrassing by publicity, so they cut it. However, most students apply to the next step long before honors are determined, so this has no effect on grad/prof admission, awards, or first jobs. H was able to announce higher standards without disadvantaging its students.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I believe the issue of Honors at Harvard focused on the large number of students who graduated cum laude, the lowest honors, as opposed to summa. The GPA required to receive a cum laude was deemed too low and was raised. The criterion for receiving summa was not changed, I believe; the numbers had held pretty steady over the years.</p>

<p>As for grade inflation, I recall Harvard engaged in a lot of discussion over this phenomenon. Unlike at Princeton, there has been no dean imposing a policy; and, like Aparent, profs have argued that if students deserve As, they should receive As regardless of curves.</p>

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<p>Afan, re whether P's success could possibly be any better...well, for most of us, the answer is no. However, these universities compete against one another like McDonald's and Burger King. Sad....</p>

<p>Marite, I continue to be puzzled as to why P rejected H's approach on honors. Based on the Prince's articles about the vote, the faculty at P was certainly not eager to pass this measure.</p>

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<p>Harvard used to use a fixed gpa to determine who received summa honors. For many years, very few grads attained that level. Then it rose to about 5%. Then it increased and there were two years duirng which 8% or so of the class graduated summa. </p>

<p>This was not acceptable. So, the rule was changed so that only 5% max can graduate summa. The gpa needed to attain it fluctuates from year to year, but in the aggregate it has gone up over time.</p>

<p>In other words, the # of those graduating summa has remained steady over time because it is based on a % of the class, not gpa.</p>

<p>Princeton has a pre-law adviser. It also has extensive material on the web for studdents applying to law school. See, e.g.
<a href="http://web.princeton.edu/sites/career/Undergrad/GradSchool/pre-law.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://web.princeton.edu/sites/career/Undergrad/GradSchool/pre-law.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>Jonri:</p>

<p>Are you sure about the 5% rule for summa? I know there were some discussions and I believe the GPA was raised a bit (was it at the time when Harvard dropped its 15 point scale?). But the larger point was that it was not the number of summa that Harvard was worried about; it was the overall number of honors. And this number was inflated by the huge number of people graduating cum laude with relatively low GPAs.
If I remember correctly, the issue of Honors and the issue of grade inflation were conflated. But profs who argued against grading on a curve also argued that the two issues should be dealt with separately. If Harvard wanted to reduce the proportion of students graduating with honors, it could just raise the required GPA. This is what it has done. I am not aware that grading practices have changed.</p>

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<p>The rule wasn't changed as part of the last go-round. It was changed a long time ago.</p>

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<p>Jonri.</p>

<p>Thanks. Does that mean that the reduction in the number of summa was not linked to the discussion of grade inflation?</p>

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<p>I agree with afan. I read the PU law school site and went to the BU law school advisor which has a table listing all the best law schools in the country showing admissions results by 75/25 percentile gpa and lsat scores.</p>

<p>The GPA's are stunningly high at all the schools. Its clear that B's cobber you in these situations.</p>

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<p>So everyone really thinks that Stanford Law School, for example, will suddenly cease to accept the kids who previously would have been A students from Princeton and now are B+ students? Don't they get a class ranking? Can't they just figure that they always accepted the top 20 Princeton kids and now they will still accept them? I find it hard to believe that grad school admissions people are so unable to interpret data. But I could be wrong. </p>

<p>I now have a D at Princeton and my feeling is if other kids do better than she does they should get better grades. I suppose it's only bad if truly all kids are performing equally and some are simply arbitrarily given Bs for the curve. As a thought, the professors might in the quantitative courses also begin to include numeric grades...</p>

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<p>I agree that quality deserves to be rewarded. However, the trouble is, "better" is not always easy to define. The president of the university teaches mol bio, which is a course that has tests and labs. Even in that course last year, which was already known as a killer, the tests were made harder as the semester progressed because the students were bright enough and motivated enough that they were beating the percentage set for the course. This was publicly announced. I would be sorry to discover that other courses at Princeton were going to follow that example. In some courses, when everyone is doing "too well," the profs are just curving down the grades. Imagine you are playing football and as you are running toward the end zone, little demons come and erase all the chalk marks and redraw them another 60 yards away -- while tackling you so you can't run! It's nuts. </p>

<p>And the admin is not coming across as being aware of this or of caring about it. As the Prince put it in pointing out that the process is very uneven, "Though the transitionary period will be too short to have a significant impact on the University as a whole, it will surely have an impact on the students who endure it. For that reason, the administration should proceed deliberately and with caution as it continues to implement the new grading standards." I would love to hear what they tell the frosh parents on Parents' Weekend. </p>

<p>It's no accident, in my book, that the creative writing people have managed to insist on keeping their courses as pass-D-fail. In creative fields, one can define "better" or "worse," but the process of growth is not at all enhanced by hammering away at that and making it the focus throughout the semester. That is, of course, one of the guiding principles of my alma mater (Brown).</p>

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<p>Sometimes a course's difficulty might be adjusted upward, to provide more challenge for students who happen to be stronger than the usual run of students, but it should never be for the sake of the grade curve.<br>
This thread led me to look up the grades for Physics 16 at Harvard. It's the hardest introductory Physics course, for students who have scored 5 on the BC Calc exam and are at least taking Multivariable Calculus.<br>
The grade distribution was as follows: 5 A+, 32 A, 19A-, 4 B+, 5B, 1B-, 1D,1E. I did not know that Harvard gave out A+s.
Should the prof have graded differently? Should he hae given a harder exam? Should the course be more difficult? Or can the prof just pride himself in having done a fabulous job of communicating the materials to his students (he got his second teaching award last year).</p>

<p>On the issue of how med and law schools look at GPAs, I recall the ariesathena observed that law schools admissions are GPA driven'I did not get the impression that there is someone figuring out where the GPA was earned, whether it was Princeton or Podunk. If that is correct, Princeton deflationary policy will definitely hurt its students. Perhaps not the ones who would be earning As under any system, but those who used to get As and are now getting A-s or B+s.</p>

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<p>I've been a way from this forum for a few weeks, and this is the first thread I've read in a while. I find it depressing.</p>

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<p>Marite, of course you know I think that H prof did a fabulous job. And imagine what he would need to do, were he being held to a group of percentages. Rather than thinking, "How can I help them learn?" he would have to think, "How can I stump them?" It's an approach far more suited to game shows than to education. </p>

<p>Btw, P does give A+, but it's not counted as such in the GPA.</p>

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<p>A small thought on curves. My D1 told me stories of assorted chemistry classes where the curve ran the gamut from a 97% being the lowest A on one test- well, if you got over 90% shouldn't that mastery be an A? Then the exam where a 44% was an A...okay, fine, but what happens when you move on and are expected to know the material and build on your knowledge?? That prof was ESL!</p>

<p>She is at the big state U, but I would still prefer that mastery = A!</p>

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<p>Somemom:</p>

<p>I don't know about that particular course or prof, but I have heard of exams where it was expected that the overwhelming majority of students would not be able to get anywhere close to 100 or 90%. I don't know why profs give out such exams. But they are not uncommon.</p>

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<p>Aparent:</p>

<p>I doubt A+s appear on Harvard transcripts, either. I'm sure it's evident that I think the Princeton policy is both misguided and unfair.</p>

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<p>I still don't believe that the top law schools and other grad schools won't choose on a ranking scale that obviates this problem. I have a source...I will check.</p>

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<p>Alu:</p>

<p>I believe Ph.D. programs put a lot of weight on profs' recommendations, courses a student has taken, and institution where a student took them. Med schools and law schools seem to be different, so make sure to ask your souce about these specifically.</p>