<p>If Princeton students were to get active, I would not be at all surprised to see many of the faculty join them. The administration has made this an issue about grade inflation. It isn't. The issue is grading QUOTAS. These are, for the reasons you have stated, bad for education.</p>
<p>that's cause the so called "Leaders" at Ivy Leagues, especially Princeton, have bookworms.</p>
<p>seriously, most ppl that would speak up are too busy making connections and joining the masons... not worrying about grades. oh wait, the important thing. ;)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don't give a **** about GPA. I learn to learn, not to get those coveted A's.<<</p>
</blockquote>
<br>
<p>Yeah, well you'll start gving a **** about the same time the grad or professional school rejection letters start rolling in, all because there are plenty of others with the same knowledge as you but have higher GPAs.</p>
<p>Did you know, a 3.9 GPA isn't going to prevent you from getting into grad school? Honestly. It won't.</p>
<p>I repeat: GET OVER IT. If your sole reason for going to college is to get a fancy transcript, your priorities are COMPLETELY misplaced, and really it's just overall SAD.</p>
<p>lol you are really not getting the point at all.</p>
<p>aparent, I think there has been some protest on the student's (and faculty) part. The student paper has published alot of articles against the new system, and many in the faculty (who I imagine should carry the most weight since it is THEIR classes). It's just that the administration doesn't honor them.</p>
<p>Interestingly, some of you in favor of the scheme don't understand the system @ princeton that was in effect before the scheme. You seem to be under the impression that A grades were freely given out to any and all students. This is vastly untrue as the data proves--the max was only about 55%. Professors had full discretion over who would get what grade. To those of you thinking the new scheme is better, you are basically saying that these world renown scholars are being easy graders, teaching easy courses, and rewarding kids for little to no work. If the professor feels 55% of the kids deserve an A, he/she knows best, and I am extremely reluctant to accede to the argument that these professors expect very little from their students. It's incredibly arrogant to think that you know better than the people teaching/evaluating these students.</p>
<p>Many of you have stated that you go to Princeton to learn, not get good grades. That's what everybody is there to do. But when you have to look at the kid sitting next to you in Orgo Lab as a competitor rather than a comrade, that's when the learning process severely takes a turn for the worse.</p>
<p>"Most disagreements surrounding the issue of grade inflation can be reduced to a divergent understanding of the purpose of grading, namely, whether grades exist to communicate the raw or relative levels of student achievement in a course.... Princetons decision to cap A-range grades at 35 percent in order to restore grades role as a communicator of relative performance jars with students expectations precisely because students persist in viewing grades as a measure of raw accomplishment."</p>
<p>Rather than defending the Princeton rule, the H senior seems to be taking an idealistic approach to the whole grading scheme by advocating a whole revamp of what the meaning of grades are. Not likely (or very feasible) to happen.</p>
<p>I'm betting that this Princeton experiment will fail, and they will go back to letting the instructors determine the grade ranges in their classes.
I also predict that while this policy is in place, they will see their application numbers from the best students decline.
I give them three years to revise this policy.</p>
<p>I'm not quite sure if the application numbers will actually fall. The overall trend in college admissions in recent years has been an increase in applications, and I would not expect this figure to fall @ any school, esp princeton, because of a grades quota. What I would not be surprised to see is their yield falling even lower, esp in terms of cross-admits between H and Y.</p>
<p>"I give them three years to revise this policy."</p>
<p>Ha. That would mean that the Class of '08 would go down in Princeton history as the class that got whomped bigtime, for all four years. <sigh></sigh></p>
<p>It comes down to whether As should be given to the best performers at a school, or whether there is some level of accomplishment that is deserving of an A.</p>
<p>Harvard, a great example of grade inflation, could well take the approach that the level of accomplishment from a lower quartile student there would probably earn an "A" at an average college. Perhaps that's their justification for the current state of affairs. My response to that would be that if the student wants to earn that A, then he/she should attend the "average" college instead of one where the competition is so tough.</p>
<p>When massive quantities of students get As, final GPA and honors achievements do little to distinguish the really incredible students from the merely superb.</p>
<p>If the elites manage to cut down on grade inflation, then the professional schools will simply have to adjust their formulas to reflect the fact that competition at Princeton, Caltech, etc. is simply tougher, and that a C+ student from one of those schools may blow away an A student from someplace else.</p>
<p>So "merely superb" student's shouldn't get A's if their work is superb in quality? I don't agree.
I'm not saying that the grade inflated schools shouldn't take a hard look and make some adjustments, but a quota like P has instituted is unfair to the many "merely superb" students at the school. I think that the" incredible" students will and do find other ways of distinguishing themselves outside of their GPAs.</p>
<p>An analogy that comes to mind is my son's AP Physics class. The 16 students taking the class had to have As in both semesters of the previous science AP as juniors, and had to have had some calc to be admitted into the class. Pretty tough. So we have the top math/science students in the school in this class, as you would expect. Should the teacher curve his grading so that there are A's through D's with these kids, who most probably all "get it?" He doesn't think so. He looks at each problem on his test and determines if the answer is an A answer, or a B answer, and so on, and judges each student's work by his own standard. If everyone gets an A, (which they don't!) so be it. I think that's fair.
You have to have profs who are willing to set a standard and keep it, but I think that is preferable to a quota system, which sets artificial boundaries that may have nothing to do with the quality of the student's work.</p>
<p>ASAP--That's the same way our AP English class works. Nobody has a 100, and nobody has an F. All our tests our essays, and she just writes a letter grade on each essay and averages them. </p>
<p>Personally, this grade thing is making me question if Princeton is right for me. I'm visiting Monday, so I plan to ask them about it.</p>