@TiggerDad : Last year someone posted that his/her son from a Midwest state with perfect Math 800 SAT II and 5 on Calculus BC got a C on the first math course he took in his first semester in Princeton. (Well, you can find the link at one of my posts but the original post has since been deleted :-/) The problem is that people only know their grades in January. In case there is any surprise at final grades, there is no time to recover emotionally. I don’t think grade deflation is the right words to describe the difficulty of Princeton courses. I think some of the courses are unnecessarily difficult. (I have good reference points to state this.) Our own life experience is that one’s relative standing in the classes during the first semester can be a very good predictor of future performance for the next 7 semesters assuming the student is taking a mix of relatively hard and relatively easy courses. For premed, the goal of the first semester is to estimate the number of geniuses in the top pack. The number can be big in Princeton, which is not good for premed. We keep track of the median and standard deviations of all the hard courses at my kid’s school and are surprised the number of geniuses exceed our expectation. Of course, for some courses like math, it seems that there are few in the top pack. For orgo II, we were surprised the number of students who are doing quite well in exam#1 (covering spectra) is relatively large. However, in exam#2 and exam#3, the median keep going lower and lower while my kid is doing better and better.