If you are attending Princeton, you should be smart enough to realize the irrelevance of Princeton’s recent attempt to battle “grade inflation”.
The crackdown on high grades, part of a national battle against grade inflation at elite schools, has increased anxiety, and in some cases, made friendly students wonder whether they should offer study help to their competitors, er, classmates.
As to that last statement, I’ll just say right now that I go to a law school where everything is curved, and if you offer to “help” your fellow classmates it gives you a tremendous opportunity to give them false information and thus give you a significant advantage when it comes to exam day.
All kidding (or was it?) aside, this “crackdown” on grade inflation is completely irrelevant. USA Today’s article cites the fact that 91% of students graduate with some kind of honors as showing how things have gotten completely out of hand in grading at elite institutions. That sounds to me as a problem with the way honors are determined (using raw GPA instead of class rank), not necessarily a problem with grading.
Raw GPA is a metric of dubious value. Is Student X’s 3.50 grade point average at Institution Y a good GPA? I really don’t know unless I see Student X’s class rank. Not all schools use identical GPA systems. Some are curved (as Princeton’s will be, at least somewhat) and some are not. Some schools have minuses, some don’t. Some schools have a plus/minus system. Some of those don’t allow a D+ or an A+, however. Some have difficulty multipliers assigned to certain courses. Some schools allow you to take a class as many times as you want until you get the grade you seek.
Given all the machinations on grade point average I have just listed, the most useful statistic is the one known as class rank. At my law school, for instance, it is a big deal to be in the top-third of one’s class, a student in this top-third of the class will have a shot at a job at almost any law firm in the nation. (Law schools seem to grasp the importance of class rank better than most, perhaps because lawyers are such competitive jackals. America’s top law schools generally have a matrix that states that the top 10% of students in a course will get an A, the next 15% will get an A-, and so on.) The reason class rank is so useful is that no school can fudge it by changing the grading rules. If you have 500 people in your class, someone is going to finish dead last. He may have a 3.72 or an 0.88 GPA. It really doesn’t matter. Class rank is the law when it comes to hiring and grad school admissions.
Still, many people don’t get it:
In a move students protested last year, Princeton became the first elite college to cap the number of A’s that can be awarded.
If you are one of the individuals who protested this move, I hope you got free coffee and donuts for participating, because it was otherwise a complete waste of your time. Now only 35% of the grades handed out will be As, which is already a much higher percentage of As than what my law school dishes out. (I’m not looking to transfer.) More lunacy:
Valen E. Johnson, the Duke professor who designed that system and went on to write the 2003 book, “Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education,” doesn’t like Princeton’s new system.
The fact any so-called academic could call grade inflation “a crisis” is utterly ridiculous. Finally, we come to the article’s heroine:
“Sometimes, your old high school mentality comes back to haunt you,” said Monica Saumoy, recalling the cutthroat competition to get the grades she needed to get into Princeton.
Saumoy, the pre-med student, remains nervous. “I’ve heard that med schools don’t really care what school you came from,” she said.
Then why the hell did she go to Princeton in the first place?! It certainly isn’t because it is inexpensive or because the weather is nice in New Jersey. Here’s what we know about this individual: [1] She doesn’t feel she can compete on this level; [2] She gets a chance to be quoted in a national newspaper and she decides to end a sentence in a preposition; [3] She actually believes that this change in the grading system at Princeton will have some effect on her life; [4] She thinks that admissions boards are incapable of distinguishing between the quality of students and education at Princeton and Kansas State. At least that’s what she has “heard”.
I don’t mean to pick on this young lady, and we wish her all the best, but I will say this much: If I were her, I would hope and pray that nobody on a med school admissions board ever read this article in USA Today…
More:
Outside the Beltway
Interested Participant
Signifying Nothing
Nathan Novak at 12:01 am
There’s nothing wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition.
Comment by Anonymous — April 11, 2005 @ 2:18 pm