Princeton has little to show for its experiment in “grade deflation,” except inflating grades that continue to lag behind those of its peer institutions.
I obtained restricted records from the Office of the Dean of the College on 120,000 grades awarded over the past three years at the nation’s top-ranked university. I confirmed their accuracy by comparing them to figures published in a recent memorandum.
The data are definitive: it’s never been easier to get an A at Princeton.
“Deflation worked, and then, when it went away, it had no long-term effect,” said professor Paul Courant GS ’74, an economist who viewed my statistics and co-authored a prior study on grades at the University of Michigan.
A- was the median grade in the 2018-2019 academic year. 55 percent of course grades were in the A-range. In 1998, they were 43 percent of course grades, according to a faculty report I acquired from Mudd Manuscript Library.
B-range grades comprised 34 percent, and the C-range comprised six percent. D’s were merely half a percent. A Princetonian’s chance of getting a F was one in a thousand. The remaining four percent went to “passes.”
But the proliferation of A’s isn’t as alarming as the many ways that students who are trying to maximize their grade point averages (GPAs) can game the system. Grades are full of quirks. The problem is that the outside world that assesses students for jobs and scholarships doesn’t seem to know or care about these nuances.