"Easy A's" are on track to become a thing of the past at Princeton, and similar steps are under consideration at Penn.
A year and a half ago, Princeton announced an ambitious goal to reduce A's, A-minuses, and A-pluses to 35 percent of all grades given. A report released last week shows that A's in undergraduate classes at Princeton have dropped from 46 percent during the 2003-04 academic year to about 41 percent of total grades in 2004-05.
Many of Princeton's peer institutions, including Penn, have expressed interest in the New Jersey school's efforts to curb grade inflation.
College of Arts and Sciences Dean Dennis DeTurck said that he attended a recent meeting of university officials at Princeton to examine the results.
"I was there," DeTurck said. "We've been watching their experiment with interest."
DeTurck said that the percentage of A grades at Penn is "a little over 50."
"It's probably a little less than some of our peer institutions," DeTurck said. "I think if it goes up a lot more, that would be bad."
Cass Cliatt, a Princeton spokeswoman, said that the impetus for the new policy came out of a faculty committee in the late 1990s that found grade inflation to be a significant issue facing many universities, including Princeton.
"What we're doing here is cultural change," Cliatt said. "A's have come to be expected, and if the A becomes the standard, then there's not anything to recognize exceptional work."
The policy does not include a specific formula for departments and professors to use to cut down on the number of A's, but rather lets each department design its own methods. In the future, the most effective practices may be adopted by the whole university.
While the 35 percent goal may seem arbitrary, Cliatt said that this number harkens back to the period before the rise of grade inflation, a few decades ago.
"They took a look at grades from that earlier period," Cliatt said. "They took a snapshot of A's at a certain time."
DeTurck said that universities are "losing the point of grading" and that he was more intrigued by Princeton's efforts to create more explicit definitions of what qualifies as A, B or C work than by its percentage goals.
"One of the most interesting things they did is they tried to determine what these grades actually mean," DeTurck said. Possible policies at Penn "may not be [as numbers-oriented as at Princeton], but it is important for the faculty to remain aware of the issue."
But not all faculty members seem to agree that grade inflation is a problem.
Charles Mooney, a past chairman of the Faculty Senate, said that an informal study of the University's grading policy conducted by the Faculty Senate Committee on Students and Educational Policy a few years ago did not find grade inflation to be a major issue at Penn.
"We found no reason for concern," Mooney said. "It's a perfectly appropriate discussion to have, but I'm not aware that we have a problem at Penn that needs to be fixed."
Mooney added that some increase in grades could be due to a more qualified, academically accomplished student body being attracted to the University in recent years.
DeTurck agreed, to a point.
"Some of the creep [in grades] is explainable because of the students that are here," DeTurck said. "A good bit of it is certainly due to that. But not all of it."
Policies to eliminate grade inflation are not without controversy.
University President Amy Gutmann was still provost at Princeton when that school embarked on its efforts to deflate grades.
"I was involved with that, and it was a multi-year effort to get an initiative through," Gutmann said. "It required working with the chairs of departments and faculty to do it."
Cliatt said that some Princeton students raised questions about whether the tougher grading policy would compromise their attractiveness to graduate and professional schools.
"We have found that that hasn't been the case," Cliatt said. "We sent letters to [graduate school] deans explaining the grading process. Graduate schools know about Princeton's grading standard."
Dartmouth and Columbia have attempted to give graduate schools a more accurate picture of their students' accomplishments by augmenting transcripts with statistics about each class a student has taken, such as median grades.
DeTurck said that, while similar propositions have been considered for Penn, "there aren't any plans to implement" such a system.
"One of the disadvantages of doing that is that it really clutters up the transcript," DeTurck said.
Currently, Penn has no plans either to act on Princeton's policy or to make significant changes to the University's grading policies.
"Our inclination is to wait and see," DeTurck said.
Bursting the bubble Grade inflation by the numbers
35: Percentage of all grades that Princeton hopes to be made up of A+, A and A- 46: Percentage of all Princeton grades in 2003-04 in that range 41: Percentage of all Princeton grades in 2004-05 in that range 50+: Percentage of Penn grades in that range
