Exams after breaks & grade deflation

Cantiger
Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:46:20 +0000

My son is a BSE freshman and varsity athlete so I can answer some of your questions from what he has shared. He was leery at first of having exams after the Christmas break but after being through it once, he decided he actually liked it. He took a good chunk of the break away from the books and started into some studying shortly before returning to campus for reading week. So there was lots of time after returning to campus to prepare. In the end he said that he was glad that the exams weren’t before the break since that time was so heavy with other assignments being due.

Grade deflation really does not affect the STEM majors the same way as others at Princeton - his experience more often was that the grades for exams were INFLATED on a curve (ie - on a math exam a 66 was actually an A). People seem to make a lot bigger deal about grade deflation than it actually is. Grad schools out there know about Princeton’s grading policy. It’s such common knowledge that there is even a website for Princeton students to calculate how much higher their GPA would be at Harvard. [url=http://gradedeflation.com/]gradedeflation.com - Home/url I think part of the reason it’s contentious may be because you have a school full of students who are pretty much all used to straight A’s in high school. Eventually they seem to learn how to work with it but of course complaints are out there.

I am not sure what the delay is in naming the next president. I do know Anne Marie Slaughter’s name was frequently tossed around as a likely for the position and she has just accepted a position elsewhere so perhaps they are allowing some time for that news to run its cycle before naming the new president.