<p>People whine about the policy a lot, but as I’ve said in my prior posts, I don’t necessarily think that the whining is justified at all. I think that if the reality of the grading situation was the same as what the grade deflation policy outlined, without there being such a policy, no one would ever know. It’s the pointing it out that becomes an issue.</p>
<p>Most of the whining I saw was online: there is some resentment from students and the faculty who handle the policy badly (“oh, I would have just given you an A, but now I have to give you a B because of the grading policy”). There was an infamous community thread a few years back called “I deserve an A” (for my $40,000 was part of the justification there…) after some student got a paper back that had an A- crossed out and changed to a B+.</p>
<p>The only time I’ve heard the grading policy discussed allowed was before class when I was taking Art. I was a junior and was only semi-aware of the grading policy, because as I’ve said, it doesn’t do squat. The person discussing in seemed to think that it pitted us all against each other and was the end of the world, and I wasn’t really sure that she and I went to the same school. Ironically, I got a B in that art class (with very few grades or feedback, but I thought it was well-deserved) in what was my poorest semester grade-wise at Wellesley.</p>
<p>Of course, half my classes were science classes, and I was glad for whatever grades I could get. About a third to a half of my physics class worked together on problem sets on a regular basis, and I would describe nothing about our group as competitive. There were people who were smarter than others, there were people who cared more than others, and there were people who were prepared more than others, but we weren’t ever against each other in any sense.</p>
<p>Somehow, that was an anomaly of my year. Apparently the physics majors in the year ahead of us didn’t get along so well. One weekend junior year, there was a sleepover consisting of myself and three other physics majors (two of us lived across campus). We went down to breakfast together in our PJs, and one of my friends heard a senior say that she didn’t realize that the junior physics majors were <em>friends</em>. The thing that shocked us about her comment? We didn’t realize the senior physics majors <em>weren’t</em> friends.</p>