Princeton Adopts Grading Limits

By a two-to-one margin, the faculty of Princeton University adopted on Monday a nonbinding proposal to cap the number of A-range grades given to its undergraduates.

The unprecedented proposal, first released three weeks ago, calls for the proportion of A-plus, A and A-minus grades for undergraduate courses to be held under 35 percent in each department.

While the initial proposal called for a hard cap, the move that passed at Monday’s faculty meeting was amended to call for an “expectation” of 35 percent A’s rather than the originally-proposed “limit.”

It marks the first major step by a top-tier university to curb grade inflation, and Princeton will begin this fall to phase in the plan over three years.

“Thirty-five percent A’s will set us apart from the pack in a way that identifies Princeton as a real leader in tackling this problem,” Princeton Dean of the College Nancy W. Malkiel wrote in a cover letter accompanying the proposal.

Princeton’s move comes as Harvard is in the midst of curricular review that is not considering grade inflation, and University President Lawrence H. Summers said in an interview last week that the curricular review is a higher priority for the College than combating grade inflation.

“I am very troubled by the fact that grade inflation is returning, but I think the priority this year is thinking about curriculum reform,” he said.

Princeton’s formal consideration of the issue began in a faculty committee which issued a set of recommendations released to Princeton faculty on April 8.

Malkiel presented the proposal at Princeton’s Monday faculty meeting, and after a 90-minute debate, they approved the revised measure by a vote of 156-84.

Malkiel declined to comment yesterday, citing her policy of not speaking to student newspapers other than the Daily Princetonian.

But she told the Daily Princetonian Monday that the plan is not intended to override professors’ prerogatives.

“These proposals do not try to tell faculty how to teach,” Malkiel said. “No faculty member should fail to give an A to a student who deserves it.”

The measure comes in response to well-documented grade inflation, at Princeton, Harvard and other elite universities.

Last year, both Princeton and Harvard awarded about 47 percent A grades. And a study conducted by Malkiel found that 11 top schools—Stanford University, MIT, the University of Chicago and the Ivy League universities—have given 44 to 55 percent A-range grades in recent years.

Summers declined to comment through a spokesperson yesterday.

He was a strong advocate of capping the proportion of Harvard students graduating with honors at 60 percent, a decision implemented in 2002 for the Class of 2005.

But since Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 released data in February indicating that A-range grades were rising again—up to 47.8 percent last year from 46.4 percent the previous year—Summers has been less vocal about confronting the issue.

“I wish it weren’t so,” Summers said at the time. “We need to think about what to do about this.”

In an interview last week, Summers said that despite his concern about grade inflation, the University is not considering a hard cap on grades and he would not support such a plan.

“I think, at least in a Harvard context, simple grade cap proposals run into the difficulty that sometimes courses are taught at two different levels, and it seems unfair for there to be the same grade distribution in the more accelerated and less accelerated versions of the course,” he said. “And what one wants to do is apply some overall pressure against grade inflation without the excessively rigid structure that a fixed curve for all courses provides.”

But Associate Dean of the College Jeffrey Wolcowitz wrote in e-mail yesterday that addressing grade inflation was not part of the mandate of the ongoing curricular review.

“Grade inflation was not taken up in the curricular review process, hence no recommendations appear in the report,” he said.

Gross wrote in an e-mail yesterday that he discussed the Princeton proposal and the issue of grade inflation at the last meeting of the Educational Policy Committee, the body that advises Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby on educational policy.

“There was no clear sense from the meeting of what we should do on grades, although a few faculty have spoken to me about it,” he wrote.

Kirby did not respond to repeated requests for comment yesterday.

In an interview on April 9, he said he would welcome any recommendations on how to reduce grade inflation.

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.