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Live from Firestone Library, Princeton University, I blog...

...more self-congratulatory rhetoric from Princeton University administrators about how they're conquering "grade inflation" despite the fact that no one at Princeton, at least in the humanities, has ever defined an objective cross-departmental grading rubric in the first place!

Behold the administrative bluff:

Nancy Malkiel, dean of the college and one of the architects of the plan to cut grade inflation, said that reducing the number of A's was important to give students a more accurate picture of how they were doing and to inspire them to work harder.

"If we're giving them the same grades for their very best work as for their good work," she said yesterday, "we're not giving them well-calibrated guidance about the difference between very good and best, and we're not challenging them to do their very best work."

Translation: If a student gets a B+ on a paper for which she might--but for the new policy--have gotten an A-, she has ipso facto gotten "well-calibrated guidance" about academic standards. Why? Well, before the policy, she would just have gotten an A-. Now she gets a B+ as a result of a university-wide campaign to reduce the number of A's awarded on the basis of the arbitrary stipulation that only 35% of Princeton undergraduates deserve A's in any given term. I mean, how much more "well-calibrated" does it get?

I think it would be intensely amusing for Princeton faculty to get together and try to produce one single "well-calibrated" grading rubric applicable across all of the humanities disciplines, and binding on every faculty member in the relevant departments. (It would be amusing enough to watch them classify departments--and programs?--as "humanities" and "non-humanities." Watching the Politics Department go through the exercise would be a scream.) Having done that, they'll be entitled to talk the talk about "grade inflation." But not before.

Posted on Tuesday, September 20, 2005 at 7:42 PM | Comments (0) | Return

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