Leopold Stotch (a pseudonymous political science professor), blogging at OTB is angry over Princeton University’s decision to cap A’s at 35% per class–effectively creating an official semi-curve.
Without getting into the issue of grade inflation itself (which is a current bugaboo in the academy)I will echo his general sentiments on one of the major problems with the administration of colleges and universities: most of those who do so haven’t ever taught and a lot of them don’t even have academic bakgrounds of any kind. This creates a substantial “culture gap” where the professoriate and the educracy see the university in radically different ways. So you get silly rules like this one.
Plus, generically speaking as a professor I resent any outside interference in how I teach my class, so a rule like this one would rankle me as well.
January 23rd, 2005 at 1:55 pm
Grade Inflation
Several interesting posts yesterday by academics reacting to Princeton’s new policy. Here at Dartmouth, we include the course median grades on the transcript. It’s a good start, but only a start.
January 24th, 2005 at 1:32 pm
Obviously, as a student, I don’t want a cap on the number of A’s a Prof. can give. However, as your syllabus points out, an A is supposed to mean excellent, and if 35% of the class is actually excellent, that is quite an accomplishment. As a student who is actually concend about learning something, it is nice to recieve an accurate appraisal of one’s work, and believe me, getting a B or C is a good way to bring an overconfident student back to reality.