Why does Princeton have a grading policy?
Princeton established a University-wide grading policysix years ago for two reasons. The first is that we wanted grading to be done fairly, so that students in one academic department could expect to be graded according to the same standards as students in any other academic department. Before we adopted the grading policy, there was wide variation in grading standards among departments. In general, students in humanities departments were being graded more leniently than students in social science departments; students in engineering were being graded more leniently than students in the natural sciences. We thought that wasn’t fair, and we set about to fix it. The second reason for the adoption of the grading policy is that we thought students deserved clear signals from their teachers about the difference between their ordinarily good and their very best work. With grade inflation and grade compression, that differentiation wasn’t happening. We thought that we had a responsibility as
