The Daily Princetonian: January 13, 2020

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Monday January 13, 2020 vol. CXLIII no. 126

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Hundreds attend ‘No War with Iran’ protest in town

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Students, community members protest India’s Citizenship Amendment Act

Opinion

The decline

and fall of grade deflation

By Evelyn Doskoch Contributor

Nearly three hundred student and local protesters gathered in Hinds Plaza on Saturday, Jan. 11, for a “No War with Iran” rally.

The rally was sponsored by the Coalition for Peace Action (CFPA) and the Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice, both Princeton-based organizations, as well as Muslims for Peace. It featured a variety of speakers that included University-affiliated physicist Zia Mian, N.J. Assemblyman Andrew Zwicker, and Montgomery Township Mayor Sadaf Jaffer.

“We know that diplomacy works,” said CPFA Executive Director Reverend Robert Moore, as the crowd cheered and applauded. “We know it works with Iran. And it’s time to have it happen again. Diplomacy, not war with Iran!”

Anti-war rallies took place across the country on Jan. 8, organized by the civic action group MoveOn.org in response to concerns of escalating conflict between Iran and the United States after the assassination of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani. The rallies were organized at over 370 sites, including New York City; Chicago, IL; and Los Angeles, CA. At the Princeton rally, speakers described the current political situation and argued See IRAN page 3

Liam O’Connor

Senior Columnist

MARIE-ROSE SHEINERMAN / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

Protestors gather on Frist South Lawn on Saturday for the teach-in.

By Marie-Rose Shienerman Assistant News Editor

Around 100 students, professors, and community members gathered on Saturday outside of Frist Campus Center to learn about and protest against the Indian government’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), enacted on Dec. 11.

The CAA offers citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Christians, and Parsis from India’s neighboring countries (specifically Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh) who are facing and have faced religious persecution. Notably, the CAA excludes Muslims, who comprise the majority of India’s non-Hindu population, according to India’s most recent census.

The undergraduates who

organized the teach-in and silent protest stood in solidarity with student protestors in India, who first demonstrated at Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), two predominantly Muslim universities, and now include thousands of people across the country. In recent weeks, the Indian government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has cracked down on protestors, with 25 deaths reported as of Jan. 10.

“I can stand here and feel assured — as I should be — that I’m not going to be tear-gassed and dragged away, and that is not a reality for students [in India],” said Aparna Shankar ’21, one of the student organizers. While home for winter See PROTEST page 2

ACADEMICS

PHOTO COURTESY OF EMILY GEYMAN

Geyman conducted research from a boat off the coast of the Bahamas.

Geyman ’19 has thesis research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal

By Kris Hristov staff writer

On Nov. 8, Emily Geyman ’19, had one chapter of her senior thesis: “How do Shallow Carbonates Record Sea Level and Seawater Chemistry?” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) journal.

Geyman graduated from the University with an A.B. degree in geosciences. Geyman’s thesis

In Opinion

focused on the use of carbonate rock to record indicators of ancient climate. Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels serve as a thermostat for the planet, so Geyman focused on deciphering signals of a changing carbon cycle preserved in rock. Understanding how the modern carbon cycle is translated from CO2 in the atmosphere in CaCO3 in rock will allow for a better understanding of Earth’s ancient climate.

The article published in the

Editor-in-Chief Chris Murphy reflects on the past year, while senior columnist Liam O’Connor examines the fall of grade deflation at the University.

PAGE 6

PNAS journal was a chapter in Geyman’s thesis which specifically focused on why carbon-13 concentrations are higher than would be expected in sedimentary rocks in the Bahamas.

Although scientists are able to accurately measure presentday levels of carbon dioxide, going further back gets much more difficult. Samples of ancient ice, known as ice cores, from deep under Antarctica and Greenland, See THESIS page 5

Princeton has little to show for its experiment in “grade deflation,” except inflating grades that continue to lag behind those of its peer institutions.

I obtained restricted records from the Office of the Dean of the College on 120,000 grades awarded over the past three years at the nation’s topranked university. I confirmed their accuracy by comparing them to figures published in a recent memorandum.

The data are definitive: it’s never been easier to get an A at Princeton.

“Deflation worked, and then, when it went away, it had no longterm effect,” said professor Paul Courant GS ’74, an economist who

See GRADES page 6

STUDENT LIFE

USG appoints Honor Committee clerk; confirms eye health ad-hoc committee

By Caitlin Limestahl Contributor

In their last meeting of the semester, the Undergraduate Student Government (USG) appointed Wells Carson ’22 as the next clerk and subsequent chair of the Honor Committee, confirmed the creation of an ad-hoc Committee on Eye Health, and heard committee updates.

The ad-hoc Committee on Eye Health, proposed by AJ Sibley ’20, will sponsor eye health awareness events similar to their efforts during Mental Health Awareness Month last November.

Potential endeavors of this committee may include pursuing blue light blockers for computer clusters.

USG also voted for Sarah Lee ’22 to replace Betsy Pu ’22 as the chair of the housing ad-hoc committee. Pu stepped down due to “other commitments,” according to incoming USG President Chitra Parikh ’21.

According to the meeting packet, Lee has now served as a student representative on the Undergraduate Housing Advisory Board for two years and was a founding member of the Committee on Student Housing.

“After the release of our [the ad-hoc committee’s] first report, we’ll be moving forward with the goal of bridging communication between Housing and the student body by soliciting feedback and statistically analyzing the Room Draw lists for 2020,” the packet reads.

Camille Moeckel ’20, current chair of the Honor Committee, introduced Carson,

Today on Campus 10:00 a.m.: Visual Arts Faculty Print Show - An exhibition of recent prints by the faculty of the Program in Visual Arts.

Wallace Dance and Theater

viewed my statistics and co-authored a prior study on grades at the University of Michigan.

A- was the median grade in the 2018-2019 academic year. 55 percent of course grades were in the A-range. In 1998, they were 43 percent of course grades, according to a faculty report I acquired from Mudd Manuscript Library.

B-range grades comprised 34 percent, and the C-range comprised six percent. D’s were merely half a percent. A Princetonian’s chance of getting a F was one in a thousand.

The remaining four percent went to “passes.”

But the proliferation of A’s isn’t as alarming as the many ways that students who are trying to maximize their grade point averages (GPAs) can game the system. Grades are full of quirks. The problem is that the outside world that assesses students for jobs and scholarships doesn’t seem to know or care about these nuances.

the committee’s new clerk, and USG voted him into the position. Carson has been on the committee since his first year and is also a Peer Health Advisor, a member of the Whitman College Council, and a former copy editor for the ‘Prince.’

Nico Gregory ’22, University Life Chair, spoke about the review of sexual misconduct on campus, funding for instant HIV testing, and failed efforts to create scooter rules.

Heavyn Jennings ’20, Social Chair, discussed Tuesday’s Dean’s Date celebration with blankets for gear and plenty of free food. Jennings also said she is working on a report from the Fall 2019 Lawnparties survey that will show the student body what their preferences reflected and better communicate how performers are chosen.

Christopher Walton ’21, of the Campus and Community Affairs (CCA), said he wanted to share data about restaurants that give student discounts with the student body. He said that after restaurant week, he realized that students are largely unaware of the roughly 25 restaurants that give discounts.

Walton also discussed the potential revival of a collaboration with campus dining, cultural groups on campus, and the CCA about increasing the frequency of cultural food nights and the input of campus cultural groups on such dining events.

This was the last meeting before Parikh succeeds Zarnab Virk ’20 as USG President.

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Monday January 13, 2020

Mir ’22: Indian left’s silence on Kashmir nothing but hypocrisy PROTEST Continued from page 1

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break, Shankar participated in protests — including a march led by a coalition of women, trans, and queer people — in New Delhi herself.

The organizers previously circulated a statement of solidarity on Dec. 21, published with 215 student signatures in The Daily Princetonian. According to Shankar, they are currently working with the cross-institutional organization Holi Against Hindutva, and members of the University’s Hindu Society have signed on to their open letter. The letter was written by Yale South Asian Society Political Chair Shreeya Singh and edited by Kamya Yadav ’21.

The protest comes on the heels of a Jan. 5 incident, when masked assailants attacked anti-CAA and Muslim students at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), sending 30 people to the hospital, while police stationed at the university reportedly stood by. The event also falls within a wave of anti-CAA campus protests around the world, including at peer institutions such as Harvard and Oxford, that took place in late December in light of events in Jamia where law enforcement fired bullets on unarmed citizens on Dec. 15.

For many of the protestors, the matter is not only political, but also personal.

“I’m from India, so I feel really personally invested,” said Kanishkh Kanodia ’23. “Just because we’re not in India doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do.”

Kanodia is a contributor for The Daily Princetonian.

Others attended to fill gaps in their knowledge.

“I heard it’s a teach-in, and I wanted to learn more,” said Akshay Yelleshpur Skrikant, an attendee and a graduate student in the physics department.

Herself an alumnus of JNU

and an assistant professor of history at the University, Divya Cherian opened the event with an explanation of the CAA, the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and the ways in which she believes the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), headed by Modi, aims to use both to discriminate against Muslims.

Cherian explained that a national register published in December found 1.9 million people living illegally in Assam, a northeastern region of India.

Surprisingly for the BJP, many of the people listed were not Muslims, but rather Hindus — a finding that was “politically expensive” for the party, according to Cherian.

“But as we say in India, not to worry, they had a back-up plan,” she said. “That back-up plan was the CAA.” Cherian said skeptics may ask protestors “what is wrong with knowing who is your citizen and who is not, with counting every person in your domain and verifying who is legally here and who is not?”

To these objections, she would respond by saying that India never had the kinds of documentation one would need to prove citizenship, with many people lacking birth certificates or having birth certificates from sources other than the official health department.

“This is where the CAA and this list of citizens combine beautifully,” she added. “The people who are found to be non-citizens, who are Hindu, who are Jain, who are Sikh — basically everyone who is not Muslim — will be caught by the CAA and be put on the path to citizenship.”

“And what will happen to every single Muslim who is not able to prove by this impossible standard that they are citizens of India is that they will be put in detention camps,” thus rendering swaths of the population permanently stateless, she continued. “There is one already in Assam, in Punjab, and many more I’m sure will be built.”

Gyan Prakash, another JNU alum and the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at the University, spoke next, commending the student organizers.

He found it fitting that young people had organized the event, as hehad observed in New Delhi two prior, “not only the entire city, but the entire nation, was consumed by protests that were all organized and led by students.”

Prakash emphasized that the protesters’ message is “We are Muslims and Indians, not Muslims but Indians.” He criticized those who have advised Muslim women not to display or embrace their religious identity during the protests.

“Why wouldn’t they?” he asked. “Their religious identity is under attack. It’s been attacked since 2014 at least … So, women come in their hijabs, come with their Muslim symbols, and assert they are Muslim citizens.”

To finish his speech, Prakash led a call-and-response chant of “What do we want?” with the audience demanding “Azaadi,” which translates to “freedom” from Hindi.

Sadaf Jaffer, a postdoctoral research associate at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) and New Jersey’s first female South Asian mayor, addressed protestors next, remarking that the past few weeks “have been some very dark times” and reflecting on her personal love for India.

She called on attendees to sign the open letter drafted by the Global Indian Progressive Alliance, call or email their congressional representatives, and speak out against hate where they see it.

The guest speakers were followed by several undergraduate students, beginning with Moin Mir ’22, a native of Kashmir, a Muslim-majority territory in northern India of about seven million people. Kashmir has been subject to five months of a digital communications blackout, part of what Mir described

JON ORT / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

Professor Divya Cherian spoke at the anti-CAA protest.

as the “longest blockade in any democracy ever.”

“News that does manage to come out of the region is mostly through local journalists, who are working without the Internet and with the administration constantly on their backs,” he explained.

“Indiscriminate detention of kids as young as 13, nighttime raids, propagation of fear among the masses by showing military might, use of pellet guns on unarmed teenagers, mental torture, sexual violence … this is the normal of Kashmir,” Mir said. “This is the normal I had to grow up watching.”

Mir went on to say that the world is now seeing the brutality of India’s government unfold on a massive scale, reflecting the militarized occupation under which Kashmiris have suffered for decades.

“The silence of the Indian left on the crimes of the Indian state in Kashmir is nothing but sheer hypocrisy,” he said, adding that he applauds the organizers of the event for not “forcing their own narrative of Kashmir” when they had the chance to let a Kashmiri speak for himself.

Kanodia, who spoke of India’s secularism as one of its fundamental tenets, followed

Mir. Kanodia condemned the BJP’s singular agenda to undermine that secularism in favor of a Hindu nationalist, or “Hindutva,” state.

“Hinduism is unique because it promotes inclusiveness,” he said. “Hindutva promotes exclusivity, promotes fear and hatred against Islam, against Christianity, against all the religions of the world.”

Students went on to address the stifling of free speech in India, the suppression of student activism, and the potentially harmful rhetoric in the Indian diaspora.

“The beginning of any revolution, any force of resistance, is education,” said Yadav, the final speaker, and thanked everyone who attended the teach-in.

At the conclusion of the event, organizer Arya Goel ’20 led the crowd in a recitation of the preamble to the Constitution of India.

The event was co-sponsored by the Carl A. Fields Center and the University’s South Asian Students Association and took place at 3 p.m. on Jan. 12. Organizers are currently in talks with other undergraduate and graduate students on creating a more long-term coalition for discussing and holding events on these issues, according to Shankar.

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Assemblyman Zwicker: Our weapon today is our voices IRAN

Continued from page 1

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against American military action. Rallygoers bore signs saying “Diplomacy Not War,” “Remove Trump,” “Hands Off the Middle East,” and “Prevent WWIII,” among others.

Mian, director of the University’s Program on Science and Global Security, spoke at length about the importance of American diplomacy and peace in the Middle East.

“The United States has to learn to treat other people and other countries as equals,” Mian said. “We think we can have it all, and the answer is ... we can have what we want, but the price that is to be paid is beyond measure, and it will come back to haunt us.”

Zwicker, N.J. Assemblyman of the 16th legislative district, also a physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, gave an impassioned defense of democracy as a peaceful force for change.

“Our weapon today is our voices,” Zwicker said. “Our weapon tomorrow is our vote.”

Mayor Jaffer spoke at the rally in place of Princeton Township Mayor Liz Lempert, who was unable to attend. Jaffer re-

cited a poem titled “Farewell”

by Kashmiri-American author Agha Shahid Ali. Pastor Lukata A. Mjumbe of the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church demanded that all faith leaders in the area advocate a continuous message of peace.

“You cannot pray and teach about peace on Friday and [not] stand up and fight for peace on Saturday!” Mjumbe said. “You cannot preach about peace on only Sunday morning, but on Monday through Friday endorse the weapons of war and violence and ... not lift up your voice in defence of our children!”

The pastor made a direct appeal to the U.S. government, arguing that the avoidance of all-out war and other atrocities — actions that he states are “morally unacceptable right from the very beginning” — does not warrant “celebration” and called for a higher standard of conduct from military operatives.

“It’s never acceptable for you to assassinate anyone,” Mjumbe said, to general applause.

Throughout the rally, vocalist Charlene Leahy performed original anti-war songs and

a few covers, such as the 1965 protest song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” by social activist and folk singer Pete Seeger.

Mary Alice Jouve ’23, a member of the Princeton Young Democratic Socialists, was among the students at the rally.

“I certainly liked what I

heard, and I’m glad that we have people who are ready to criticize not only the Republicans for warmongering, but also just the whole system in general,” Jouve said.

Other speakers in attendance were Irene Etkin Goldman from Jewish advocacy group J Street, U.S. and U.K.

veteran fighter pilot Richard Moody, Democratic Party Vice Chairman Ali Mirza of Long Island’s Nassau County, Chief Activist Robt Seda-Schreiber of the Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice, and former UN official Salim Lone.

EVELYN DOSKOCH / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

Hundreds of people gathered outside Princeton Public Library to protest against U.S. military action against Iran.

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Geyman can more accurately infer sea level and carbon cycle changes THESIS

Continued from page 1

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can only go back about a few million years at best. This means most of the four-and-a-half- billion-year geologic history of our planet is relatively inaccessible.

However, there is another log of Earth’s climate: sedimentary rock found at the bottom of the seafloor. Sedimentary rock is formed by layers of organic and inorganic debris deposited on the seafloor over time which accumulate and harden into rock. This rock contains calcium carbonate dating back billions of years, which can give glimpses of what the ancient oceans looked like.

Researchers have interpreted changes in the global carbon cycle from ancient carbonate layers since the 1980s. However, little research had been performed to understand how carbonates form today.

“Scientists hadn’t done the leg work to understand modern calcium carbonates. Geyman looked for the Rosetta Stone of how calcium carbonates form today to translate records from the past,” Professor Adam Maloof, Geyman’s senior thesis advisor, explained.

Geyman’s thesis aimed to provide a theoretical framework for

scientists studying the past to reinterpret data. Her work can be described in five chapters, Maloof said.

The first phase was to create an accurate map of water depth.

Geyman’s research was conducted in the Bahamas, primarily due to the shallow water and geologic stability. Sedimentary rock in deeper oceans is frequently subducted into the Earth’s mantle, which destroys it and any carbonate records. So the modern Great Bahama Bank is an excellent analogue for the paleoenvironments represented in the rock record.

Because the region is too shallow for oceanography ships, Geyman had to create a measure to the nearest 10s of centimeters of how deep the water is where she took samples. Many of the islands visited had never been explored on foot, only photographed from space.

“We started off from Andros Island in a small 14-foot boat loaded with a month’s worth of food, gasoline and water. The Bahamas are great for research on samples because they’re extremely shallow; most of the time the water is barely up to your neck,” Geyman recounted.

Samples were collected through hundreds of free dives into the clear blue water to get pieces of sedimentary rock from the sea-

floor.

“There was two interests in the samples: we wanted to figure out how the chemical makeup of the sedimentary rocks is influenced by the surrounding water and how depth changes over time and affects the rock’s physical properties,” Geyman explained.

The second phase was measuring tides and creating a tide model. For this, Geyman employed satellite imagery. Using the color of the water as an indicator, with darker coloration representing deeper water, Geyman was able to reliably create a model of the tide fluctuations which could accurately show the change in water depth over a 24-hour period and thus the flux of water on and off the bank. Those measurements were important because the water carries nutrients and alkalinity required for calcium carbonate precipitation.

The third and fourth phases dealt with the chemistry of calcium carbonate. Geyman’s thesis focused on this compound’s creation. In a typical day, once the sun goes up, photosynthetic organisms, known as phytoplankton, begin taking CO2 out of the water.

Inside water there are two types of carbon, carbon-12 and carbon-13.

Because carbon-12 forms a weaker bond, it is broken off and taken into the organism.

This creates concentrations of carbon-13 rich water around wherever the organisms were located.

Calcium carbonate sedimentary rock formed during the day and thus had a much higher concentration of carbon-13 than would be normally expected. At night, as water becomes more acidic, calcium carbonates stop forming until daytime, when photosynthesis resumes.

Geyman proposed this process as “the diurnal carbon cycle engine” and realized that the carbon isotopes recorded in shallow carbonates may not reflect global ocean conditions. That realization led to a drastic new interpretation of ancient carbon isotope records, and a new understanding of how to interpret paleoclimate from rock.

As part of the same study, Geyman combined field work and numerical modeling to find the relationship between water depth and the type of sedimentary rock that would form (e.g., mud versus shelly grains). Water depth is controlled by global ice volume, which is a sensitive indicator of climate.

So, as before, Geyman developed a new way to translate the ancient rock record. Now, researchers could look at a stack of ancient carbonates and more accurately infer both changes to sea

level and the global carbon cycle.

This research provides a useful tool to any industry or project interested in sea-level and carbon changes. Paleoclimatologists, the oil industry, and deep sea carbon sequestration projects could all use this modern analogue to generate a better understanding of the past.

Maloof emphasized the scope of Geyman’s research.

“Fieldwork was done over the span of two years, with a month spent in the Bahamas each year.

Geyman travelled with a small boat, camping on tiny islands and diving to take samples of the seabed and make depth measurements. I’d be thrilled to see my fifth-year PhDs doing the same work she is doing,” Maloof explained.

Geyman is now researching researching ice volume changes on the Svalbard Archipelago in Norway. The goal of her current project is to create a three-dimensional model of the Svalbard ice sheet from Norwegian Air Force photographs from the 1930s. With this model, glaciologists and other researchers will be able to track how climate change affected the Svalbard ice sheet over the past 90 years.

Her research is funded by the University’s Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Fellowship.

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Letter from the Editor: Reflecting on a year of service Chris Murphy

Editor in Chief

It is unbelievable that just under a year ago, I was addressing you all for the first time as the editor in chief. Today, I am addressing you for the last time.

In the past year, our campus community has grown and developed in a variety of ways. Students challenged the inaction of the University administration in dealing with campus issues related to Title IX through public demonstrations that lasted over a week. The campus began preparations to welcome the largest class in Princeton history, approving and beginning construction of a new residential college that expands campus across Carnegie Lake. Frequenters of the Street pondered how in the world someone could take the door off an eating club and attach it to a light pole at the Washington Road intersection.

My staff and I had the opportunity to cover it all firsthand.

Outside of day-to-day coverage, we had the pleasure of tak-

ing deeper dives into some of the most complex portions of Princeton history. Two special-edition papers explored African-American activism since the 1960s, and took a look at how ROTC cadets and alumni exemplify “Princeton in the Nation’s Service.”

Writers investigated the challenging legacy of the Firestone Library name, examined eating club membership based on socioeconomic background, explored the nutrition and weight lifting program for Princeton football, and more. I am honored to have been able to oversee all of these stories.

What I am most proud of is seeing the growth of studentjournalists throughout our board and the changing perceptions of students outside of it.

Earlier this year, one of our most senior editors noted, “We don’t recruit journalists, we build them.”

For those that do not know, most Prince staff writers come in with no prior experience in journalism; they come in with a passion to try it out and a desire to learn as much as possi-

ble. Watching students who had never written an article in their life turn out stories that impress even the most veteran of journalists has been one of the most rewarding experiences of the position – validating how the ‘Prince’ is fostering an environment that promotes an accepting community that challenges each other to reach new heights.

As for students outside of the organization, I have been impressed with their continued commitment to readership and debate. Princeton students have challenged our organization to better cover affinity spaces, questioned the intentions of various University initiatives, and celebrated the work of those whose stories often go untold.

Thanks to a readership who cares enough to demand we do better, this past year we have been able to push the organization in ways never thought possible and are on the path to reaching towards new heights.

I am very excited and honored to pass the torch onto Jon Ort, who will be the next editor in chief. Jon was one of my clos-

est advisers last year, and it is clear he is incredibly fit for the job ahead. He is incredibly diligent, putting in as much effort for an article at 10 p.m. as an article at 1:30 a.m. Furthermore, Jon is willing to have provocative conversations that challenge the status quo of the ‘Prince’; I look forward to seeing what barriers he attempts to break down in the coming board. With his experience as a managing editor, Jon is already acutely aware of the necessary qualities to be a good EIC, and I am confident his transition to the role will be seamless.

The ‘Prince’ is in very good hands with Jon and the rest of his board.

As for me? I certainly plan on sticking around at the ‘Prince.’

I hope to serve as a resource to the 143rd Managing Board in any way I can. Most excitingly, I plan on going back to writing for the sports and features section, returning to my roots after nearly a year off.

Thank you all for your continued support to the organization, and I leave you with this: keep reading, keep learning, keep questioning, and keep growing.

The decline and fall of grade deflation GRADES

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A struggling economics student takes a high-grading English seminar just to get an A. Graduates of elite high schools — there are tons of them here — receive advanced placements into upper-level classes, in which exam curves are more generous. C’s batter an engineer in her packed introductory courses; her grades might have been in the Brange if class sizes were smaller.

These scenarios play out every day at Princeton. Nobody would ever truly know what grades — especially GPAs — mean without understanding larger trends across the University.

As of last year, the college-wide GPA was 3.46. Yet using the average rate of inflation during 1985-2000, I projected that it would be approximately 3.63 today had deflation never occurred. That’s on par with Harvard’s 3.65 in 2016 and Yale’s 3.58 in 2012. Still, Princeton’s grades are inflating at roughly the same pace as they were in the late 1990s.

While deflation aimed to create “uniform grading standards” for academic departments, it didn’t affect them equally. The humanities’ course GPA tumbled 0.15 point when it was enacted, whereas the natural

sciences hardly changed. Engineering and the social sciences each suffered a 0.10 point drop.

Grades have been 0.30-0.35 point higher in the humanities than in the natural sciences at least since 1985.

But the gap narrowed to 0.20 point during the policy’s peak. Today, it has returned to 0.30.

A’s were the most common grade in all academic divisions. Over twothirds of the humanities’ grades were in the A-range — C’s were virtually nonexistent — versus 46 percent in the natural sciences.

Although engineering and the natural sciences graded harsher, students were about twice as likely to earn an A+ in them as their classmates in other divisions. Unlike generic A’s, professors must file a special statement explaining why they’re giving an A+. Both are worth 4.0 points on the GPA scale.

“Even individual faculty within departments have very different practices in how they assign A+ grades,” an Office of the Dean of the College memo noted last fall. A+’s comprised one in twelve of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s grades. East Asian Studies gave none.

Slavic Languages and Literatures took the title of having the highest course GPA (3.75) among Princeton’s 36 departments. Music (3.69) came in

second, and Comparative Literature (3.68) was third.

Chemistry (3.21) rounded off the bottom. Say goodbye to the phrase “rocks for jocks,” as Geosciences (3.22) was the next stingiest grader, following its second consecutive year of deflation. Slightly above, Mathematics tied with Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (3.25).

Economics (3.34) was the sole department in the humanities and social sciences to have a course GPA lower than any of those in engineering and the natural sciences.

Classics led the charge for inflating its own grades, jumping nearly 0.20 points in one year. Anthropology and the Woodrow Wilson School trailed behind it with gains of 0.15 points and 0.09 points, respectively.

Mathematics, Computer Science, Economics, Chemistry, Physics, Mechanical and Aerosmith Engineering, and Molecular Biology gave more C-range grades than the other 67 departments and programs combined, despite having one-third the number of students in their courses.

The humanities’ tendency toward higher grading than the sciences isn’t unique to Princeton. Courant discovered the same trend at the University of Michigan, while former Duke professor Stuart Rojstaczer has tracked it on a national scale.

“If a student’s grade point aver-

age is widely used for consequential purposes, differential grading standards might do a good deal of mischief,” Courant wrote in his study.

Employers and selection committees often ignore them.

Most fellowships — including the Rhodes and Marshall — require candidates to have a minimum GPA of 3.7 regardless of their major. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that only onefifth of Princeton’s American winners of these awards over the past decade majored in technical fields, according to press releases that I compiled.

Professional schools weed out applicants by their GPAs in addition to their standardized test scores. Trevor Klee ’15, an LSAT tutor, flat-out urged in the ‘Prince’ for undergraduates to “take easy classes and choose an easy major” so that they improve their odds of getting into prestigious law schools. Top jobs in finance are similar in their GPA expectations.

Course level had a surprising impact. Departments with low grades overall were more lenient in their advanced classes. Engineering and the natural sciences had the widest divides. In Mathematics, for example, the average grade was 3.15 for 100-200 level courses but was 3.65 for 300-400 level courses.

“People who aren’t good at math would just get murdered by the third

vol. cxliii

editor-in-chief

Chris Murphy ’20 business manager

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GRAPHIC COURTESY OF LIAM O’CONNOR / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

Monday January 13, 2020

Opinion

page 7

{ www.dailyprincetonian.com } semester of real analysis,” Courant said. He mused that advanced sciences classes have students who are already skilled in their subject and few who aren’t, driving up grades.

Different exam curves must play a role as well, or else courses would give out the same percentage of A’s regardless of their level.

Courant also argued in his paper that large, mandatory courses have leeway to grade harshly because they don’t have to worry about losing students. Departments with low enrollments, in contrast, sometimes inflate their grades to attract students.

I partially tested his claim by plotting GPAs against last year’s average course sizes, which I scraped from the registrar’s website. Departments that had larger classes on average indeed gave lower grades.

This course-level effect highlights the grading advantages that elite high school graduates enjoy. Their

edge has particularly strong implications for technical subjects because science-oriented magnate schools — like Thomas Jefferson, Stuyvesant, and Bronx Science — send a lot of their seniors to Princeton.

The University’s advanced placement policy lets undergraduates start out in higher-level courses — above what first-years usually take — in which grading is more generous than at lower levels. Elite high schools provide the best preparation to score 5’s in AP exams, take upper level classes, and simply pass departments’ placement tests.

Likewise, if their graduates opt to retake an introductory course that they completed in high school, they will sit with classmates who have never seen the material before. As a result, graduates from elite high schools have a better chance of scoring on the exam curves’ upper ends.

It’s a win for elite high school

graduates either way.

“While the Committee on Examinations and Standing follows grading data and reports to the faculty each year on trends, the responsibility for grading resides with departments and individual faculty,” Deputy University Spokesperson Michael Hotchkiss wrote in an email.

Students don’t serve on the Committee. But he said that the Undergraduate Student Government’s (USG) Academics committee meets with it once per semester.

USG Academics Chair Olivia Ott ’20 declined my interview request.

All of these statistics demonstrate that the campus’ GPA obsession is ridiculous. Comparing a 3.7 to a 3.4 is pointless, since either could be the average or the exception within their departments.

Gordon Scharf ’09, along with University professors Robert Vanderbei and Daniel Marlow, proposed a

new method to make grades more reflective of students’ performances.

They created a dual regression model that corrected GPAs for inflation and courses’ difficulties. It would eliminate the need for policies like deflation that attempt to standardize grading — yet the registrar at the University is unlikely to implement it anytime soon.

Until then, the best thing to do would be to take Courant’s advice: ignore grades unless you know what they mean in a given field. He thought that they were “overused almost everywhere.” Professors’ letters of recommendation can make the “fine distinctions” — to borrow the words of a faculty memo — between “off scale, phenomenal and merely excellent students.”

“Undergraduates at Princeton have a pretty good life,” Courant told me. He lamented how “sad” it was that students spend too much ener-

gy trying to raise their GPAs instead of “taking the benefit of [a] wonderful liberal arts college.”

With deflation’s disappearance, Princetonians lost a reason to complain about grading. But they still lose sleep over it. I hope that this data will put an end to grade grubbing and help employers, scholarship committees, and graduate schools rethink how they judge their applicants.

If everyone focused on learning for the sake of learning, we wouldn’t worry about finding easy A’s to boost our GPAs. (See more statistics on my Google Drive, available on the online version. The full grading reports from 2019 and 1998 are also available.)

Liam O’Connor is a senior geosciences major from Wyoming, Del. He can be reached at lpo@princeton.edu.

GRAPHIC COURTESY OF CHARLOTTE ADAMO / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

GRAPHIC COURTESY OF CHARLOTTE ADAMO / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

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Monday January 13, 2020

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{ www.dailyprincetonian.com } MEN’S BASKETBALL

Men’s basketball beats Penn 63-58 to sweep the season series

By Elan Zohar Staff Writer

The saying goes, “it’s not how you start, but how you finish,“ and for the Princeton men’s basketball team, these words are becoming more real with each passing game — most recently, a 63–58 win over rival Penn at home. The Tigers (6–8, 2–0 Ivy), who won only one of their first eight games to start the season, have now won five of their last six, including a sweep of Penn (7–6, 0–2) to begin league play 2–0. For Princeton head coach Mitch Henderson ‘98, starting 2–0 is sweet, but sweeping a rival is even sweeter. “[Penn] swept us two years ago and it buried us,” Henderson said. “They bring out in us and that’s what rivals should be. I think that’s the best thing about sports.”

From the outset, it was clear that this game had a different intensity than Princeton’s 14-point win last Saturday in The Palestra. The Quakers shot out of the gates to a 10–2 lead, but Princeton answered

immediately with the help of a pair of three-pointers from junior guard Ryan Schwieger to tie the game at 10.

“They punched us in the face bad. We were holding on in the first few minutes of the game, but we wrestled control back. I just think the guys have been really locked in,” Henderson said.

The Tigers would not stop there, as they soon went on an 18–3 run to pull ahead by 12 points, their largest lead of the game. By the time the first half buzzer sounded, Princeton had seven three-pointers, four of which belonged to Schwieger, and the Tigers went into the locker room with a 36–28 lead. Especially pleasing to fans was Princeton’s newfound resilience on both sides of the court.

“We just didn’t get discouraged,” Schweiger said. “I think we got discouraged earlier in the year when we went down, but last game they made a couple runs and we fought back, and this game we were up and we just kept going.”

A soaring dunk by first-

year forward Tosan Evbuomwan to start the second half made it clear that not even the intermission could diminish

10–2 run. However, the Quakers were determined to make sure this game did not turn out like the last, clawing back

JACK GRAHAM / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

Ryan Schwieger led Princeton with 16 points in the win over Penn.

Princeton’s first half intensity, as this time, it was the Tigers to start the half on a

to cut the Princeton lead to six points with roughly four minutes left to play. A Devin

Goodman three-pointer made it a one-possession game with 39 seconds remaining, but once again, Princeton answered back.

With one second left on the shot clock, senior guard Jose Morales made an acrobatic layup to seal the game. A backup point guard, Morales may have been an unlikely hero to many, but Henderson put him in the game for a reason.

“He may be a knucklehead, but he’s our knucklehead. I say it lovingly, but that kid has a lot of moxie,” Henderson said.

With final exams approaching, the Tigers now have a three week break from Ivy games until their back-toback at home against Dartmouth and Harvard at the end of the month. Whether the break will be a roadblock that stalls Princeton’s positive momentum or a constructive period to hone in on areas that still need improvement, Henderson will make sure his players are ready for the rest of Ivy League play.

“For us, it’s like a whole new season.”

WOMEN’S BASKETBALL

No. 25 women’s basketball starts Ivy play with road win over Penn

By Jack Graham Head Sports Editor

Senior forwards Bella Alarie and Taylor Baur have participated in many consequential games against Penn during their time at Princeton, including each of the past three Ivy League tournament championships.

For rookie head coach Carla Berube, on the other hand, Saturday’s game was the first taste of both Ivy League play and the Penn-Princeton rivalry. Fortunately for Berube, she was able to rely on seniors with plenty of relevant experience.

Baur and Alarie, playing for the final time in the Palestra, helped Princeton (13–1, 1–0 Ivy) begin the 2020 edition of the rivalry on a successful note. Both recorded doubledoubles — 25 points and 11 rebounds for Alarie, 15 points and 13 rebounds for Baur — as Princeton raced past Penn (10–2, 0–1) to open Ivy League play with a 75–55 win. “[The seniors] have been helping me since I stepped

on the Princeton campus,” erything, we’re at an away Princeton took a 10–2 lead Berube said. “Both Taylor and gym, [so] you have to attack to start the game, but Penn Bella have been extremely significant in the transition. We talked about this being PennPrinceton a little bit, but we also said this was just another game on our schedule, and if you make it out to be too big, then your emotions can get the best of you.” “[The coaches] don’t know yet how deep the rivalry goes, and how important these games are to us” Alarie said. “ A big thing was just trying to stay composed … they kept us calm but excited about this game.

Berube also relied on her seniors to dominate the offensive glass, with both Alarie and Baur pulling down five offensive rebounds. Princeton out-rebounded Penn 44–25, and the Tigers had 25 secondchance points off 17 offensive rebounds, compared to nine JACK GRAHAM / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN. off six offensive rebounds for Grace Stone and Princeton beat Penn 75-55 at the Palestra, Wednesday.

Penn.

“We tried to be as relentless as possible and just go the boards.” quickly responded. Princeton after everything,” Alarie said.

The game was fairly evenly went to halftime with a nar“We weren’t going to hit ev- matched through 20 minutes. row 33–30 lead.

In the third quarter, however, the Tigers started to take over. Princeton began the quarter on an extended 18–4 run, with nine of those points coming from Alarie. The Tigers allowed just 12 points in the quarter and entered the fourth leading 54-42. In the final quarter, ten points from sophomore guard Abby Meyers helped Princeton extend the lead, and the Tigers coasted to the 20-point win.

Princeton had to survive an impressive performance from Penn first-year guard Kayla Padilla, who scored 27 points on 10–14 shooting. 17 of those points came in the first half, and Princeton did a better job containing her in the second.

“She’s going to be a lot of fun to go against the next four years,” Berube said about Padilla. “I thought we did a much better job [in the second half], all five of us, recognizing where she is and being better help defenders.”

Princeton will now have a three week break for finals before resuming play Friday, Jan. 31 at Dartmouth.

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