Grade Deflation at Yale?

UPDATED: April 13, 2013, at 12:03 p.m.

With reading period just a few weeks away, Harvard students are busy preparing (or busy thinking about how they should be preparing) for the upcoming end of the semester. Yale students, meanwhile, work toward the end of the spring term with the knowledge that their grading system could undergo radical changes in the very near future.

Last week, after student protests, Yale faculty voted to table a proposal that would dramatically change Yale's grading distribution and scale.If the measure were to pass when it is voted on next fall, Yale would adopt a 100-point grading scale in place of the traditional 4.0, as well as a set of suggested guidelines for grade distribution (35 percent of grades would be between a 90 and 100, 40 percent between 80 to 89, 20 percent between 70 and 79, and so on). The proposal is partly aimed at addressing grade inflation.

Yale isn't the only Ivy League school to address this issue—in 2004, Princeton passed a set of policies to curb grade inflation. Those who put the Princeton policy into place in 2004 expcected other peer institutions to follow suit, but so far that has not been the case. Still, as of 2012 there were no plans to get rid of grade deflation at Princeton.

It's unclear whether or not Yale's plan will work out in the fall—which would likely be a boon to Princeton's policy. We'll just have to see if Harvard gets any ideas.