Tag: Princeton
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A Visit From Bill Gates
Bill Gates visited Princeton on Friday, accompanied by his father, a prominent Seattle lawyer who now heads the Gates Foundation, and by Kevin Schofield, a Microsoft exec (and Princeton alumnus) who helped to plan the university visits. After speaking briefly with Shirley Tilghman, Princeton’s president, Mr. Gates spent an hour in a roundtable discussion with…
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DRM Textbooks Offered to Princeton Students
There’s a story going around the blogosphere that Princeton is experimenting with DRMed e-textbooks. Here’s an example: Princeton University, intellectual home of Edward Felten and Alex Halderman, has evidently begun to experiment with DRM’d textbooks. According to this post, there are quite a few digital restrictions being managed: Textbook is locked to the computer where…
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Fear-to-Peer, Art and Science at Princeton
“Fear-to-Peer at Princeton: A Debate about Filesharing on Campus” will be held Friday, May 6, at 3:30 P.M., in Friend Center 101 on the Princeton campus. (directions) Dean Garfield, VP and Director of Legal Affairs at the MPAA, will square off against Wendy Seltzer, an intellectual property attorney with the EFF. I’ll be the moderator.…
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Frist Filibuster
Last night about 9:30 I was walking across campus, and I came across the Frist filibuster, an event that had until then existed only in the media for me, even though it has been going on for nearly a week, no more than 500 yards from my office. The filibuster is a clever bit of…
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Student Writing Blog: "Information Technology and the Law"
This semester, I’m teaching “Information Technology and the Law”. We’re reading a series of articles and court decisions on important techno-legal issues. I’ve created a student writing blog, on which students will post weekly essays on topics related to the course. Essays are 400-500 words in length, with due dates staggered through the week so…
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Princeton Faculty Passes Grade Quota
Yesterday the Princeton faculty passed the proposed grade inflation resolution (discussed here), establishing a quota on A-level grades. From now on, no more than 35% of the course grades awarded by any department may be A-level grades, and no more than 55% of independent work grades may be A-level. I had to miss the meeting…
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How Much Information Do Princeton Grades Convey?
One of the standard arguments against grade inflation is that inflated grades convey less information about students’ performaces to employers, graduate schools, and the students themselves. In light of the grade inflation debate at Princeton, I decided to apply information theory, a branch of computer science theory, to the question of how much information is…
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Another Form of Grade Inflation
You may recall Princeton’s proposal to fight grade inflation by putting a quota on the number of A’s that can be awarded. Joe Barillari made a brilliant followup proposal in yesterday’s Daily Princetonian, to fight the “problem” of inflation in students’ ratings of their professors’ teaching.
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Princeton Proposes Quotas to Control Grade Inflation
Princeton is considering putting a cap on the number of A’s that professors could award to students, as a way of fighting grade inflation. Details are in Alyson Zureick’s story in today’s Daily Princetonian. To my knowledge, Princeton would be the first major university to take such a step. The proposal would have to be…
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Princeton Ignores Strauss, Makes Sensible Decisions
The Office of Information Technology (OIT) here at Princeton has taken the unusual step of issuing a statement distancing itself from the views expressed by one of its employees, Howard Strauss, in a column in Syllabus magazine. (OIT operates the campus network and other shared computing facilities. It is not to be confused with the…