Tag: 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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…