Dive Brief:
- A group of Princeton University faculty and administrators is recommending that the school consider alternate grading for freshmen, such as “covering” first-year grades to show only pass or fail on transcripts, easing their transition to college.
- Alternate grading is just one idea on a list of recommendations the group issued for helping students — especially those from lower-income families — with academic and campus life challenges at Princeton.
- A poor student’s lack of money can make him or her more likely to take a pass on extracurricular activities, and therefore feel less accepted, than students with higher incomes, the group reported.
Dive Insight:
Other recommendations included using faculty mentoring to help high-achieving lower-income students, looking at using online modules to help retain students in STEM fields, creating online resources to help low-income and first-generation students with issues like emergency funding and peer mentoring, creating a centralized system for monitoring student academic difficulties, and raising the awareness of socioeconomic diversity issues through faculty, staff and student orientating training.
