Testing Moderate Madness: Legitimation and the Persistence of Grade Inflation at Princeton University

Abstract

Grade inflation is widely documented in selective higher education, yet sustained institutional attempts to restrain it are rare and often short-lived. This article examines Princeton University’s 2004–2014 numerical grading policy as a difficult test of a process theory of stable dysfunction termed Moderate Madness (MM). MM proposes that, under conditions of awareness and apparent reform possibility, institutions may incrementally accommodate and then legitimate departures from their own reform commitments. Using structured process tracing and a pre-specified codebook, the study reconstructs the policy life cycle from recognition through implementation, monitoring, formal abandonment, and post-repeal reproduction. The core MM mechanism is absent during early monitoring, when the original target remained publicly affirmed, and becomes observable only when the documentary record shifts toward reinterpretation and abandonment. Established rival accounts explain substantial portions of the outcome; MM contributes residual explanatory leverage regarding the timing of that shift, in a claim limited to complementarity rather than displacement.