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First-semester students in one University of Michigan college will receive either “pass” or “no credit” marks next fall instead of traditional letter grades to help “curb the mental health crisis,” sparking widespread backlash and prompting a national debate.
“While LSA students will still receive grades and instructor feedback in every course as they always have, final grades will not be recorded on their external transcripts and will not be reflected in their GPAs,” reads the new policy for the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.
The pilot program prompted national headlines, with many critical of the approach. But Special Advisor for Humanities at the University of Utah Hollis Robbins said she believes it could tackle grade inflation.
“Faculty are under immense pressure from above and below … they don’t want students to feel bad about college and leave, costing the institution tuition dollars,” Robbins, an English professor, told The College Fix via email.
There is also “great pressure on institutions right now, with the population of college students falling, with international students not getting visas, and institutions want to support the students they have,” she said, adding all of this places pressure on faculty to give good grades.
Consequently, the policy could prove beneficial by allowing faculty to award the grades students actually earned while giving students honest, accurate feedback, Robbins said.
She added that Johns Hopkins University used this grading system when she was a student there.
“Grades were covered for all first year students. And so I could see what it took to get an A or a B (I got some pretty bad grades) and I was able to improve my performance,” she said.
However, some JHU faculty members disagree.
In the Johns Hopkins News-Letter, Beverly Wendland, dean of the Krieger School of Arts, and Ed Schlesinger, dean of the Whiting School of Engineering, wrote that covered grades often “delay development of study skills and adaptation to college-level work.”
JHU abandoned a pass/no credit system for first-semester students in 2017 after it was found to “negatively impact students who perform well as first-semester freshmen.”
Further, a 2014 study of a similar system at Wellesley College found that the program shifted letter grades of first-semester students down by 0.13 grade points, concluding that this effect is consistent with lower student effort.
Other experts are skeptical the policy will be met with academic rigor.
“I don’t mind this sort of thing *if and only if* it’s paired with rigor, and the first semester is used as an adjustment to that rigor, and to allow students to take risks with the courses they take,” Independent Women Policy Analyst Neeraja Deshpande wrote on X.
“Unfortunately, ‘increased rigor’ is probably not the direction Michigan will take,” she wrote.
Many social media users are commenting on the school’s stated effort to curb the “mental health crisis,” and even Catholic Bishop Robert Barron, of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, weighed in on X.
Bishop Barron said he believes this policy will actually “exacerbate the crisis.”
“Electing not to count first-semester grades toward students’ GPAs in order to spare the delicate emotions of eighteen-year-olds is, spiritually speaking, about as dumb a move as a university could make,” he wrote.
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, UMich alumnus and Hillsdale College Professor John J. Miller gave the pilot program “an F.”
“What we have here is a crisis of coddling,” wrote Miller, also founder of The College Fix. “College is hard. Or at least it’s supposed to be hard. It should challenge rather than infantilize. It should also help students find ways to rise to the challenge.”
“Grades are a means by which professors can deliver good news, bad news and hard news.”
In a statement shared with The College Fix, UMich spokesperson Chris Sebastian said the program “is still in its development phase.”
He said the policy is “designed to help first-year students better acclimate to the demands of a University of Michigan education.”
“We will have more details to share this fall, as faculty, staff and students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts continue to inform the design, development and implementation of a pilot program,” Sebastian said.
