Michigan says hiding freshman grades with ‘pass’ and ‘no credit’ will ease the mental health crisis on campus. Johns Hopkins and Dartmouth tried comparable protective policies. Both walked them back.
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It’s been more than 20 years, but I can still feel the shock of seeing the letter “F” on my first college English test.
It was a serious blow to my pride. Worse, it threatened the scholarships I needed to afford college, as they depended on a solid GPA.
I was a freshman at Hillsdale College, a liberal arts school in Michigan, and English had always been my strongest subject. I felt confident about my abilities.
When I showed up later that day in my professor’s office (yes, I cried), I discovered that I had completely missed an important page of the exam. Rather than let me redo the test, he kindly yet firmly told me I had plenty of time to make up for the bad grade.
And I did. While devastating at the time, this was an integral learning experience for me.
Skip to the present. At the University of Michigan, just down the road, administrators in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts don’t think their freshman students can handle the hard truth of a bad grade.
Starting in fall 2027, the school will hide grades from first-semester freshmen so they can “start strong” and help “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.” Instead of letter grades, first-semester students will see only “pass” or “no credit” on their transcripts.
This is the latest bad idea from a university flush with them. From a costly, failed diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy to bias response teams that curtailed free speech, Michigan seems to think college is for coddling students – not preparing them for the rigor of real life.
Does academic excellence matter? More colleges are saying it does. Not Michigan.
The LSA college says the purpose of the pilot program is to help students “establish early momentum.”
“Our goal is to help first-year students acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys – core elements of a liberal arts and sciences education,” the Michigan website states.
It’s worth asking, though, how students will know they are building positive momentum if they aren’t getting accurate feedback on their performance. Plus, according to MLive, more than 70% of undergrads had grades in the “A” range in 2022, indicating grades are fairly meaningless anyway.
With this new policy, Michigan is bucking a trend at other elite schools, which are moving the opposite direction: cutting back on grade inflation (Harvard) and reinstating the SAT for admissions (Dartmouth).
Neetu Arnold, an education policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute who drew wide attention to Michigan’s new policy in a viral post, says she’s observed a growing divide in how universities approach academic standards.
“I see this (Michigan) policy less as a mental health initiative and more as an attempt to boost retention and graduation rates,” Arnold told me. “I’m skeptical that it ends well. I worry students will be less engaged, which could lead to declining quality of courses.”
Well-meaning policies, like hiding grades, often have the opposite effect
A handful of other colleges have experimented with hiding grades from freshmen. That includes John Hopkins University. Yet after more than four decades of the practice, the university stopped doing this in 2017.
Why? According to a 2016 student newsletter, Johns Hopkins deans told students the policy was ending because faculty said covered grades too often delayed students from developing study skills and adapting to college-level work.
Similarly, after COVID-19 hit, many universities dropped required standardized tests for admissions in an effort to boost diversity. Then in 2024, Dartmouth reversed course and reinstated them, after an internal study turned up an unintended consequence.
The university found that when testing was optional, economically disadvantaged students sometimes withheld their scores – wrongly assuming they were too low to help them.
“Our bottom line is simple: we believe a standardized testing requirement will improve − not detract from − our ability to bring the most promising and diverse students to our campus,” Dartmouth said at the time.
Since then, other top universities have reinstated standardized tests. Not Michigan, though.
College is supposed to be tough – and it’s supposed to prepare students for work and life. Grappling with hard ideas, as well as bad grades, is all part of the higher education journey.
Oh, and that Hillsdale professor who gave me my worst grade? I asked him to officiate my wedding.
Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on X: @Ingrid_Jacques