16 ms·

U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’

• speak_plainly 2mo ago
  The stated reason for doing this seems suspicious. A pass/fail dynamic would likely maintain student anxiety, if not increase it. What I think is more likely is that this move will help them hire less qualified teachers and reduce administrative oversight as now they no longer have to worry about all the issues that come with grading, such as consistency, or the grades accurately reflecting performance. The quality of curriculum will likely drop significantly and this will be reflected in the student’s second year grades.
  • nemomarx 2mo ago
    The pass fail dynamic won't increase anxiety if you tell everyone to not fail students, though.
    • speak_plainly 2mo ago
      I would have anxiety if I was a first year student who wanted to transfer out to another school or program and not know if my 'pass' would be sufficient to get prior recognition of learning or advanced standing.
      • Jtsummers 2mo ago
        The resolution to this anxiety, like for all transfer students, is to contact the academic advisors at your next institution and work with them. That's what I did, I had taken a break to work during college and when I returned it was to a new institution. I sat down with one of the advisors and worked out what transferred, what didn't, and what paperwork was needed so I didn't have to take 1st year courses that I already knew but didn't have a clear correspondence to past academics. For instance, linear algebra was mostly covered in my calculus 2 course previously, but was a separate required course at that institution. The advisor discussed it with me (he was a math professor, almost all the advisors were professors) and was satisfied I knew it well enough, I just had to take a different math course to get sufficient math credits but it was a substitution.
  • eclipticplane 2mo ago
    Hire less qualified teachers, move to even larger class sizes with less support, and move more teachers into administrative roles, furthering the decline of education.
  • Jtsummers 2mo ago
    > A pass/fail dynamic would likely maintain student anxiety, if not increase it. Pass/fail means that whatever was a C before is going to be passing now. It lowers expectations compared to the previous grading scheme (in that a C no longer has a serious impact on your GPA, you still pass). If the majority of the students are getting a C or better, the majority of students would get a passing mark.
  • doctorwho42 2mo ago
    So MIT has been hiring worse professors for the last 20+ years?
  • chasd00 2mo ago
    > A pass/fail dynamic would likely maintain student anxiety, if not increase it. it will increase it because in pass/fail classes i have had you do not know if you're passing or failing until the final grade/result. With a grade average you know how far you are from failing but without it you have no idea. Maybe they keep the grading the same but whatever you end up with doesn't affect your GPA (good or bad), I can see that reducing anxiety. However, the students are going to be in for a shock the next semester when it's assumed they learned everything they should have first semester and class takes off from there.
• quaddoggy 2mo ago
  I'll just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coddling_of_the_American_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coddling_of_the_American_M...
  • SamuelAdams 2mo ago
    That is an excellent book that describes the changes higher education is facing in its students around 2014-2018. I have read it about a year ago. They really ought to do a follow up for 2026. From what I gather talking to faculty and professors, this problem became noticeably worse since COVID and the years following. A follow up book or study would be very interesting to read.
• AngryData 2mo ago
  It sounds okay at first glance, but how many people are going to get saddled with an extra semester of debt now because they didn't figure out they weren't suite/ready for college yet but were just passed along through the first semester anyways?
  • dtj1123 2mo ago
    Completely agree. My first semester of university was straight up hazing, which at the time felt like crap. The consequence though, was that every single person who stayed on the course actually cared about being there. Staying motivated for the next three and a half years was made so much easier because the first six months were so difficult.
    • jerlam 2mo ago
      People called them "weeder" classes in my university. But it's better earlier rather than later. The consequences aren't severe and you can change majors, lessen your course load, or stop those volunteer opportunities. That's part of learning how to be an adult. I knew a few people my freshmen year that were put on academic probation. They turned out all right after making some drastic changes. Others simply disappeared during the break.
      • odyssey7 2mo ago
        Apart from the notion of a moral obligation that may now seem quaint and old-fashioned, you’re talking about their customers who are paying for an education. The responsibility rests partly on the school for solving these challenges. Declaring students “weeds” would tell you all you need to know about the place.
        • mrngld 2mo ago
          If it's simply pay to win then the value of a degree from an institution falls to absolutely zero. If the product a student is buying is a credential that's supposed to say "I know and can do things, pay me money please" then in order for that credential to fulfill its objective then low performing and mediocre students ("weeds") need to be filtered out. Otherwise, employers and the wider world will quickly realize the credential is meaningless. See the problem here?
• quaverquaver 2mo ago
  research tilts towards grades not helping learners in contrast to non-quantitative feedback so there's that.
  • harimau777 2mo ago
    Huh, I never considered that grades might be intended to help the person learning. I always assumed they were just intended as a signal to the rest of the world that they had learned something.
    • morkalork 2mo ago
      Yeah, the students are being graded like meat. It's not for the cow's sake, it's for the consumer. I say this as someone who had to maintain a set gpa through to keep a scholarship.
    • culi 2mo ago
      I think that's possibly one of the main problems with grades and why they inevitably lead to the grade inflation crisis. From the article: > In May, Harvard University faculty voted to approve a 20% cap on the number of A’s per undergraduate course in an effort to curb grade inflation. It won’t apply to A-minuses, which committee members predicted would become the most awarded grade. > At the University of Michigan, a review by the news site MLive found that 74.1% of all undergraduate grades in 2022 were an A+, A or A-. A decade earlier, that percentage was 57.6%.
    • dpkirchner 2mo ago
      For the most part, the only people that see the grades are you, your parents, your teacher, and maybe your friends. Most of the world will just see a pass/fail result (degree or not), unless you also earn special awards.
      • otoburb 2mo ago
        You're right, but I understand that many graduate programs will ask for your undergraduate GPA and/or transcript as part of the application process. If one doesn't plan on applying to grad school immediately after undergrad then hopefully there is less self-imposed grade pressure.
• fhdkweig 2mo ago
  It's been a while since I was in college, but mine gave the bare minimum credit hours (3 classes) to qualify as a full time student and the classes were brain-dead easy. That seemed like a good compromise to get students used to the college life.
  • michaelfm1211 2mo ago
    Probably varies on area of study. Many engineering students take prerequisites with intense course load their first year.
• ilc 2mo ago
  To those saying this is soft: https://registrar.mit.edu/classes-grades-evaluations/grades/grading-policies https://registrar.mit.edu/classes-grades-evaluations/grades/... If you want to say MIT is soft. Feel free.
  • hodgesrm 2mo ago
    Michigan also dropped their mandate for ACT / SAT to obtain admission. So, yes, I would say that's pretty broken. Combined with systematic grade inflation American universities as a whole are removing any real feedback about student preparation, level of effort, or ability.
    • culi 2mo ago
      The UC system and many other of the top universities in the country have also stopped looking at SAT scores. Growing up with no one in my family having gone to college I had no idea how any of this stuff worked or anybody to tell me its important. Eventually I moved to a middle class suburb and saw kids hire private tutors for it. Meanwhile I remember 2 days before I had mine scheduled and had to find someone to beg to drive me there. I'm quite thankful that universities acknowledge how silly it is to assess a student's aptitudes from a single test score like that. I think personal essays and a more holistic assessment is a great alternative but I'm worried about the LLM age and the limits it introduces to that as well. Perhaps interviews are the future. It would certainly better prepare students for the real world
      • criddell 2mo ago
        I'm a fan of selection by lottery for kids that can clear some reasonable bar.
        • ghaff 2mo ago
          The current system is probably closer to that than a lot of people would like to admit.
      • 2mo ago
• joezydeco 2mo ago
  When you force high school kids to work days that are significantly longer than a normal adult to achieve a good GPA and get into a good college, you can expect that they are going to throttle back once they're away from home with way more free time than is normal. From my kid's experience: she was up at 6:30am, in AP classes by 7:30am (three more to go during the day). Classes were done by 3:00, then sports practice until 5:00. Gotta have that activity on your college application, not counting other volunteering and clubs in the open spaces. Then homework after dinner until 10:00 or so, sometimes much later. Homework assigned over weekends. Homework assigned over breaks. That's 15+ hours a day, every weekday, for an entire school year. Then you have test prep (APs and the ACT/SAT), college applications, writing essays and scholarship applications, college tours, sorting decisions, financial aid applications, etc etc etc. And now her college already has a few hours of orientation videos stacked up for her to watch before she moves in. Personally, I don't blame her if she checks out for a few weeks. Or a semester.
  • estearum 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    • vjulian 2mo ago
      Working like a dog like this is necessary if you’re gunning for the elite / upper echelon of society, yes. If you’re already in that echelon of society, it’s not necessary. Thank goodness I didn’t need to work so hard, but I can acknowledge what a shitty system it is. Help me understand why these children or their parents are gunning in this manner and working like dogs in this manner, to join into and propagate such a shitty system?
      • estearum 2mo ago
        Because having money is a lot better than not having money
        • deleted 2mo ago
          [deleted]
• tptacek 2mo ago
  Having put two kids through college now: this makes sense. First semester grades are a shitshow anyways, and aren't especially predictive. The first semester at an R1 is utterly unlike any ordinary high school experience and a lot of what you're measuring is just kids getting their sea legs. What's the point? If it's causing drama, just get rid of it.
  • alistairSH 2mo ago
    Maybe. Maybe not. In my case, that first semester of near-failing grades was the kick in the pants I needed to start exerting myself. I entered college assuming it was just as easy as high school. It wasn't. Not even close. And a semester of pass/fail wouldn't have taught me that lesson because I did pass, just barely.
    • tptacek 2mo ago
      So issue the grades but don't record them in the GPA.
      • red-iron-pine 2mo ago
        teacher tells you you scored a C+, GPA record just says Pass or Fail
      • doc_ick 2mo ago
        Or maybe that’s the wake up call kids need, without the penalty where would the learning experience be?
        • cindyllm 2mo ago
          [dead]
  • hgoel 2mo ago
    I was initially thinking they were being too coddling, but you're right, my first semester grades weren't all that good either. I was working hard, but it takes a lot to adapt to the much higher expectations of a decent uni. They aren't a meaningful signal for how capable a person is by the end of the program. But maybe the fix would be to not count them towards the GPA/permanent transcript, while still providing the achieved grade to the students so they have a measure of how they did.
• culi 2mo ago
  https://archive.ph/FBFjJ https://archive.ph/FBFjJ Given that 75% of all grades in 2022 were A's, grade inflation has already made the indicator value of grades pretty meaningless. I think this take from a student captures it well: > Louth, 20 years old, said he earned all A’s and one B in his first semester and doubted he would have worked as hard had the classes been pass/fail. But he thinks he would have learned more from his classes without the pressure of earning high marks. The first semester should help students explore and engage their curiosity. I think it's a good move and hope the experiment succeeds
  • mrngld 2mo ago
    But it's not true. Cute to say that, but I wouldn't believe it. Just like most students, given the opportunity to use AI to essentially cheat will often do so (look at the stunning percentages professors are detecting when they bother to try to figure it out), the same applies here; given the option to study these things more deeply or fire up Tinder, Facebook, Minecraft or whatever, they're going to do the latter.
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
  • guywithahat 2mo ago
    > But he thinks he would have learned more from his classes without the pressure of earning high marks. I don't believe that for a moment. Classes exist to force students to learn hard things, and tests exist to verify they learned the things. It's a nice thought but the reality is without verifying students learned things they'd start skipping class and not doing readings.
• everdrive 2mo ago
  Breaking news: student anxiety peaks in the second semester.
• timcobb 2mo ago
  Johns Hopkins has had this since forever
  • evanelias 2mo ago
    I was about to post the same; they adopted the pass/fail first semester policy in 1971. But then I was just horrified to read apparently they got rid of that system in 2017 [1], and now it's a normal letter grade?! Assuming that Hopkins still skews quite harshly on grading, that's an awful regression. [1] https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2016/05/university-to-end-covered-grades-in-fall-2017/ https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2016/05/university-to-...
    • timcobb 2mo ago
      Wow thanks for the update/correction
  • skt5 2mo ago
    +1. As an alum I've observed both: * kids who partied hard first semester since grades didn't matter only to struggle second semester * kids who benefited from this transition because they didn't go to Hotchkiss I ended up in both buckets and I have mixed feelings about this since it helped and hurt me. In the long run - it really didn't matter.
• nodesocket 2mo ago
  This sort of coddling and weak policy is setting students up for a rude awaking when they get into the professional workforce.
  • amanaplanacanal 2mo ago
    Seeing the purpose of education to be preparing you to be part of "the professional workforce" is the problem.
  • claudiulodro 2mo ago
    Companies don't expect interns or new graduates to perform at the level of a senior engineer. They expect and plan that they have to ease them into the "professional workforce" somewhat. Anyways, the biggest tech companies in Michigan are automakers, Dow chemicals, and Whirlpool. These are all respectable places and have different expectations than X or OpenAI or companies like that.
  • red-iron-pine 2mo ago
    [dead]
• GlibMonkeyDeath 2mo ago
  This has the knock-on effect that it becomes impossible to excel in your first semester. Both of my kids worked hard and were prepared for college, and they did very well their first years, as they were used to the pace and level of information. It's something they are proud of, and it gave them confidence in their future lives. By eliminating the chance to excel, we make life worse for students who should be standing out.
  • Jtsummers 2mo ago
    > This has the knock-on effect that it becomes impossible to excel in your first semester. No, it eliminates the grade and GPA award for excelling. You can still excel, unless you absolutely require external validation for your work. And even then, it's still college, professors notice top performers even if they aren't giving them an A+++++ and have to give them a Pass instead.
    • GlibMonkeyDeath 2mo ago
      In my opinion you are under-appreciating the external validation. Removing grades disincentives excelling. Why work any harder than getting a "pass"? At the larger schools (like Michigan), professors (if a professor is actually grading the class, and not an adjunct or grad student) are hardly going to remember individual performances on freshman exams, or even pay much attention.
      • Jtsummers 2mo ago
        This is one semester, not all, and they still will be getting individual marks (necessary to determine final grade). They can excel if they want to, and they'll have external signals if that's what they need. It just won't be reflected in their GPA for that semester. Oh no, the horror.
      • doctorwho42 2mo ago
        Classes in college aren't everything, I found that extracurriculars in college were more important than straight A's. I have only had one company ask for my transcripts and GPA. Ever! And guess what, they were the one company I never wanted to work for after the interviews. You know what the best companies I ever worked for cared more about? That I got the degree, and a million questions about my skills and projects that I engaged in.
• spelk 2mo ago
  My university let us take 3-4 courses, up to 12 credits total, as Pass/Fail, but only for electives. I ended up taking just one that way. The policy was really designed for the breadth year because in upper years, you had much less room for electives, but you could try a difficult or unfamiliar subject without worrying too much about your GPA. If you discovered you liked it enough to switch into that major, the course would then be converted to a regular graded course. I think allowing 3-4 Pass/Fail courses in the first year strikes a good balance. It gives students room to challenge themselves and explore unfamiliar subjects, while still preserving grades as a useful signal of whether they're prepared for college-level work.
• SteveMqz 2mo ago
  At MIT first semester grades for freshman have been pass/no-record for several years now
  • Chinjut 2mo ago
    For 58 years now.
• dividefuel 2mo ago
  I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, this is good for people who need time to adapt to college. It's a big change, especially for young people who are living apart from family for the first time. You have to adapt to living alone AND an entirely new social environment AND a much more independent/rigorous academic environment all at once. On the other, it may just delay the same result. If someone knows their first semester doesn't really count, they may not put in the time to adapt, then crash out anyway in the second semester when it becomes real. I also feel our society tries a little too hard to insulate young people from failure, and I wonder whether that means people avoid learning important lessons earlier. I guess the biggest advantage is it lets someone spread the growth out over a little more time rather than getting railroaded at once. This approach is probably most useful for someone who is genuinely trying and struggling, rather than for someone who is not really putting in any effort. It's probably better to help the former, so overall it's probably a reasonable approach.
  • wildzzz 2mo ago
    I think there's a way to make it work. If you do poorly first semester, you go on academic probation and must improve by your second semester or you are suspended for the next fall. If you successfully get off academic probation at the end of second semester, you can drop those freshman fall grades. Same with suspension but either way, you must have one successful semester under your belt to drop that first semester. I did really well my freshman year and managed to get deans list. Then I transfered to a much more rigorous school and didn't do well. I didn't enjoy my major, I was living in a house far from campus with three other guys I didn't know and didn't really have any shared interests with. By spring, I was on academic probation. I lived like a hermit and wasn't going to class much or studying hard. I was pretty depressed and my undiagnosed ADHD didn't help. I did have some highschool friends at that school but I hadn't seen them in a while so it was hard making the effort to see them. I got on academic suspension at the end of my second year and had to take my next fall off. I waited the whole summer until I had come back to school to tell my parents because I was so ashamed. I remember my dad was trying to figure out why he hadn't gotten a tuition bill yet and called the bursar office while we were at the beach in August. They couldn't say why he hadn't gotten a bill yet so he handed the phone to me and the lady on the other end is saying "you need to tell them you're suspended." That was a gut punch. I was actually suicidal at this point but I kept it together until I wrote them a long email saying how bad things were. My dad visited me and convinced me to see a therapist. This ended up getting me an ADHD diagnosis and a prescription for Adderall. I stayed in my room a lot of that suspended fall semester but I did join a club sport (while lying about my eligibility as a full time student) which lead to making some friends. When I came back the next spring semester under a new major, I felt ready to crush it and I did. I stayed for the summer and crushed some more classes. I moved in with a friend and got along great with those guys. I was also right next to campus so there was no excuse to missing classes. I met my wife and made a huge turn around. But, those grades from my sophmore year were an albatross around my neck. They ruined my GPA. My in-major GPA was decent but I was still graduating with a 2.6 (freshman year grades didn't apply since they were transfer credits). Luckily, my parents had helped me get internships and my wife's father got me in for an interview at my current employer so GPA wasn't a huge burden to employment. I really wish I could have dropped any of those sophmore grades. Obviously this policy wouldn't have helped me but I can certainly understand how it could help.
• RickJWagner 2mo ago
  I see this akin to what the great Thomas Sowell calls ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’. Eventually this will lower the bar for everyone.
• b0rtb0rt 2mo ago
  why even go to college if you can’t handle it and aren’t ready?
  • duxup 2mo ago
    If you're not a super high achiever, how would you know for sure? For most students college is nothing like high school.
• duxup 2mo ago
  I get the justification, don't necessarily disagree. But this also seems like it is just kicking the can down the road.
• Balgair 2mo ago
  No one's mentioning it, but also the disease factor. I remember the first semester in the dorms was mostly the sound of coughing. Building up the immune system takes disease exposure and that takes time. Addnib all the immune system depressants and increased exposure events there at Michigan - booze, pot, late nights, hookups, crowds, stress, etc - and you get a perfect storm for the immune system to take a beating.
• red_admiral 2mo ago
  Better than lowering grading standards, I guess.
  • TacticalCoder 2mo ago
    > Better than lowering grading standards, I guess. But both are done. Grading inflation is very real. The problem is not specific to US uni: in many western EU countries education level is going down the drain at a totally alarming rate. We're talking about kids coming out of primary school and arriving at secondary school with "good grades" although they can barely write, even in their native language. An official report from the OECD is saying stuff like: "29% of 15-year-old French students failed to reach Level 2 (the baseline level of basic proficiency needed to participate fully in modern society) in mathematics.". We're talking about nearly 1 in 3 people that cannot add and subtract numbers. And it's not specific to France. It's the same in other western countries. Education in the west is going down the drain while students in Singapore, Japan, China, etc. are hard at work. People are going to say it's "inhumane" to not grade-inflate. That we should let students pass the first semester without grades. But why stop there? Why not let students who cannot write, cannot add numbers, get their diploma? Neuro-surgeons? Plane pilots? Why not just pick people randomly in the population and assign them a role in society? No more math/physics/chemistry in first year of medicine: anyone can be a doctor. Really: where do you draw the line? Why stop after that first semester? It's Idiocracy. And people left and right, just like most in this thread, explaining how all the ideas that let to this state of affair are wonderful ideas that makes lot of sense because school/college/uni is "too difficult psychologically". The little precious snowflakes, we need to cuddle them.
• Otterly99 2mo ago
  For people that find this controversial: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2023.2233007 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2023.2... "Our findings reveal that gradeless learning can increase motivation and reduce surface learning but has no significant effect on students’ later academic achievements."
  • cj 2mo ago
    For some reason that doesn't make me feel better. If college is supposed to prepare kids for the real world, we should be creating environments that simulate the real world as much as possible. Creating a consequence free semester is the polar opposite of how the real world works. In the real world, you get a job, and you're on probation for your "first semester" when the scrutiny is at its highest. You don't get the privilege of easing into the job, you're thrown in. Shouldn't be any different for college kids. The safety bubble we're building around kids + young adults is not going to end well.
    • igorkraw 2mo ago
      Genuine take: maybe it would be more efficient for the economy and society, as well as better for everyone involved individuall, to make room for the ease in period as well, with a clearly communicated end towards the same, so people can acclimatize? Speaking as someone who grew up in a slightly more cruel world, but still received way more kindness than previous generations (did not die of previously deadly respiratory complications in childhood, got accepted into gifted children program for enthousiasm, not IQ, got recommendation letters for the same reasons, short sighted, ADHD) in my self evaluation, each time I got a break it spurned me to work harder and try more to "pay it back", and every time I powered through strict evaluation and scrutiny it left scars that overall impede my productivity/would do so if I had not gotten therapy to overcome them . Nature is cruel, but also inefficient. We have long since started building a "rela world" full of safety bubbles that let us thrive. Why not continue with this one?
      • pjm331 2mo ago
        Agreed, I dont get the argument “life sucks so school should suck too” How about we work on making things not suck
• brunoborges 2mo ago
  Just to be clear, a semester here is 3 months only, right?
  • Octoth0rpe 2mo ago
    4 at UofM, Sept -> Dec.
  • bell-cot 2mo ago
    U of Mich's standard seems to be 69 class days - a touch under 14 weeks: https://ro.umich.edu/sites/default/files/calendar/pdfs/Cal_2026-2027.pdf https://ro.umich.edu/sites/default/files/calendar/pdfs/Cal_2...
• ta20240528 2mo ago
  Tell me comrades, are China and India doing this?
  • red-iron-pine 2mo ago
    they sure don't. their fix is rampant out of control cheating
• technothrasher 2mo ago
  Back when I went to University of Rochester in the early 90's, the entire first year was not included in your GPA. So we still got grades, but they didn't count for anything. But in my junior year, the state of NY told the school that they would lose their accreditation if they kept it up, because they saw it as unfairly raising the GPA of UR graduates versus all other NY universities. So while my class was grandfathered in, the practice was stopped the next year for the incoming freshman class.
  • nuclearnicer 2mo ago
    Fascinating. Sort of an interesting experiment between the last freshman of no grades and the first with grades.
  • mikemcquaid 2mo ago
    Studying my 4 year BSc in Scotland: the first two years didn’t “count” to your overall grade and had more “required” modules/classes (e.g. maths for CS degrees). This had pros and cons: - it was nice to have a bit more of a gradual build - this would probably avoid some of the issues here - if you are lazy like me: you do bare minimum effort first and second year and then get crushed by both workload and lack of foundational knowledge in third year - if you apply to a US company, some will want to see your “full transcript” and don’t accept “I was too busy playing CS (Counterstrike) to study CS (Computer Science)”
• ungreased0675 2mo ago
  The University of Michigan has around a 15% acceptance rate. How is it possible that they’re letting in kids who aren’t ready to do college level work? What are they selecting for?
  • dbvn 2mo ago
    Once you cross a certain threshold, it's luck of the draw if you're selected. Clearly the entire thing is broken.
    • csa 2mo ago
      > Once you cross a certain threshold, it's luck of the draw if you're selected. For most schools, it’s the opposite. For folks qualified to get in, they will be selected. For folks at the marginal threshold, it’s luck of the draw. > Clearly the entire thing is broken. I agree with your sentiment, but for opposite reason. We need to scale down the number of people at R1 schools and develop a more robust system of technical and trade schools (imho). The spreadsheet types have taken over the universities from the professors (it started decades ago), so I don’t think that this change will happen unless and until the current system implodes.
  • cogman10 2mo ago
    It's a pretty different environment going from high school to college. There's a dynamic change that's pretty sudden where your parents are no long really in the picture for support. What they are trying to do is keep the kids that would otherwise do well but might freak out in the first semester. Seems pretty fine to me especially since those are grades that if we are being honest really don't matter anyways.
    • cm2187 2mo ago
      I wonder how kids have managed to deal with that for two centuries…
      • wolttam 2mo ago
• nobodyandproud 2mo ago
  In the US the problem starts in late middle school/early high school. For whatever reason, not having a remedial high school and not giving teachers the authority to push underperforming students to such high schools causes problems.
  • tartuffe78 2mo ago
    Teachers are forced to spend more and more time dealing with students who don't give a shit, and whose parents don't either. Source my wife is a high school math teacher
• dbvn 2mo ago
  If nobody is failing, nobody is learning
  • doctorwho42 2mo ago
    Then I guess you think MIT students don't learn in their first year? And havent learned in over two decades during that first year. I guess we should stop valuing MIT education as the peak of STEM education in the world!
    • dbvn 2mo ago
      Have you been to a public university recently? Its abysmal.
      • doctorwho42 2mo ago
        K, but that is not the discussion point.
        • frollogaston 2mo ago
          University of Michigan is public. And it's a great school, but the bar for admission isn't like MIT.
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• sauceontheside 2mo ago
  I think this is a long time coming given the trends in education. Students just aren't learning and able to receive feedback in ways that would have been commonplace before.
• storus 2mo ago
  Soon the whole US academia reputation will go down the drain and the degrees we all worked so hard for will have no meaning. How to shoot oneself in the foot 101.
  • hirvi74 2mo ago
    I honestly support the downfall of this system. The truly great and exceptional will continue to be such. Degrees are nothing more than a signal, and a weak one at that.
    • thomassmith65 2mo ago
      That may be intended as hyperbole. If it is meant sincerely, it is the kind of idea that falls apart in the actual world - especially if someone wants to graduate with Honors in a degree program that requires higher maths. That isn't to deny there is a lot of societal bullshit involving higher education, but that's true in many aspects of life.
  • OkayPhysicist 2mo ago
    They're copying a policy MIT has had for decades. Last I checked, MIT is still in the running for the best regarded university in the world.
• stack_framer 2mo ago
  I bet some students who pass will face a mental health issue from not knowing whether they passed with an A or a C-.
  • chasd00 2mo ago
    that's pretty funny and i bet you're exactly right. It will drive high achieving kids crazy to go without a rank or grade and not knowing where they stand relative to their peers. That reminds me of this simpsons clip where the elementary school teachers went on strike and Lisa has no one to grade her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h4GD2feZ8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h4GD2feZ8Q
• throwawaypath 2mo ago
  The competency crisis is coming faster than anyone expected.
• c7b 2mo ago
  Fwiw, afaik in most Oxford and Cambridge degrees the only exams that count towards your grade are in the final year or the final two years. Everything before that is basically preparation, and the colleges doing weekly supervision and regular mock exams to keep tabs who is on track to pass and who needs extra attention. I've never heard there was a problem with a lack of rigor or recognition for the degrees awarded there. So U of Michigan taking a small step in that direction shouldn't be the end of the world either.
  • rahimnathwani 2mo ago
    I did my undergraduate degree at Oxford. My degree class was entirely determined by my performance on eight 3-hour exams in the final weeks of the final term. These covered topics studied in the final two years.
• throw7 2mo ago
  The soft bigotry of low expectations.
• hirvi74 2mo ago
  I honestly support this. At least at face value for the devil is always in the details. I have had a similar discussion with many of my friends that are academics. We all, more or less, agree that grades do not really serve their purported purpose. Grades in their current form might be the purest incarnation of Goodhart's Law.
• fucktheMs 2mo ago
  Millennial parents have fucked up multiple generations with their corruption of “gentle parenting” Weird that trying to appease children, giving them no boundaries, and acting like entitled assholes isn’t a good way to raise a human. Not that beating them into submission is good either, but the pendulum swung wildly wrong.
  • smcg 2mo ago
    Children of millennials are not college age yet, for the most part. What are you basing this on?
• baggy_trough 2mo ago
  They pretend to learn, and we pretend to grade them.
• markus_zhang 2mo ago
  I don't know. Why are they lowering the standards again? Maybe they should raise the standard of high schools instead? Or maybe they can help them by giving access to mental health practitioners, or maybe set some mandatory sessions to help them for the transition. Anyway I think dropping first semester grades is a huge band-aid that they should never use. If we keep lowering the standards, maybe the whole education system is failing our children.
• dividefuel 2mo ago
  Thinking more about this, I feel a good solution might be to let students decide whether they want to keep the first semester letter grades once they receive them, or simplify them down to a pass/no-pass. That way there's still an incentive to do good work, and students who do well still get to receive the benefit of keeping the letter grade. Students who do poorly receive the letter grade as feedback, but have a one-off chance to reduce the impact and try again the next semester.
• rahimnathwani 2mo ago
  I grew up in the UK. When I started working full time, I had three academic things on my CV: - 11 GCSE grades - 4 A level grades - 1 University degree For virtually all of these, the grades/results were determined by exams taken at the end of a period of study: - GCSE exams taken at ~16yo - A level exams taken at ~18yo - University finals taken at ~21yo At the time, I thought it was very very strange that my GCSE grades for English Language and English Literature were not based on exams, but on a bunch of essays I had written over a two year period. It seemed strange because those past essays did not measure my current capability, but something else. But this (measuring students on performance over multiple years) is the norm here in the US. Sure, many students take the SAT or ACT or various AP exams. But many students enter university with their academic performance measured on their high school GPA, which seemingly doesn't even attempt to measure mastery.
• jmull 2mo ago
  I think the consternation here isn’t warranted. If a large enough proportion of incoming students need an adjustment period, surely it’s better to have one than not. Also, it’s misdirected. If incoming students aren’t prepared for college, that’s a problem at the high school level (possibly earlier, too). A university is going to do better for its students if it adjusts to reality rather than expecting it to adjust to tradition.
• randusername 2mo ago
  This is a bewildering article and discussion. Grades and academic performance are outcomes. They're indirect stressors at best; why would one generation suddenly be unable to cope? The real story is what has changed to increase the stakes of grades. I suspect freshmen are taking out historic debt to contend with food, housing, and tuition costs meanwhile the entry-level job market is extraordinarily competitive. There is no room for error.
  • oarla 2mo ago
    My personal opinion is that grades are one aspect of a filter that decides which college and subsequently which network a certain individual will have access to. It has a high correlation with intelligence but not linked via causation. Every generation has struggled with it, except now it’s discussed heavily on social media and other forums. Hence the impression that it’s unique to this generation. Are there challenges today that didn’t exist for previous generations? Yes! Are they more complex compared to what the previous generations faced? No!
  • wredcoll 2mo ago
    Famously places like china/india/japan/etc have extremely traumatic final exams. There was just an article about suicides from some kind of (indian?) final exam screw up. It doesn't take much of a logical leap to associate it with the pressure put on the children taking the tests. Presumably that kind of pressure ia coming to america.
    • 7402 2mo ago
      children? Showing my age here, I guess. Fifty years ago, 18-year-olds in college were referred to as "men" and "women."
      • nobodyandproud 2mo ago
        You must've heard the viral claims that the brain doesn't fully develop until 26? Nevermind that actual findings like https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260218031606.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260218031606.h... and https://scitechdaily.com/your-brain-doesnt-magically-finish-developing-at-25-heres-what-actually-happens/ https://scitechdaily.com/your-brain-doesnt-magically-finish-... say something completely different. Though auto-insurance claims do show some truth to late teens and early twenties drivers being...not mentally ready.
• jbs789 2mo ago
  What are grades for? If for potential employers, then first semester doesn’t matter a whole lot. If for students, then sounds like they are getting the feedback they need w this approach. I guess the question is one of comparability across schools.
• ratelimitsteve 2mo ago
  They're not getting rid of grades, they're just moving everything to pass/fail rather than letter grades. Afaic this is really just a reflection of the reality on the ground. You either get a C or better and move on to the next level, or you don't. Passing with a C fulfills the prerequisite just as well as passing with an A. Then eventually you either get a C or better in all the classes you need to graduate, or you don't. Cs get degrees. Then you go to the job market and you either have a degree or you don't. Outside of some extremely competitive internships no one cares how you graduated, only whether you did.
• dekhn 2mo ago
  "The tyranny of soft expectations" I was intensely stressed through high school and undergrad, then later in grad school, postdoc, full time job as computer scientist, then as a SWE. It wasn't pleasant but it drove me to achieve at far higher levels, in ways that paid off well in the long run (like financial stability and earlier retirement). Note: in undergrad, I specifically went to a school that did not have grades but still felt all the stress to perform. I suspect that as unpleasant as stress is, it ultimately can make us better people.
• maxwells-daemon 2mo ago
  My college (Caltech) was pass/fail (no quantified grades) for the first couple of terms, and I thought it worked very well. It did alleviate the some of the stress of beginning a higher-expectations environment, but it also let students explore classes they wouldn't have if they had to worry about GPA. I know a few people that changed their whole field as a result; the geology department was known to pick up students this way.
• krupan 2mo ago
  My best grades were freshman year before I started the engineering program. It would kinda suck to not have those as part of my GPA!
• SanjayMehta 2mo ago
  A few years ago a teacher was fired for passing out 0% grades when the stated school policy was a minimum of 50%. "Zero work, zero grade." 50% was the old zero, now zero grades are 100%? https://www.wmtv15news.com/content/news/Florida-teacher-fired-for-giving-0-to-students-who-didnt-turn-in-homework-494375231.html https://www.wmtv15news.com/content/news/Florida-teacher-fire...
• burnt-resistor 2mo ago
  Didn't UCSC try something like this? And didn't it not have net positive results?
• metalman 2mo ago
  As a "foody" I stop anywhere and everwhere there is groceries/food for sale, which means a lot of mom and pop family places,farms, farm markets, road side, etc, which means kids and others, making it up as they go along, involving heavy equipment, much manual labour, a wide variety of food processing equipment, sharp knives and money, often simultainiously. One local place seems to be staffed entirely with kids, that has an ice cream stand, bakery, fresh produce that they get strait from the field and clean and process right there, and a wide variety of local cheese, meat, etc, with a significant portion of the clentel, other kids sent to pick stuff up, cash bieng normal, no pause while figuring out change. Lets just say that the general level of competency displayed in these places is far far higher than what I see(and hear about) everywhere else.
• flufluflufluffy 2mo ago
  I was a straight A student all through high school; first year of college I got Bs and Cs, couple As, and failed one class. Next three years I got my shit together and was back to straight As, including retaking the class I failed. I would have appreciated this lol
• NichoPaolucci 2mo ago
  Soon they will start a program where you can either take a failing grade, or pay double tuition for those credit hours to get a pass in that class. When I has in school we had a similar semester during covid. The school offered the entire student body to either take their letter grade, or take a PASS/FAIL (Which in some cases would improve GPA). The idea is probably that if you give students good grades, they're happy to pay more in tuition. High drop-out classes and difficult coursework will go the way of the dodo.
  • pjm331 2mo ago
    If you are wealthy enough this already exists look up st Anne HS NYC - k thru 12, no grades ever, most kids go to Ivy league - tuition is like 60k per year starting in k
• androiddrew 2mo ago
  I think messing up teaches people to straighten up. But hey I’m a Millenial, maybe I’m out of touch now.
• asdfasvea 2mo ago
  One if the worst discussion I've seen on HN: I did this... Well I did this... My experience was .. Me me me... anecdote anecdote anecdote. Nothing but humblebrags, dismissals of others experiences with their experiences and reminiscings.
• tancop 2mo ago
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