The University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts is trying out something new this coming term: a dual grading system in which professors give students ordinary letter grades based on the quality of their work, but what shows up on the student’s transcript is either a “pass” or “no credit”.
The initiative applies just to first-semester students.
The idea, it seems, is to bring about the benefits of both graded and ungraded systems, without some of the costs of each.
A benefit of grades is that they are a relatively practicable way for instructors to inform students about how well they’re learning the relevant material and skills, at least insofar as that’s demonstrated on course assignments. A benefit of having no grades (or ungrading) is that students might be more encouraged to explore new subjects, less concerned that their unfamiliarity might put them at a disadvantage, grade-wise. And perhaps liberating students from a significant pressure to instrumentalize their learning might help some of them develop better attitudes about the value of their own education. Furthermore, instructors might be less susceptible to grade inflation pressures and less targeted by grade grubbers, and may be able to provide students with more honest feedback about their work.
The University of Michigan isn’t the only school to try out a grade-covering program. MIT has long had one for students during their first year (switching to first-semester-only a few years ago), and California Institute of Technology, Swarthmore College, Wellesley College, and others have had similar programs, according to news reports.
The university, in announcing its policy, also discusses grades and the mental health of students, along with some other reasons for it:
We believe that covering grades will help students start strong and curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals. 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. For example, they can explore a subject that may not come easily to them or take a course in a new field without the fear that a low grade may have long-term consequences. LSA is investing in students’ well-being and growth by fostering a culture of connection and collaboration—rather than competition.
Of course, the risk with any measure like this is that you get the worst of both worlds, not the best: students use the grade-free term to fulfill as many of what they think will be their most difficult required core courses, in essence prioritizing their eventual GPA over their present learning (some evidence for that effect at Wellesley College, here). Or they basically check out for the term. Meanwhile, since, according to The Hill, “the university will maintain final grades internally for athletic eligibility, compliance reporting, and students’ eligibility for financial aid, among other purposes,” there is a question of just how liberated from grading some students will feel.
Those who are familiar with how such experiments have worked elsewhere are welcome to share what they know.
One question we might ask is whether a grade-covering policy like Michigan’s would be good for philosophy programs. Philosophy courses often fulfill some core requirements, and also seem to be perceived as more difficult than other humanities courses. So perhaps students would have an increased interest in taking philosophy courses during one’s first semester. And perhaps the tremendous potential of philosophy courses to interest students in the subject who previously were unacquainted with it will be given a boost by the grade-free context, with the result being more students choosing to major or minor in philosophy. Wishful thinking? Is there data on whether the implementation of grade-covering policies led to changes in the numbers of students majoring in particular fields?
Reed College has been doing something analogous for (at minimum) a long time. But I lack any data on outcomes. (Though obviously Reed is very successful in admissions to graduate programs, in Philosophy and elsewhere.)
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘something similar’ – but my experience as an undergraduate at Reed was different from this. (Things also may have changed since I graduated in 2011). When I attended, students received grades for their classes, but did not see their grades unless they explicitly ask their advisor to see them. (Similarly, individual assignments received a grade, but you typically did not see the grade – only the professors’ written comments). Some students complete their education without ever seeing their grades; I regularly asked to see mine, as I thought that would be relevant to determining which graduate schools were reasonable for me to apply to.
I had the same experience at Reed! But (in my circles) there was heavy social pressure to *not* inquire into what one’s grades were. (One Reedie to another: as you know, the social pressures from bubble to bubble differ wildly.). And this seemed analogous to that: just as at Reed, the students *would* be given grades, but they’d not be publicized. (Of course, as you note, a lot rests on how you read my ‘analogous’…)
My university has something called a “Discovery Credit” which allows students to designate one of their courses as such and they’ll receive a Pass or Fail final grade. The intention is to encourage students to try new things without worrying about whether they’ll be good at them or not. In reality what happens is students who aren’t doing well in a course will retroactively declare it a Discovery Credit to avoid the lower mark on their transcript.
There is an experiment in not giving grades at all in chapter 16 (I think, from memory) of Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was of course fictional, but did bring out some of the psychological considerations.
I don’t doubt the mental health stuff is real, I just think whats being done here just kicks the can down the road rather than dealing with it.
First year is the cheapest/easiest place in anyone’s life to discover they struggle under high competitive assessment. There’s a free counselling service and a tutor whose actual job is to notice, there are resits, AND there are three more years to fix it. Whatever comes nex (a job or grad school, PhD) has none of that environmentally friendly scaffolding around it. So nobody’s been spared the baptism by fire into high performance high competition assessment, that’s coming. It’s just been shifted to the point where they’ve got rent to pay and nobody’s checking on them.
Of course the post already spots that students might try stuffing the covered pass/fail semester with whatever scares them most. Which rather suggests the pressure hasn’t actually gone anywhere!
The bit that bothers me more, though, is this: separating the excellent from the perfectly fine is a good chunk of what grades are actually for (functinoally speaking), and the people downstream genuinely grades to play that function reliably. Anyone who’s sat on a grad admissions panel knows what happens when the signal doesn’t work well. when that happens, we fall back on worse proxies, which in practice means where you studied and who wrote your letter. And Michigan’s keeping the grades internally anyway, and your instructor still tells you what you got, so the information exists. It just doesn’t reach anybody who has to make a decision with it.
If eighteen-year-olds are showing up unable to handle a competitive environment, that’s an argument for hiring more therapists, and probably for looking hard at what we’re doing to them at sixteen and seventeen. It isn’t, as I see it at least, an argument for quietly switching off one of the things a university is supposed to do.
Best comment.
It’s worth noting that Oxford has long since done effectively this: you need to pass an exam on the first year of your studies in order to stay in the course, but the grade you get on that exam has zero impact on your overall degree class (GPA, in US terms).
That said, the model works somewhat better for more narrowly designed courses with more of a cumulative-content structure; it’s not obvious how well it fits the more modular structure of a typical US liberal-arts degree.
This policy is a continual source of discussion at Wellesley. Here’s a paper by some of our Econ colleagues about what the data so far show, in case that’s of interest: https://media.licdn.com/dms/document/media/v2/D561FAQERn9MM1Ys83w/feedshare-document-url-metadata-scrapper-pdf/B56Z_yVpdwJkA4-/0/1786477190445?e=1787173200&v=beta&t=p9XgY06XKC1kRNmzM6UTeL-uCpvuG_B_Cyy8w5npRto
To be clear, a major goal of ungrading is to make the instructor-student relationship non-evaluative: to focus the instructor’s role, as much as possible, on fostering student learning (the “teacher” role in Thi Nguyen’s “Teacher, Bureaucrat, Cop” schema, which I think about often). This UM-LSA policy doesn’t move at all toward achieving that goal of ungrading, insofar as it maintains grades as a prominent feature of instructor-student relationships, even though the grades don’t matter for a student who passes. It might still be a good policy, but its pros and cons should probably be evaluated in terms of student wellbeing and course selection rather than pedagogically.
I frequently use a policy in my classes similar to the Reed one described above, whereby knowledge of grades is opt-out rather than automatically being presented to students (so they can focus on the feedback rather than gravitating to the grade).
Do you mean opt-in? I’m curious what percentage of students opt in (or out, if that is what you meant).
I’m sorry, yes, that was a typo–I meant to say “opt-in.” My experience, similar to the experience of some colleagues who’ve done this, is that about half the students opt in at some point in the semester. (Lower than you might expect!)
Maybe electives should be ungraded but major classes shouldn’t be. That way students have the freedom to experiment with interestijg electives without worrying about grades, but they’d still have to take weeder classes seriously and their employer would get a good signal of their academic progress in the field they’re majoring/working in.