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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
First, I was a 'provisional' admission. Which meant that I had to maintain at least a C Average for the first year, Had to log a certain number of hours in one of the 'study centers' every week (Although I could technically do whatever, so I wound up reading a lot of books once I had my coursework done,) and there was a 1 hour a week pass/fail that was primarily following up on the study center logs and connecting students with extra help if the needed it.
Second, I remember a -lot- of people pledging a fraternity their first semester, and statistically it seemed to cause a much higher fail rate... In fact, I tried pledging a social fraternity my second year, dropped out in less than a week because I realized the time commitments and requirements would have tanked my grades; sure enough out of the entire group that didn't drop out, less than 10% survived through the full year.
That second point actually got so bad that, for my last year they actually banned Social fraternities from recruiting first semester freshmen... not sure whether it stuck or not after I graduated tho.
The same amount of people maybe that will not have quit and would go on to thrive. Two sides of the same coin. If you want to go to the bottom of it, it's wrong answers only.
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.
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.
ACT/SAT is still needed for merit based scholarships though so if you fall in the income bracket between homeless and owning your own island those tests are very very important.
Caltech, too. It was the entire first year when I was there but they have since changed to to the first two terms then normal grades for third term.
However, Caltech and MIT have a reason for this that probably doesn't apply to a large (35000 undergraduate) public university like UM.
Caltech, MIT, and UM all have incoming classes that did very well in high school. Around 88% of the UM class was in the top 10% of high school. It is 96+% for Caltech and MIT.
At all three most students will be going from having been one of the top students at every school they have attended to a school where they are more average. This drop on average will be bigger at Caltech and MIT because their students are clustered more tightly toward the top of their high school class.
Another thing that makes the drop bigger at Caltech (and MIT?) is that UM has a way more flexible schedule. For example if you take physics in your first year, they have I believe three different courses for that. One if for people majoring in life sciences and emphasizes the physics most useful in those areas. Another is for engineers and others doing practical applications. It is more rigorous. The third is for physics majors.
Compare to Caltech. First, there is no "if you take physics". It is a first year requirement. Second, there is just one course. Go to Caltech to major in English (which does occasionally happen! [1]) and your first year you are taking the same required physics and math courses that people there for physics and math are taking. Third, because admissions specifically looked for people with very strong math/science ability, the professors don't have to slow down. Those courses cram a lot into a short time compared to even the courses meant for people majoring in their subject at less specialized schools.
The net effect is that for a top high school student Caltech and MIT are much bigger academic shocks than UM because even though at UM you can find comparable courses structural differences due to its size and its much bigger number of students mean it doesn't make you take a bunch of rigorous courses right from the start at an insane pace.
[1] It is rare. The reasons some have done it include:
• They intend to be science writers or science journalists.
• They intend to go to medical school. Medical school admissions committees like English majors and they like a hard science background.
• They intend to go to law school. An English major with a serious hard science education and a law degree is a good fit for patent law or for going into science policy work.
Coincidentally just last week a relative recounted a conversation with someone who used to be a student counselor (or psychiatrist?) at MIT who said MIT should be even softer on students. WTF, right? The dynamic, the counselor explained, is that MIT is already extremely hyper-competitive to get into and so it already selects for students who are very self-driven and competitive. Hence they tend to take on a much harder workload than they can handle, especially because MIT courses are no joke either no matter how smart you are.
This causes very high levels of stress amongst a large portion of the student body. The counselor hence wished MIT had even softer policies to make it easier for students to walk away from courses with no repercussions.
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.
Personally, I don't blame her if she checks out for a few weeks. Or a semester.
Nor would I, but I'd also accept that she did so and failed a few classes.
Just like I did in the 90s. Although in my case it wasn't burn-out, but system shock at actually having to try to get good grades (Fairfax County PS then UVA).
Did that bombed first semester probably eliminate med school or an elite graduate program? Sure. But I probably wasn't cut out for either anyway. And it was a kick in the pants and got me to pay attention and work.
Yes, same here, for me high school was easy and I failed (or effectively failed, a D counted the same as an F) a couple classes right out of the gate. It was a lesson to myself that I never learned to study in high school and had to learn that skill ASAP.
Michigan and its apologists here would rob these kids of real-world experience, reducing them to infants. And then we're all disappointed when these adults act like infants.
This kind of applicant is now treated as table stakes for programs like UMich, and acceptance rates for impacted majors like CS in top programs have dropped to single digits.
It is ridiculously competitive to get into top programs now. I got into an Ivy in the late 2000s to early 2010s. With my stats from back then (13 APs all 4s and 5s, a 4.5+ GPA, varsity wrestling, JV XCountry, NHS, CSF, USAPHO, USAMO, Policy and LD debate, a 2200+ SAT, 35 ACT, 8 SAT Subject test), I would have been lucky to get into CS@UC Davis today and I absolutely wouldn't have gotten into my alma mater.
Policy/LD debate, especially if you were good, might as well be a minus these days. That just tells everyone you're going to spread "post-modern neo-marxism" / fashionable nonsense wherever you go, and/or be more slimy than the worst memes about lawyers could ever imagine.
Debate is actually dying, and for a reason. Good riddance, don't let the door kick your ass on the way out.
I'm pretty sure you would get into Berkeley with that profile. Also you can just major in math and get a job as a software engineer anyways. I agree that the system has reached the point of absurdity though. ETH Zurich and KU Leuven have the best solution to this issue in my mind, which is to let everyone in but make the classes ridiculously hard so that 50% leave in the first year.
This schedule is no different than my schedule from 30 years ago and I don't consider it problematic at all. You frame it as 15+ hour days by including all aspects of their day as "work" but no normal adult includes their workout time and their social engagements as part of their work day. Time spent in sports is fun, not work. If it is work, then quit. Time spent in gym class and lunch is not work. Remove all that bloat from your framing and it is a very reasonable workload.
It is fun when it is fun, when you can skip it or do it purely because you want to. If you go to sports club because you have to, it is work and not fun.
If you go volunteer or have to join the club for college application, they become work. They are not fun stuff.
> Time spent in gym class and lunch is not work
Gym class is work. Kids are not there voluntarily.
Are normal adults not "working" in a similar way to your kid for 15+ hours per weekday?
Comparable adult parent things would be up at 6am, prep kids for school day, in the office by 8am, 8 hours of work plus a lunch, departing the office around 5pm, transporting kids to/from some activities, dinner, helping kids with homework, somehow fit in regular shopping needs (food, essentials, etc), maybe some volunteering or hobby things, if lucky in bed by 10pm, and we're easily at 15 hours of "work" on a weekday.
we wake up at 7, prep the kids to school, they walk there alone then, we have coffee together, then I drive to the office by usually 9:30. have a proper lunch break with colleagues, then in the office until 6pm or so, then drive home, have dinner, put the kids in bed by 8, then we can watch a movie/do hobbies/etc.
while I work, my wife can do the shopping and take care of other household chores if needed.
We need to normalize a gap year, or at least a gap semester. Young adults need a break after the pressure of graduation and college admissions, and whether it’s work or travel, some perspective helps ground the college experience and make it a choice instead of an obligation.
In my experience, many freshmen treated their first year as a gap year anyways, especially if they took difficult senior classes. First year classes aren’t always as rigorous as good AP classes (depending on both the high school and the university), so you can skip or cram while partying.
I wish the US had mandatory conscription. Not necessarily military conscription, but kind of like the German model where you either do military service or public service (if I remember correctly).
I sure could have used the maturity, the money, and the time when I was younger. I learned the hard way that attending college when you have no idea what you want to do only delays your graduation date (major change absolutely fucked me).
The issue is that these conscriptions are rarely for the benefit of the person and are usually for the benefit of the nation. They are usually cheap labour or just bodies to put where you need a physical presence but no real skill. If the conscription paid the appropriate wage for the role, absolutely that would be a great idea and help those who were coming out of difficult situations such as foster and poor home life too.
> The issue is that these conscriptions are rarely for the benefit of the person
Issue? That's the best part.
> They are usually cheap labour or just bodies to put where you need a physical presence but no real skill.
That rhymes with many jobs and services people perform.
> If the conscription paid the appropriate wage for the role, absolutely that would be a great idea and help those who were coming out of difficult situations such as foster and poor home life too.
That would be one contingency, yes. In my fantasy, there would also be free healthcare and public, secondary education for any and all the performed military or civil service. In fact, I would even advocate for fast-tracking immigration and citizenship in a similar manner.
My state sort of has a similar policy. Any adult 18 years or older without a secondary education degree can attend community college for free. However, some n number of hours of mandatory community service is required every semester in order to receive the benefit.
So because you personally needed extra time to mature, you want to force a nationwide measure to force everyone to do the same? No one is stopping anyone from taking a year off before applying to college.
No, I want to force a nationwide measure for conscription or civil service. The bit about my benefit was to merely illustrate why I find the idea appealing. It was never meant to serve as a sufficient argument.
The reasons I would support such a policy would be difficult to describe in a terse manner. My one-liner justification is that such a policy would be have to be transactional. Citizens serve their nation and their nation servers its citizens -- far from what we currently have.
A gap year, no grades and claiming some kind of disability (30-45% of students were noted to game the system this way in some colleges) would do marvels, I'm sure. The only part that is missing is religion. Oh wait, Catholicism is now on the rise in the relevant age groups. Oopsie Protestant America.
Sorry if this seems naive but do students in America actually work that hard these days? Modern television and social media seem to suggest they are all on drugs and doing God knows what
Is she typical or atypical of the kids having issues? My bet is the kids having issues are ones that were less academically inclined. Perhaps they were misled throughout primary education (trophies for everyone, equality of results rather than opportunity, dumbed down mathematics, skipping physics as a req., etc.)
I don’t think kids like yours are having issues but rather kids who didn’t apply themselves academically.
Basically A or even B grades cannot be an average grade. C or 2.0 would be the expected average but of course this hasn’t been close to true since GWB introduced his idiotic policy.
It’s no secret, if you let kids (or people) slack, 80 to 90% will slack off. 10 to 20% will endure out of principle or habit.
A lot of this is just inflicted by parent culture and anxiety. Unless your kid applying to an elite school, most college/university accept between 60-80% of their applicants. If they have decent GPA.
We are making the kids endure that out of fear of their college, but stats don't back up the grind they make the kids do.
> sports practice until 5:00. Gotta have that activity on your college application, not counting other volunteering and clubs in the open spaces.
Still baffles me why is that even a thing that's considered at the colleges. I thought it was just a relic of Soviet past but no, apparently it exists in the US and other first world countries as well for some strange reason.
It really isn't. I've never played formalized sports in my life and had no problem getting into multiple universities (yes, a few decades ago but I doubt if society has become more sports driven; on the contrary people often say that due to the tech boom we now live in an era where if anything, unsporty nerds have too much power)
> You have 100 places on the course next year. You have 10,000 applications with straight A's. You need to put ~9,000 in the bin.
This is the situation for less than 10% of universities in the US. Likely a lot less than 5%.
I wish I could find the source (a university president), but over 70% of public universities simply set a bar, and whoever meets the bar is admitted. There's no notion of "limited seats".
I just checked 3 decent state universities near me. Admission rates are 76, 77 and 87%.
One of them has a 75th percentile SAT score of 1230. 25th percentile is in the 900's. Another's range is from mid 1100's to 1400.
I've worked in multiple top tech companies. I know plenty of alumni from these 3 universities working there - with several doing quite well (and very technically competent). Most of them did not even go to grad school, so it's not as if an advanced degree from a good name place helped them.
This idea that you need to go to a top school to get good salaries and careers is something only people who live in a bubble believe. It's true for law school, and not that true for business school, and really not true for engineering.
If I had to summarize my experience: Motivated students going to very average schools for engineering do quite well. Average students who go to top engineering schools almost always change their career path at some point because they don't grow well in a technical career. Top schools don't provide a magical recipe.
(OK, as a footnote, having gone to both a low ranked and a top 10 school, the one thing I will admit is better in a top 10 school is that networking is easier - which I'm sure does help in one's career).
It's pretty reasonable IMO. Shows the person can commit to something, can work hard, is competitive, likely social. Sports are also very humbling because natural differences in ability are very obvious, and chances are there is someone more gifted than you.
I think participating in a fairly competitive sports league tells you more than most other activities you can do.
> 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.
In other States, high school starts later like 8:45/9am. You can take classes online and start school later if you want or do dual enrollment and skip later periods.
> Gotta have that activity on your college application, not counting other volunteering and clubs in the open spaces.
Mine worked and were in clubs. Kids are remarkably resilient. In some States, work time counts in lieu of volunteer time.
> 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.
This sounds like a lot of undue pressure. UCF didn’t make you do that. ACT or SAT works and you have a couple years to do it. Not all at once in Senior year and you usually can composite your score across the highest tests.
Just to present another reality... a lot of kids coast through high school academically. They sleep through classes or play video games on their school-provided laptops, or play on their phones all day. They know about "minimum-F" policies where submitting 0 work earns them 50%. And they don't really care about getting Ds. Then some community support program assigns them a counselor who drags them over some finish line to get them admitted to a community college.
No, this isn't every high school student. But there are more people in the group I describe than there are in the group you describe.
Here's my point: There is a lot of ground between the two extremes. And both ends of the spectrum are making it into college of some sort. So it you think your child is under too much stress from taking seven AP classes, drop four of them. If they are overwhelmed by tennis practice, ... maybe recognize that removing all friction from a person's life is not necessarily a good thing. Work together to build coping skills. But no child has to be an Olympic medalist neurosurgeon senator CEO all at the same time. Who is "forcing" that on high school students? You?
There is plenty of room for people with 3.2 GPAs and only two AP classes when they graduate. Frankly, with some family support, it is not that hard to have a 3.8 GPA for 60+% of students.
But I've seen high school valedictorians with 3.9 college GPAs graduate and struggle to find a white collar job. What is the plan for that from U Mich?
I am still traumatizes from high school after almost 30 years. I had no extra-curricular activities but I had to travel far for the school of choice (I was an ESL student). Waking up at 5:45, 90 minute travel one way, then 8-9 periods ending at around 5PM. Get home at 7 and then do homework.
Then the never-ending pressure of midterms, finals, and regents exams.
That blows my mind. It seems so unnecessary. It also doesn't seem to work given where the US ranks globally in education. Is the problem what the admission process? In the UK, even to get into the most prestigious universities you do the same exams as everyone else, maybe a little extra-curricular stuff, and interview with the university. The amount of studying in the evening is no different than anyone else trying to get a good grade, and there are certainly no extra classes you can take (never mind starting the schooldays before the normal time).
If the sports and clubs are stressful, your kid should find other activities.
I did everything you mentioned in the nineties and aughts (my sport was year round and coach expected us to travel on our own dime to tournaments that lasted the entire weekend at least four times in the summer, and during the school year I was out of town most Sat-Sun at tournaments, which take way more time than the couple hours a volleyball game lasts or whatever), and volunteer activities that lasted until 10pm for a few week stretches a few times a year.
I had a blast doing things I loved. Counting travel, 30+ hours a week of sports. School from 6:30 to 3:30 (because I took an extra AP physics class that happened before school officially started). I acted in community theatre. I did martial arts. I quit tennis to teach acting for the YMCA my senior year.
Why doesn't your kid love the sport she plays? Why doesn't she love the volunteer activities? Those are meant to be FUN. Like, that's why the colleges want them: to see why she's an interesting person, not a time-management robot. They can tell these things, so stop gaming the system ad find a hobby she'll be so obsessed with that she'll write a college entrance essay all about how it made her a more interesting person.
There is no adcom in the world that is trying to find a selfless 17yo who does drudgery because it's expected of them. They're trying to find people who LOVE building for Habitat, who want to be chefs and serve at a soup kitchen, who LOVE God and ran tech support during COVID for their church livestream, etc.
> 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,
My neighborhood and social circle have a number of high school age children, some aiming for high ranking universities.
None of them have these grueling 15 hour day schedules you’re describing.
I don’t even know of a high school around me that starts at 7:30AM.
What universities are you targeting with such an extreme schedule?
There are some parallels here to the people who say that everyone in tech is working 80 hour weeks: If you get pulled into one of these bubbles you are surrounded by others doing the same thing and it starts to feel like everyone is doing it. You assume everyone, everywhere is having the same experience. The people outside the bubble are left puzzled by these descriptions.
> I don’t even know of a high school around me that starts at 7:30AM.
Within 30 minutes in each direction this was the normal start time for practically all high schools in my area growing up. Where I live now my niece who I occasionally drive to school when weather is bad starts at 7:30. We need to leave her house by 6:45 to make it on time with traffic.
The reason for the absurd starting times was always explained that bussing schedules forced it. They did not want to start grade school so early, and the same busses ran routes for both. One or the other had to start 60-90 minutes before the other.
I’d sleep in my clothes and try to make it out the door to be at my bus stop by 6:40 every morning. Luckily I had a really great bus driver who knew where I’d live and if I was running late would stop outside my house and honk.
You spent the entire morning extremely tired and a lot of kids slept through study hall or classes. The early study hall was coveted for this reason - additional time to sleep.
This was pretty much every bog standard public or private (think catholic schools) high school in the area.
I had this same schedule at a mediocre school in small town USA in the 80s. The AP science course started at 7:30am to give us time for lab work (e.g. dissection in biology). After school activities continued until 4:30, longer if it’s an away game. Homework, part-time job, one off events. It didn’t feel overwhelming at the time, but kids today are soft.
Hi from Germany here I have had to for the largest part of my School life grt up at 6:15 so i could be in school at 8:00 then i often had school until 15-17 and had to do homewerk after aswell. Only in my 11th to 13th grade did it relax a bit because I changed schools and also got better due to redoing some of the basics.
And mind you in germany Extra Curriculars are not realy necessary.
> None of them have these grueling 15 hour day schedules you’re describing.
I have contact with a lot of teens. This schedule is not unusual, although the truth IMO is that long hours and poor productivity form a vicious cycle.
> I don’t even know of a high school around me that starts at 7:30AM.
Irrelevant to the argument. NYC has 8am start times.
Notice that the hours were driven by involvement in sports, though.
> What universities are you targeting with such an extreme schedule?
Every highly selective school.
Plus they have no clue what’s really necessary so there’s a lot of “cargo culting”.
Plus, they don’t even know what they’re targeting until year 3 or 4 of high school, years after the long hours pattern starts.
> bubble
You are also universalizing your experience, no?
Frankly, looking at the map of educational achievement, most people are not going to college or not successful there, so this whole discussion of “student doesn’t want to attend their state university” is already a rarified atmosphere.
I agree that this is behavior destructive and unnecessary.
Same with my kids. At the bus stop by 6:30am, out doing sports and extra-curriculars until 8pm, then dinner+homework until 11pm or so, rinse and repeat.
I'm 32. In my senior year of high school, I woke up at 5:30 AM, my first class (zero hour) was at 6:30 AM, regular school started at 7:35 AM. school let out at 2:30 PM. I had extracurriculars until 6:00 PM most days. Go home, eat dinner while studying, go to bed at 11:00 PM. I took 8 AP classes and had straight A's. 5 on every test. strong ACT.
I attended a prestigious land grant university, like Michigan, and I was totally prepared and performed very strongly right out of the gate. I was competitive with elite students who had attended the most prestigious high schools both in the United States and internationally.
Today, I'm an extremely well compensated engineer. My household income is top 1%. My career is gratifying. I have a rich social life and a loving wife and child. If your children are operating at this caliber, and they're able to sustain this level of effort, they're going to go places, no matter what they chose to do. You are rewarded for this effort.
Cool story, but I also went to High School and Uni and it was not even close to that, and I also have cousins that go to Uni now and kids that will go to high school soon and it is not even close to that.
Perhaps I should disregard my own lived experience and substitute it for what this comment on the (dead and AI-generated) internet is telling me to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The bar is only high for straight out of high school admissions
If you have intention and a cool life story, no crime record, and evidence of a support system, and an ability to pay, universities would love to have that on campus
So forget the grueling stuff and contrived extracurriculars and just graduate, gain some life experiences - gap year, apprenticeship, endeavor - and then apply to colleges
If we're measuring this by hours, I had to get up at 4:45 AM to get to middle school. I didn't get home until around 4:30 PM. That's 12 hours a day just to attend middle school. I didn't get any of the advantages of AP classes, sport classes, volunteering, or clubs.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Our findings reveal that gradeless learning can increase motivation and reduce surface learning but has no significant effect on students’ later academic achievements."
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.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 24.7 ms ] threadWhat 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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember two things about my university.
First, I was a 'provisional' admission. Which meant that I had to maintain at least a C Average for the first year, Had to log a certain number of hours in one of the 'study centers' every week (Although I could technically do whatever, so I wound up reading a lot of books once I had my coursework done,) and there was a 1 hour a week pass/fail that was primarily following up on the study center logs and connecting students with extra help if the needed it.
Second, I remember a -lot- of people pledging a fraternity their first semester, and statistically it seemed to cause a much higher fail rate... In fact, I tried pledging a social fraternity my second year, dropped out in less than a week because I realized the time commitments and requirements would have tanked my grades; sure enough out of the entire group that didn't drop out, less than 10% survived through the full year.
That second point actually got so bad that, for my last year they actually banned Social fraternities from recruiting first semester freshmen... not sure whether it stuck or not after I graduated tho.
If you want to say MIT is soft. Feel free.
It lets you actually focus on getting acclimated and into the groove without being worried about the difference between an A and a B.
However, Caltech and MIT have a reason for this that probably doesn't apply to a large (35000 undergraduate) public university like UM.
Caltech, MIT, and UM all have incoming classes that did very well in high school. Around 88% of the UM class was in the top 10% of high school. It is 96+% for Caltech and MIT.
At all three most students will be going from having been one of the top students at every school they have attended to a school where they are more average. This drop on average will be bigger at Caltech and MIT because their students are clustered more tightly toward the top of their high school class.
Another thing that makes the drop bigger at Caltech (and MIT?) is that UM has a way more flexible schedule. For example if you take physics in your first year, they have I believe three different courses for that. One if for people majoring in life sciences and emphasizes the physics most useful in those areas. Another is for engineers and others doing practical applications. It is more rigorous. The third is for physics majors.
Compare to Caltech. First, there is no "if you take physics". It is a first year requirement. Second, there is just one course. Go to Caltech to major in English (which does occasionally happen! [1]) and your first year you are taking the same required physics and math courses that people there for physics and math are taking. Third, because admissions specifically looked for people with very strong math/science ability, the professors don't have to slow down. Those courses cram a lot into a short time compared to even the courses meant for people majoring in their subject at less specialized schools.
The net effect is that for a top high school student Caltech and MIT are much bigger academic shocks than UM because even though at UM you can find comparable courses structural differences due to its size and its much bigger number of students mean it doesn't make you take a bunch of rigorous courses right from the start at an insane pace.
[1] It is rare. The reasons some have done it include:
• They intend to be science writers or science journalists.
• They intend to go to medical school. Medical school admissions committees like English majors and they like a hard science background.
• They intend to go to law school. An English major with a serious hard science education and a law degree is a good fit for patent law or for going into science policy work.
This causes very high levels of stress amongst a large portion of the student body. The counselor hence wished MIT had even softer policies to make it easier for students to walk away from courses with no repercussions.
Then there are Ivies and Stanford which are just soft.
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.
Nor would I, but I'd also accept that she did so and failed a few classes.
Just like I did in the 90s. Although in my case it wasn't burn-out, but system shock at actually having to try to get good grades (Fairfax County PS then UVA).
Did that bombed first semester probably eliminate med school or an elite graduate program? Sure. But I probably wasn't cut out for either anyway. And it was a kick in the pants and got me to pay attention and work.
Michigan and its apologists here would rob these kids of real-world experience, reducing them to infants. And then we're all disappointed when these adults act like infants.
This kind of applicant is now treated as table stakes for programs like UMich, and acceptance rates for impacted majors like CS in top programs have dropped to single digits.
It is ridiculously competitive to get into top programs now. I got into an Ivy in the late 2000s to early 2010s. With my stats from back then (13 APs all 4s and 5s, a 4.5+ GPA, varsity wrestling, JV XCountry, NHS, CSF, USAPHO, USAMO, Policy and LD debate, a 2200+ SAT, 35 ACT, 8 SAT Subject test), I would have been lucky to get into CS@UC Davis today and I absolutely wouldn't have gotten into my alma mater.
Debate is actually dying, and for a reason. Good riddance, don't let the door kick your ass on the way out.
It is fun when it is fun, when you can skip it or do it purely because you want to. If you go to sports club because you have to, it is work and not fun.
If you go volunteer or have to join the club for college application, they become work. They are not fun stuff.
> Time spent in gym class and lunch is not work
Gym class is work. Kids are not there voluntarily.
Comparable adult parent things would be up at 6am, prep kids for school day, in the office by 8am, 8 hours of work plus a lunch, departing the office around 5pm, transporting kids to/from some activities, dinner, helping kids with homework, somehow fit in regular shopping needs (food, essentials, etc), maybe some volunteering or hobby things, if lucky in bed by 10pm, and we're easily at 15 hours of "work" on a weekday.
Yes, it's a lot.
while I work, my wife can do the shopping and take care of other household chores if needed.
In my experience, many freshmen treated their first year as a gap year anyways, especially if they took difficult senior classes. First year classes aren’t always as rigorous as good AP classes (depending on both the high school and the university), so you can skip or cram while partying.
I sure could have used the maturity, the money, and the time when I was younger. I learned the hard way that attending college when you have no idea what you want to do only delays your graduation date (major change absolutely fucked me).
Issue? That's the best part.
> They are usually cheap labour or just bodies to put where you need a physical presence but no real skill.
That rhymes with many jobs and services people perform.
> If the conscription paid the appropriate wage for the role, absolutely that would be a great idea and help those who were coming out of difficult situations such as foster and poor home life too.
That would be one contingency, yes. In my fantasy, there would also be free healthcare and public, secondary education for any and all the performed military or civil service. In fact, I would even advocate for fast-tracking immigration and citizenship in a similar manner.
My state sort of has a similar policy. Any adult 18 years or older without a secondary education degree can attend community college for free. However, some n number of hours of mandatory community service is required every semester in order to receive the benefit.
The reasons I would support such a policy would be difficult to describe in a terse manner. My one-liner justification is that such a policy would be have to be transactional. Citizens serve their nation and their nation servers its citizens -- far from what we currently have.
Force young people to work with and get to know people from other backgrounds.
I don’t think kids like yours are having issues but rather kids who didn’t apply themselves academically.
Basically A or even B grades cannot be an average grade. C or 2.0 would be the expected average but of course this hasn’t been close to true since GWB introduced his idiotic policy.
It’s no secret, if you let kids (or people) slack, 80 to 90% will slack off. 10 to 20% will endure out of principle or habit.
We are making the kids endure that out of fear of their college, but stats don't back up the grind they make the kids do.
Still baffles me why is that even a thing that's considered at the colleges. I thought it was just a relic of Soviet past but no, apparently it exists in the US and other first world countries as well for some strange reason.
You have 100 places on the course next year. You have 10,000 applications with straight A's. You need to put ~9,000 in the bin.
This is the situation for less than 10% of universities in the US. Likely a lot less than 5%.
I wish I could find the source (a university president), but over 70% of public universities simply set a bar, and whoever meets the bar is admitted. There's no notion of "limited seats".
I just checked 3 decent state universities near me. Admission rates are 76, 77 and 87%.
One of them has a 75th percentile SAT score of 1230. 25th percentile is in the 900's. Another's range is from mid 1100's to 1400.
I've worked in multiple top tech companies. I know plenty of alumni from these 3 universities working there - with several doing quite well (and very technically competent). Most of them did not even go to grad school, so it's not as if an advanced degree from a good name place helped them.
This idea that you need to go to a top school to get good salaries and careers is something only people who live in a bubble believe. It's true for law school, and not that true for business school, and really not true for engineering.
If I had to summarize my experience: Motivated students going to very average schools for engineering do quite well. Average students who go to top engineering schools almost always change their career path at some point because they don't grow well in a technical career. Top schools don't provide a magical recipe.
(OK, as a footnote, having gone to both a low ranked and a top 10 school, the one thing I will admit is better in a top 10 school is that networking is easier - which I'm sure does help in one's career).
I think participating in a fairly competitive sports league tells you more than most other activities you can do.
> 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.
In other States, high school starts later like 8:45/9am. You can take classes online and start school later if you want or do dual enrollment and skip later periods.
> Gotta have that activity on your college application, not counting other volunteering and clubs in the open spaces.
Mine worked and were in clubs. Kids are remarkably resilient. In some States, work time counts in lieu of volunteer time.
> 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.
This sounds like a lot of undue pressure. UCF didn’t make you do that. ACT or SAT works and you have a couple years to do it. Not all at once in Senior year and you usually can composite your score across the highest tests.
No, this isn't every high school student. But there are more people in the group I describe than there are in the group you describe.
Here's my point: There is a lot of ground between the two extremes. And both ends of the spectrum are making it into college of some sort. So it you think your child is under too much stress from taking seven AP classes, drop four of them. If they are overwhelmed by tennis practice, ... maybe recognize that removing all friction from a person's life is not necessarily a good thing. Work together to build coping skills. But no child has to be an Olympic medalist neurosurgeon senator CEO all at the same time. Who is "forcing" that on high school students? You?
There is plenty of room for people with 3.2 GPAs and only two AP classes when they graduate. Frankly, with some family support, it is not that hard to have a 3.8 GPA for 60+% of students.
But I've seen high school valedictorians with 3.9 college GPAs graduate and struggle to find a white collar job. What is the plan for that from U Mich?
Then the never-ending pressure of midterms, finals, and regents exams.
I did everything you mentioned in the nineties and aughts (my sport was year round and coach expected us to travel on our own dime to tournaments that lasted the entire weekend at least four times in the summer, and during the school year I was out of town most Sat-Sun at tournaments, which take way more time than the couple hours a volleyball game lasts or whatever), and volunteer activities that lasted until 10pm for a few week stretches a few times a year.
I had a blast doing things I loved. Counting travel, 30+ hours a week of sports. School from 6:30 to 3:30 (because I took an extra AP physics class that happened before school officially started). I acted in community theatre. I did martial arts. I quit tennis to teach acting for the YMCA my senior year.
Why doesn't your kid love the sport she plays? Why doesn't she love the volunteer activities? Those are meant to be FUN. Like, that's why the colleges want them: to see why she's an interesting person, not a time-management robot. They can tell these things, so stop gaming the system ad find a hobby she'll be so obsessed with that she'll write a college entrance essay all about how it made her a more interesting person.
There is no adcom in the world that is trying to find a selfless 17yo who does drudgery because it's expected of them. They're trying to find people who LOVE building for Habitat, who want to be chefs and serve at a soup kitchen, who LOVE God and ran tech support during COVID for their church livestream, etc.
My neighborhood and social circle have a number of high school age children, some aiming for high ranking universities.
None of them have these grueling 15 hour day schedules you’re describing.
I don’t even know of a high school around me that starts at 7:30AM.
What universities are you targeting with such an extreme schedule?
There are some parallels here to the people who say that everyone in tech is working 80 hour weeks: If you get pulled into one of these bubbles you are surrounded by others doing the same thing and it starts to feel like everyone is doing it. You assume everyone, everywhere is having the same experience. The people outside the bubble are left puzzled by these descriptions.
Within 30 minutes in each direction this was the normal start time for practically all high schools in my area growing up. Where I live now my niece who I occasionally drive to school when weather is bad starts at 7:30. We need to leave her house by 6:45 to make it on time with traffic.
The reason for the absurd starting times was always explained that bussing schedules forced it. They did not want to start grade school so early, and the same busses ran routes for both. One or the other had to start 60-90 minutes before the other.
I’d sleep in my clothes and try to make it out the door to be at my bus stop by 6:40 every morning. Luckily I had a really great bus driver who knew where I’d live and if I was running late would stop outside my house and honk.
You spent the entire morning extremely tired and a lot of kids slept through study hall or classes. The early study hall was coveted for this reason - additional time to sleep.
This was pretty much every bog standard public or private (think catholic schools) high school in the area.
Eventually we wound up home schooling / remote schooling during Covid and moved to a spot where the school started much later.
Frankly though, not late enough. I let them sleep until 10 during COVID and I feel it was positive for everyone involved.
I have contact with a lot of teens. This schedule is not unusual, although the truth IMO is that long hours and poor productivity form a vicious cycle.
> I don’t even know of a high school around me that starts at 7:30AM.
Irrelevant to the argument. NYC has 8am start times.
Notice that the hours were driven by involvement in sports, though.
> What universities are you targeting with such an extreme schedule?
Every highly selective school.
Plus they have no clue what’s really necessary so there’s a lot of “cargo culting”.
Plus, they don’t even know what they’re targeting until year 3 or 4 of high school, years after the long hours pattern starts.
> bubble
You are also universalizing your experience, no?
Frankly, looking at the map of educational achievement, most people are not going to college or not successful there, so this whole discussion of “student doesn’t want to attend their state university” is already a rarified atmosphere.
I agree that this is behavior destructive and unnecessary.
Is it possible that the kids who have to study very very long hours to get a GPA decent enough to get into college are just not that sharp?
I did the whole APs, sports, volunteering thing too, and managed to do just fine in college.
Kids today are just so fucking soft.
lucky she has you who considers this. speaking from experience: think about trying to handle that with parents who dont have time management skills
I attended a prestigious land grant university, like Michigan, and I was totally prepared and performed very strongly right out of the gate. I was competitive with elite students who had attended the most prestigious high schools both in the United States and internationally.
Today, I'm an extremely well compensated engineer. My household income is top 1%. My career is gratifying. I have a rich social life and a loving wife and child. If your children are operating at this caliber, and they're able to sustain this level of effort, they're going to go places, no matter what they chose to do. You are rewarded for this effort.
Perhaps I should disregard my own lived experience and substitute it for what this comment on the (dead and AI-generated) internet is telling me to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The bar is only high for straight out of high school admissions
If you have intention and a cool life story, no crime record, and evidence of a support system, and an ability to pay, universities would love to have that on campus
So forget the grueling stuff and contrived extracurriculars and just graduate, gain some life experiences - gap year, apprenticeship, endeavor - and then apply to colleges
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Eventually this will lower the bar for everyone.
But this also seems like it is just kicking the can down the road.
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.
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."