As those who pay attention to higher education know by now, The University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) announced late last week that they will be initiating a pilot study in which the grades for first-year first-semester students will be “covered” or not revealed in their transcript. What will appear is either “pass” or “no credit.” Students will still receive grades and feedback from their instructors, who presumably will be encouraged to teach in ways that they find most effective.
The university presents this as offering a solution to several problems:
“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.”
This has been covered widely in the national press and in the press concerned with education. (I personally have spoken with two reporters about the topic: at the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Detroit Free Press.) I have read numerous comments on LinkedIn, the New York Times, and elsewhere, both in support and, probably more numerously, against.
Let me say at the outset that I am enthusiastic. I think this is an audacious attempt to take on what those of us working in higher education recognize as a system that is not exactly working. We may have different understanding of what it means to say that “higher ed is not working,” but it is obvious that our students are not thriving nor are they learning well. It’s not all cell phones nor AI; it’s not still COVID lockdowns. This has been an emerging problem for a long time.
I have been studying higher education for over 20 years (after 20 years doing something else) and as I titled one book, students recognize, and have recognized for a long time, “I Love Learning; I Hate School.” (A student at a highly selective university uttered that line in an interview nearly twenty years ago.)
Arguments against the policy seem to fall into several categories: the “real-world” argument, that at a job people have to face tough consequences, the “in my day” argument, the “lowered standards” argument, and the “life-is-tough” argument.
I think all of these are erroneous but I understand that the centrality of grades in our thinking about school makes people believe that grades are necessary and useful for every purpose. Don’t forget that there are institutions of higher education without grades and their students often thrive and do well.
Just to put this out there: the majority of medical schools in the US have gone to essentially pass/fail grading structures for their first two preclinical years, with the understanding that students need to be motivated to learn well by something beyond grades, and that medical students’ mental health, already precarious, is made worse by a fixation on grades.
The job argument? If you go to a job and you don’t write the document the right way at the beginning, you probably won’t be fired, but rather you will be instructed on how to do it again. If you are learning to bake at a bakery, you will probably apprentice and will not be given full responsibility immediately. Vygotsky, a psychologist, talked about the “zone of proximal development,” the idea that we gradually increase our challenge with the help of and in company with others, as in the process of moving from one level of schooling to another.
Image from Mother Jones
But for me the most important issue involves the world in which our students are emerging, especially into highly selective universities like the University of Michigan and the one at which I teach (the University of Notre Dame): their entire childhood has revolved around grades and scores and metrics. This is essential: the acceptance rate at UM is 17 percent.
In high school, students and their parents can check the online gradebook daily to see whether they got the extra points for the extra credit, or to see their class ranking, or to see how they did on the biology exam. Add this to the teaching-to-the-test that has really consumed most of K12 education in the last two decades, with often-annual exams, and in high school SAT, ACT, Advanced Placement, and International Baccalaureate, and the notion that you have to excel at every single thing, from being captain of your sports team to winning state at least, or nationals, for Mock Trial, to your class rank, in order to enter a highly competitive school like Michigan, and you have students whose every waking moment has been consumed with metrics. Alexandra Robbins wrote The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids in 2006, and it’s far worse now.
Add to that our increasing economic inequality and the fear of falling out of, or fear of not entering, a class of security, and you end up with students who believe that all of school is essentially a gauntlet. Survival is not guaranteed.
This is not to say that students don’t learn, nor is it to have any kind of nostalgia for a golden age where all students were completely obsessed with learning in a pure sense, but most students nowadays see college as an entirely return-on-investment transactional enterprise. There is no room for error and there is no room for risk. The game is existential.
One final feature is that students enter college with disparate degrees of preparation and security. Some students have had what is essentially a college course, and may in fact have had a dual-enrollment course in college. And they know how to play the college game, knowing what some called the “hidden curriculum.” Others managed to get to college but almost everything about it is new, from living away from family to having a lot of unstructured time, to having papers that are not entirely guided by a simple rubric, to being allowed to visit faculty during “office hours.”
In contrast to the comments about how the writer had failed a course and this motivated them to try harder, failing a course for some will mean flunking out and losing their opportunity for college. This may or may not be a first-generation low-income college student, the kind of students we admit in the hope it will lead to some kind of social mobility, which is one of several sometimes contradictory goals of college, but do we really want such a high-risk first semester?
Grades have never been good at communicating information. Feedback with the opportunity to revise, to learn from mistakes, is what all learning experts know contributes to learning. A hundred years of research on grades shows their flaws. Current efforts at “grading reform” and “alternative assessment” are proliferating.
All of us who went to school “before” are removed from the painful alienating experience of students these days, with their fixation on high GPAs above all else and the disconnection between learning and school, and the fear of taking any risks at all. Perfectionism is not only an individual mental health issue but also limits the genuine learning that happens in classes.
I have been trying to disrupt the “game of school” for nearly twenty years. My students tell me that in most of their courses they don’t dare take a risk because anything that threatens to disrupt their perfect metrics will be too costly. My students work hard and learn a lot, but I don’t grade on the specific assignments. I have spent decades working on motivating them through intrinsic interest, just as the UM pilot program hopes to do: what can students genuinely enjoy learning? What will revive their sense of curiosity and wonder? What hard things can they attempt, without the terror of failing?
With AI available to take students’ courses, to produce facsimiles of learning, to produce surface-level perfection, what might we do to disrupt the transactional high-stakes school game?
UM may not have all the answers, but I applaud their audacity in trying.
Susan D. Blum earned 3 degrees at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: MA in Chinese Language and Literature, MA in Anthropology, and PhD in Anthropology
