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

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• Hacker News
• 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.

  by markus_zhang
• 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.
  by c7b
• 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.
  by rahimnathwani
• 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.

  by speak_plainly
• So MIT has been hiring worse professors for the last 20+ years?
  by doctorwho42
• The pass fail dynamic won't increase anxiety if you tell everyone to not fail students, though.
  by nemomarx
• > 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.

  by Jtsummers
• > 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.

  by chasd00
• 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.
  by eclipticplane
• 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.
  by maxwells-daemon
• 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.

  by GlibMonkeyDeath
• I struggled my freshman year. In high school, I never had to study or do much of anything outside of class. College was a huge adjustment. My high school also had an experimental math program that didn’t help anything. I’m a decent test taker, so I placed into classes my high school did not prepare me for.

  My GPA being low, but not failing, gave me the wake up call I needed to make the needed adjustments. A “Pass” wouldn’t have given me that wake up call, and a “Fail” may have just bounced me out, not giving me the chance to right the ship.

  by al_borland
• > 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.

  by Jtsummers
• Kids can absolutely still excel. This just means their "excellence" isn't reduced to a 1-dimensional score. Excelling by writing a phenomenal essay that you still think about or creating a relationship with a professor that stays with you beyond the class is probably an even more meaningful way to excel than achieving some test score
  by culi
• To those saying this is soft: https://registrar.mit.edu/classes-grades-evaluations/grades/...

  If you want to say MIT is soft. Feel free.

  by ilc
• Pass/No Record is one of MITs best ideas for undergrads (that and S^3).

  It lets you actually focus on getting acclimated and into the groove without being worried about the difference between an A and a B.

  by samiwami
• 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.

  by keeda
• Everything I've heard about MIT is that the school itself is softer than others, but the students are very competitive, which makes it actually hard.

  Then there are Ivies and Stanford which are just soft.

  by frollogaston
• 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.

  by tzs
• 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.
  by hodgesrm
• 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?
  by AngryData
• 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.
  by locallost
• Pretty good question.

  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.

  by to11mtm
• 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.

  by dtj1123
• 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.
  by technothrasher
• Fascinating. Sort of an interesting experiment between the last freshman of no grades and the first with grades.
  by nuclearnicer
• 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)”

  by mikemcquaid
• 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

  by culi
• > 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.

  by guywithahat
• 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.
  by mrngld