alt Hacker NewsU of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
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What are grades for?
If for potential employers, then first semester doesn’t matter a whole lot.
If for students, then sounds like they are getting the feedback they need w this approach.
I guess the question is one of comparability across schools.
The University of Michigan has around a 15% acceptance rate. How is it possible that they’re letting in kids who aren’t ready to do college level work? What are they selecting for?
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.
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.
I think the consternation here isn’t warranted.
If a large enough proportion of incoming students need an adjustment period, surely it’s better to have one than not.
Also, it’s misdirected. If incoming students aren’t prepared for college, that’s a problem at the high school level (possibly earlier, too). A university is going to do better for its students if it adjusts to reality rather than expecting it to adjust to tradition.
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 grew up in the UK. When I started working full time, I had three academic things on my CV:
- 11 GCSE grades
- 4 A level grades
- 1 University degree
For virtually all of these, the grades/results were determined by exams taken at the end of a period of study:
- GCSE exams taken at ~16yo
- A level exams taken at ~18yo
- University finals taken at ~21yo
At the time, I thought it was very very strange that my GCSE grades for English Language and English Literature were not based on exams, but on a bunch of essays I had written over a two year period.
It seemed strange because those past essays did not measure my current capability, but something else.
But this (measuring students on performance over multiple years) is the norm here in the US. Sure, many students take the SAT or ACT or various AP exams. But many students enter university with their academic performance measured on their high school GPA, which seemingly doesn't even attempt to measure mastery.
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.
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?
Thinking more about this, I feel a good solution might be to let students decide whether they want to keep the first semester letter grades once they receive them, or simplify them down to a pass/no-pass.
That way there's still an incentive to do good work, and students who do well still get to receive the benefit of keeping the letter grade. Students who do poorly receive the letter grade as feedback, but have a one-off chance to reduce the impact and try again the next semester.
Soon the whole US academia reputation will go down the drain and the degrees we all worked so hard for will have no meaning. How to shoot oneself in the foot 101.
For people that find this controversial:
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."
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.
To those saying this is soft: https://registrar.mit.edu/classes-grades-evaluations/grades/...
If you want to say MIT is soft. Feel free.
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.
I think this is a long time coming given the trends in education. Students just aren't learning and able to receive feedback in ways that would have been commonplace before.
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.
I'm not sure how to feel about this.
On the one hand, this is good for people who need time to adapt to college. It's a big change, especially for young people who are living apart from family for the first time. You have to adapt to living alone AND an entirely new social environment AND a much more independent/rigorous academic environment all at once.
On the other, it may just delay the same result. If someone knows their first semester doesn't really count, they may not put in the time to adapt, then crash out anyway in the second semester when it becomes real. I also feel our society tries a little too hard to insulate young people from failure, and I wonder whether that means people avoid learning important lessons earlier.
I guess the biggest advantage is it lets someone spread the growth out over a little more time rather than getting railroaded at once. This approach is probably most useful for someone who is genuinely trying and struggling, rather than for someone who is not really putting in any effort. It's probably better to help the former, so overall it's probably a reasonable approach.
I bet some students who pass will face a mental health issue from not knowing whether they passed with an A or a C-.
The competency crisis is coming faster than anyone expected.
The soft bigotry of low expectations.
Breaking news: student anxiety peaks in the second semester.
I get the justification, don't necessarily disagree.
But this also seems like it is just kicking the can down the road.
Just to be clear, a semester here is 3 months only, right?
They pretend to learn, and we pretend to grade them.
Better than lowering grading standards, I guess.
At MIT first semester grades for freshman have been pass/no-record for several years now
research tilts towards grades not helping learners in contrast to non-quantitative feedback so there's that.
Millennial parents have fucked up multiple generations with their corruption of “gentle parenting”
Weird that trying to appease children, giving them no boundaries, and acting like entitled assholes isn’t a good way to raise a human.
Not that beating them into submission is good either, but the pendulum swung wildly wrong.
I see this akin to what the great Thomas Sowell calls ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’.
Eventually this will lower the bar for everyone.
In the US the problem starts in late middle school/early high school. For whatever reason, not having a remedial high school and not giving teachers the authority to push underperforming students to such high schools causes problems.
why even go to college if you can’t handle it and aren’t ready?
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.
I honestly support this. At least at face value for the devil is always in the details. I have had a similar discussion with many of my friends that are academics. We all, more or less, agree that grades do not really serve their purported purpose.
Grades in their current form might be the purest incarnation of Goodhart's Law.
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.
This sort of coddling and weak policy is setting students up for a rude awaking when they get into the professional workforce.
I'll just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coddling_of_the_American_M...
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.
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.
This is a bewildering article and discussion.
Grades and academic performance are outcomes. They're indirect stressors at best; why would one generation suddenly be unable to cope?
The real story is what has changed to increase the stakes of grades. I suspect freshmen are taking out historic debt to contend with food, housing, and tuition costs meanwhile the entry-level job market is extraordinarily competitive. There is no room for error.