Grades Get in the Way of Learning. A Worthy Experiment.

The University of Michigan recently announced that starting in fall 2027, first-semester grades for first-year students in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts will be reported as pass/no credit. Letter grades will still be recorded internally, but external audiences will only see whether or not credit was earned.

The university has framed the experiment as an aid to help first-year students adjust to the demands of college, giving them space to experiment without worrying about a grade point average.

This has triggered the ire of some, including Neetu Arnold of the Manhattan Institute, who posted on social media that the move was an indicator of lack of college preparation and that this lowering of standards was a sign of larger institutional rot.

Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute described the move as “swaddling” and offered a call for “ratcheting up rigor” in coursework. He does not describe what this rigor looks like, or how it is related to getting letter grades, but he seems to think this connection is clear. Walter Kirn, once a perceptive and singular novelist who has turned into a conspiracist crank, believes that such a move will lead to students not attending classes or turning in work.

On the flip side are people like Robert Talbert, the new executive director for the Center for Teaching Excellence at Texas A&M and co-author of Grading for Growth, who believes such experiments are worth doing, and Susan Blum of Notre Dame, a leading voice on alternative grading, who argues this should only be a first step toward further de-emphasizing grades across higher education.

Count me in with Talbert and Blum in believing that this is an experiment worth doing and we should be eager to hear directly from the students themselves as to how the change has impacted their orientation toward college and the choices they make about their own educations.

It is not surprising that the divide between the critics and the supporters essentially falls between outside think tankers who view education as a kind of gauntlet by which we shall sort the worthy from the wanting and people who work inside educational institutions who are trying to foster a culture of learning.

Arnold is a 2018 college graduate who has worked in a series of conservative institutions and has no experience teaching. Hess has been one of the most frequently wrong people in education for decades while exerting considerable policy influence through his position at AEI. It is sort of insulting that journalists feel the need to even platform the views of people who don’t know what they’re talking about, but thankfully, Michigan appears committed to the experiment.

As I have written repeatedly both before and after the arrival of ChatGPT, the chief barrier between students and learning is the transactional model of education. Grades are central to this problem, as students are incentivized to do whatever it takes to receive the highest grade possible, including outsourcing their work to a large language model.

In my many conversations with students over the last several years, they have consistently expressed a desire to learn, but also convincingly argued that often the systems they are working within do not seem to value learning for its own sake.

The most important capacity we should be fostering students is agency, the ability to make choices consistent with their own interests and goals. The pressure for grades combined with the availability of a homework machine robs students of their agency over their schoolwork.

Going to pass/no credit for a semester is hardly a solution to this challenge, but at least for a short while, students will be confronted with the challenge of deciding what matters to them, what they want to learn, what they desire from their experiences of college.

No doubt, some students will make what outsiders would judge as unproductive choices, doing the bare minimum to pass. This is the choice I made first semester at the University of Illinois in 1988 when I took a series of large-lecture gen ed courses that did not require class attendance to pass the multiple-choice exams.

I was a “bad” student, but my grades were fine (mostly B’s). What I learned, however, was that I did not want to sleepwalk through the entirety of my four years, and so I sought out some courses that did stimulate my curiosity, that did make me want to learn.

Other students will take much better advantage of the opportunity to explore without risk to the GPA, shortening the journey to figuring out what matters to them, what motivates their own best engagement.

Only a narrow mind believes that rigor is rooted in a letter grade. Every one of us has gotten an A without learning all that much, or a grade less than A while learning quite a lot. In the end, grades are rather meaningless if we are interested in learning and development.

Far better than rigor is developing the capacity for self-regulation.

The good news is that once the experiment commences in a year’s time, we can go to the source (students) to see what impact removing grades for a semester is having on their choices, their attitudes, their learning.