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.
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 wouldn't blame her but anyone who has to check out should just fail.
This is about gunning for the elite/upper echelons of society. Doing that requires working like a dog not just for 2 years of high school and 4 years of college, but for likely several decades after.
It's totally fine if not everyone can do it and that more people try than actually achieve it. It would be surprising if those weren't true, and engineering the system otherwise is just degrading what it means to achieve the result.
> This is about gunning for the elite/upper echelons of society.
Is that what it’s about? Keep in that the University of Michigan is a public university, explicitly founded to “provide the inhabitants of this state with the means of acquiring a thorough knowledge of the various branches of literature, science, and the arts.” There’s nothing about being elite in there at all. This is an institution that serves the public.
I’m no stranger to long hours to achieve high status—I’m a professor. But I also started my journey at a public school and a public undergraduate institution. Many of my friends—all good and smart people but in many cases decidedly NOT elite-have leveraged their public education into satisfying careers. I, and my friends, would not have had our opportunities otherwise. I simply could not afford top private school.
I don’t know what to think about this change exactly, but it’s worth pointing out that MIT has had this policy for first year students since 1968. MIT! Seems like UM can make this work if they are thoughtful about it.
All universities are for the elites. I would love for that not to be the case, but the only reason admissions are this competitive is because there's competition for limited slots.
And yes, certainly a (traditional) university education should not be required for having good career opportunities.
IMO there's a need for a type of education that's vastly more scalable and still equips people with the beyond-secondary education they need to be productive in today's economy.
Let me tell you about the scam of 'honors' classes in today's high schools. They not doing anything more introspective or challenging. It's the same classwork thrown at them faster and without as much teaching support. Just more to grind out. But when you don't understand something?
You're smart, you'll figure it out.
In return you get inflated GPAs that get you into better colleges. But if you can't figure it out on the first try? More stress.
Interestingly, a lot of colleges now ignore the 'honors' weighted GPA and ask to see the unweighted score. If you have a teen entering high school, skip the honors track and help them do better in the normal track version of the class. See if your school offers dual-credit with a local community college or state university. Those transfer credits are WAY more valuable now (and cheaper!) than an AP score, with a lot less test stress.
Yeah definitely. But "can you grind" is legitimate selection criterion for making it into the upper echelons. Not an ideal one, but it's not illegitimate.
Sad state that of affairs when comments like this appear and have affirmative replies. Shows how socially unaware and one-dimensional a Hacker News is.
Working like a dog like this is necessary if you’re gunning for the elite / upper echelon of society, yes. If you’re already in that echelon of society, it’s not necessary.
Thank goodness I didn’t need to work so hard, but I can acknowledge what a shitty system it is.
Help me understand why these children or their parents are gunning in this manner and working like dogs in this manner, to join into and propagate such a shitty system?
Universities at least apply some meritocratic standards. If we bypass universities, there will be some other gatekeeper, it will be worse: mostly an "old boys network" and corrupt, pay-to-play advancement.
We want no more universities, as it's just producing socialists unless you're in math / sciences, and if you're in the sciences it's wasting productive time in industry.
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.
Yes, if you go to a junior college or night school, you will discover what an actual busy schedule looks like and it's not sports clubs and volunteer activities taken for the sole purpose of inflating your college admissions letter.
Some of those students have 40 hour jobs, some night shift, that they can't skip or else they don't have a home or school anymore. Others have kids that can't be neglected.
Indeed. At uni, starting in my second year, I worked as a programmer (no remote work, office at 1hr commute from uni dorm) on top of my studies. It was hard, but doable. My major was applied math, so the CS part was the easier bit, but the math, especially Analysis, Numerical Methods, Linear Algebra, and Analytic Geometry they kicked my butt. We also had a really bad prof for the Math Logic class and no textbook, only lecture notes and his lectures were unstructured shit :(
The biggest problem wasn't the workload itself, but how inefficient learning was back then. It was the early days of the Internet, no coursera, no Google indexed uni sites, no LLMs, no online tutors. I only had a mediocre textbook and some notes I borrowed from friends when I couldn't attend lectures or labs. It took ages. I’d burn hours trying to parse two paragraphs in the textbook, only to ask mates who didn't understand it either.
Now, we have an incredible amount of information & tech at our fingertips: LLMs, Google NotebookLM, online tutors, dozens of textbooks, and sites like Anna's Archive packed with high-quality "free" material. With all this technology, the time it takes to understand, prepare, and master a topic is a fraction of what it used to be. It still takes work and discipline, but man... you can feed textbooks into an LLM and use targeted prompts to debug your exact knowledge gaps on the practice test you get from the LLM.
So I reckon it's easier now than before, simply because learning can be done so much more efficiently. After all these years, I still remember the hardest classes and the most stringent professors with great affection - even though I hated those bastards back then. My Group Theory prof once invalidated a definition I wrote because of a single missing word. At the time, I thought it was an injustice, but later I realized that word was crucial.
University is where young people must face hard work and reality, because it teaches them what true meritocracy is. It should be hard, it's the same way a gym workout should be hard or it’s ineffective.
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.
Naw. Adult life is so much easier with regards to competitive pressure compared to getting into a good college. The real world is Pass/Fail, much to the chagrin of plenty of HNers.
Your comment specifically compared it to the normal adult, my point is the normal adult who is a parent is very likely doing even more than your example of your kid. Even for adults who aren't in the elite high earner category, heck people who make less money are likely working even more hours per day just to make ends meet.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
People called them "weeder" classes in my university.
But it's better earlier rather than later. The consequences aren't severe and you can change majors, lessen your course load, or stop those volunteer opportunities. That's part of learning how to be an adult.
I knew a few people my freshmen year that were put on academic probation. They turned out all right after making some drastic changes. Others simply disappeared during the break.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I would have anxiety if I was a first year student who wanted to transfer out to another school or program and not know if my 'pass' would be sufficient to get prior recognition of learning or advanced standing.
The resolution to this anxiety, like for all transfer students, is to contact the academic advisors at your next institution and work with them. That's what I did, I had taken a break to work during college and when I returned it was to a new institution. I sat down with one of the advisors and worked out what transferred, what didn't, and what paperwork was needed so I didn't have to take 1st year courses that I already knew but didn't have a clear correspondence to past academics. For instance, linear algebra was mostly covered in my calculus 2 course previously, but was a separate required course at that institution. The advisor discussed it with me (he was a math professor, almost all the advisors were professors) and was satisfied I knew it well enough, I just had to take a different math course to get sufficient math credits but it was a substitution.
Huh, I never considered that grades might be intended to help the person learning. I always assumed they were just intended as a signal to the rest of the world that they had learned something.
I think that's possibly one of the main problems with grades and why they inevitably lead to the grade inflation crisis. From the article:
> In May, Harvard University faculty voted to approve a 20% cap on the number of A’s per undergraduate course in an effort to curb grade inflation. It won’t apply to A-minuses, which committee members predicted would become the most awarded grade.
> At the University of Michigan, a review by the news site MLive found that 74.1% of all undergraduate grades in 2022 were an A+, A or A-. A decade earlier, that percentage was 57.6%.
For the most part, the only people that see the grades are you, your parents, your teacher, and maybe your friends. Most of the world will just see a pass/fail result (degree or not), unless you also earn special awards.
Yeah, the students are being graded like meat. It's not for the cow's sake, it's for the consumer. I say this as someone who had to maintain a set gpa through to keep a scholarship.
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 was initially thinking they were being too coddling, but you're right, my first semester grades weren't all that good either. I was working hard, but it takes a lot to adapt to the much higher expectations of a decent uni.
They aren't a meaningful signal for how capable a person is by the end of the program. But maybe the fix would be to not count them towards the GPA/permanent transcript, while still providing the achieved grade to the students so they have a measure of how they did.
Maybe. Maybe not. In my case, that first semester of near-failing grades was the kick in the pants I needed to start exerting myself. I entered college assuming it was just as easy as high school. It wasn't. Not even close. And a semester of pass/fail wouldn't have taught me that lesson because I did pass, just barely.
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.
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.
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.
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 wouldn't blame her but anyone who has to check out should just fail.
This is about gunning for the elite/upper echelons of society. Doing that requires working like a dog not just for 2 years of high school and 4 years of college, but for likely several decades after.
It's totally fine if not everyone can do it and that more people try than actually achieve it. It would be surprising if those weren't true, and engineering the system otherwise is just degrading what it means to achieve the result.
> This is about gunning for the elite/upper echelons of society.
Is that what it’s about? Keep in that the University of Michigan is a public university, explicitly founded to “provide the inhabitants of this state with the means of acquiring a thorough knowledge of the various branches of literature, science, and the arts.” There’s nothing about being elite in there at all. This is an institution that serves the public.
I’m no stranger to long hours to achieve high status—I’m a professor. But I also started my journey at a public school and a public undergraduate institution. Many of my friends—all good and smart people but in many cases decidedly NOT elite-have leveraged their public education into satisfying careers. I, and my friends, would not have had our opportunities otherwise. I simply could not afford top private school.
I don’t know what to think about this change exactly, but it’s worth pointing out that MIT has had this policy for first year students since 1968. MIT! Seems like UM can make this work if they are thoughtful about it.
All universities are for the elites. I would love for that not to be the case, but the only reason admissions are this competitive is because there's competition for limited slots.
And yes, certainly a (traditional) university education should not be required for having good career opportunities.
IMO there's a need for a type of education that's vastly more scalable and still equips people with the beyond-secondary education they need to be productive in today's economy.
Let me tell you about the scam of 'honors' classes in today's high schools. They not doing anything more introspective or challenging. It's the same classwork thrown at them faster and without as much teaching support. Just more to grind out. But when you don't understand something?
You're smart, you'll figure it out.
In return you get inflated GPAs that get you into better colleges. But if you can't figure it out on the first try? More stress.
Interestingly, a lot of colleges now ignore the 'honors' weighted GPA and ask to see the unweighted score. If you have a teen entering high school, skip the honors track and help them do better in the normal track version of the class. See if your school offers dual-credit with a local community college or state university. Those transfer credits are WAY more valuable now (and cheaper!) than an AP score, with a lot less test stress.
Yeah definitely. But "can you grind" is legitimate selection criterion for making it into the upper echelons. Not an ideal one, but it's not illegitimate.
Sad state that of affairs when comments like this appear and have affirmative replies. Shows how socially unaware and one-dimensional a Hacker News is.
Working like a dog like this is necessary if you’re gunning for the elite / upper echelon of society, yes. If you’re already in that echelon of society, it’s not necessary.
Thank goodness I didn’t need to work so hard, but I can acknowledge what a shitty system it is.
Help me understand why these children or their parents are gunning in this manner and working like dogs in this manner, to join into and propagate such a shitty system?
Because having money is a lot better than not having money
Do we really want the upper echelons of society to be made up of neurotic workaholics? Do we really want universities to be gate keepers here at all?
No, we don't, but the alternatives are worse.
Universities at least apply some meritocratic standards. If we bypass universities, there will be some other gatekeeper, it will be worse: mostly an "old boys network" and corrupt, pay-to-play advancement.
We want no more universities, as it's just producing socialists unless you're in math / sciences, and if you're in the sciences it's wasting productive time in industry.
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.
Yes, if you go to a junior college or night school, you will discover what an actual busy schedule looks like and it's not sports clubs and volunteer activities taken for the sole purpose of inflating your college admissions letter.
Some of those students have 40 hour jobs, some night shift, that they can't skip or else they don't have a home or school anymore. Others have kids that can't be neglected.
Indeed. At uni, starting in my second year, I worked as a programmer (no remote work, office at 1hr commute from uni dorm) on top of my studies. It was hard, but doable. My major was applied math, so the CS part was the easier bit, but the math, especially Analysis, Numerical Methods, Linear Algebra, and Analytic Geometry they kicked my butt. We also had a really bad prof for the Math Logic class and no textbook, only lecture notes and his lectures were unstructured shit :(
The biggest problem wasn't the workload itself, but how inefficient learning was back then. It was the early days of the Internet, no coursera, no Google indexed uni sites, no LLMs, no online tutors. I only had a mediocre textbook and some notes I borrowed from friends when I couldn't attend lectures or labs. It took ages. I’d burn hours trying to parse two paragraphs in the textbook, only to ask mates who didn't understand it either.
Now, we have an incredible amount of information & tech at our fingertips: LLMs, Google NotebookLM, online tutors, dozens of textbooks, and sites like Anna's Archive packed with high-quality "free" material. With all this technology, the time it takes to understand, prepare, and master a topic is a fraction of what it used to be. It still takes work and discipline, but man... you can feed textbooks into an LLM and use targeted prompts to debug your exact knowledge gaps on the practice test you get from the LLM.
So I reckon it's easier now than before, simply because learning can be done so much more efficiently. After all these years, I still remember the hardest classes and the most stringent professors with great affection - even though I hated those bastards back then. My Group Theory prof once invalidated a definition I wrote because of a single missing word. At the time, I thought it was an injustice, but later I realized that word was crucial.
University is where young people must face hard work and reality, because it teaches them what true meritocracy is. It should be hard, it's the same way a gym workout should be hard or it’s ineffective.
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.
Yes, it's a lot.
That's also assuming you have children. I'm childfree and most days are all mine once I punch out unless I've got stuff to triage here and there.
Naw. Adult life is so much easier with regards to competitive pressure compared to getting into a good college. The real world is Pass/Fail, much to the chagrin of plenty of HNers.
And we shouldn't expect adult/parent level of work out a 16/17 year-old. There's no time left any more to be a kid.
Your comment specifically compared it to the normal adult, my point is the normal adult who is a parent is very likely doing even more than your example of your kid. Even for adults who aren't in the elite high earner category, heck people who make less money are likely working even more hours per day just to make ends meet.
Absolutely. I think some degree of competitive attitude should be developed, but admissions since the late 2000s have become hyper-competitive.
Pressure makes diamonds, but it also crushes everything else.
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.
^^^ This. 100% This.
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.
It’s what the American corporate work culture expects though. She’ll be well acclimated.
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
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?
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.
People called them "weeder" classes in my university.
But it's better earlier rather than later. The consequences aren't severe and you can change majors, lessen your course load, or stop those volunteer opportunities. That's part of learning how to be an adult.
I knew a few people my freshmen year that were put on academic probation. They turned out all right after making some drastic changes. Others simply disappeared during the break.
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.
To those saying this is soft: https://registrar.mit.edu/classes-grades-evaluations/grades/...
If you want to say MIT is soft. Feel free.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The pass fail dynamic won't increase anxiety if you tell everyone to not fail students, though.
I would have anxiety if I was a first year student who wanted to transfer out to another school or program and not know if my 'pass' would be sufficient to get prior recognition of learning or advanced standing.
The resolution to this anxiety, like for all transfer students, is to contact the academic advisors at your next institution and work with them. That's what I did, I had taken a break to work during college and when I returned it was to a new institution. I sat down with one of the advisors and worked out what transferred, what didn't, and what paperwork was needed so I didn't have to take 1st year courses that I already knew but didn't have a clear correspondence to past academics. For instance, linear algebra was mostly covered in my calculus 2 course previously, but was a separate required course at that institution. The advisor discussed it with me (he was a math professor, almost all the advisors were professors) and was satisfied I knew it well enough, I just had to take a different math course to get sufficient math credits but it was a substitution.
Breaking news: student anxiety peaks in the second semester.
research tilts towards grades not helping learners in contrast to non-quantitative feedback so there's that.
Huh, I never considered that grades might be intended to help the person learning. I always assumed they were just intended as a signal to the rest of the world that they had learned something.
I think that's possibly one of the main problems with grades and why they inevitably lead to the grade inflation crisis. From the article:
> In May, Harvard University faculty voted to approve a 20% cap on the number of A’s per undergraduate course in an effort to curb grade inflation. It won’t apply to A-minuses, which committee members predicted would become the most awarded grade.
> At the University of Michigan, a review by the news site MLive found that 74.1% of all undergraduate grades in 2022 were an A+, A or A-. A decade earlier, that percentage was 57.6%.
For the most part, the only people that see the grades are you, your parents, your teacher, and maybe your friends. Most of the world will just see a pass/fail result (degree or not), unless you also earn special awards.
You're right, but I understand that many graduate programs will ask for your undergraduate GPA and/or transcript as part of the application process.
If one doesn't plan on applying to grad school immediately after undergrad then hopefully there is less self-imposed grade pressure.
Yeah, the students are being graded like meat. It's not for the cow's sake, it's for the consumer. I say this as someone who had to maintain a set gpa through to keep a scholarship.
Johns Hopkins has had this since forever
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 was initially thinking they were being too coddling, but you're right, my first semester grades weren't all that good either. I was working hard, but it takes a lot to adapt to the much higher expectations of a decent uni.
They aren't a meaningful signal for how capable a person is by the end of the program. But maybe the fix would be to not count them towards the GPA/permanent transcript, while still providing the achieved grade to the students so they have a measure of how they did.
Maybe. Maybe not. In my case, that first semester of near-failing grades was the kick in the pants I needed to start exerting myself. I entered college assuming it was just as easy as high school. It wasn't. Not even close. And a semester of pass/fail wouldn't have taught me that lesson because I did pass, just barely.
So issue the grades but don't record them in the GPA.
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.
Probably varies on area of study. Many engineering students take prerequisites with intense course load their first year.
I'll just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coddling_of_the_American_M...
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.
This sort of coddling and weak policy is setting students up for a rude awaking when they get into the professional workforce.
Seeing the purpose of education to be preparing you to be part of "the professional workforce" is the problem.