Michigan’s pass-fail grading won’t cure student angst
The university’s new pass-fail policy is a well-meaning experiment in avoidance — but psychologists say avoidance breeds more anxiety, not less.
Let’s suppose you’re the kind of citizen who puts a “Science is Real” sign on your lawn. You’re outraged by the Trump administration’s baseless attacks on vaccines and its brazen denials of human-made climate change. You think data — not ideology — should determine our social policies.
How can you also be OK with a college lowering its academic expectations for students?
I’m talking about the University of Michigan, which announced last week that first-semester students in its college of arts and sciences would receive pass-fail grades rather than traditional letter marks. The aim, Michigan said, was to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.”
That’s an admirable goal, of course. But there’s no evidence that easing up on students will help them feel better.
To the contrary, psychologists have been reminding us for years that the best way to improve mental health is to address our fears and challenges head-on. Avoiding them might bring momentary relief, but it will make us feel worse in the long run.
Put simply, Michigan is engaging in a huge collective experiment in avoidance. The first term of college is indeed a challenging time for students. But we don’t do them any favors by letting them coast in class.
And make no mistake: That’s what they’ll do. I’ve been teaching college for 35 years, and I can assure you that all but a handful of students would do less work if I wasn’t grading them.
Think about yourself at 18. Would you have devoted yourself fully to your studies if you could get the same grade without putting in the effort?
Gamely, Michigan officials said that eliminating grades in the first term would “allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys.” Instead of just working for a grade, the argument goes, students will explore ideas that truly interest them.
That would be wonderful, but it won’t happen. Of course, I want students to develop a love for learning. But most of them won’t do that unless we grade them, too. Remember, they’ve been graded for a decade or more before they arrive at our doors. It’s what they know.
And the more we expect of them, the more they’ll learn. In a now-classic 1965 experiment, psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson administered IQ tests to elementary students, and then told their teachers that certain randomly selected members of the class were “bloomers” who would likely improve. Regardless of their initial scores, those students showed more gains than their classmates when the test was administered again at the end of the school year.
Rosenthal and Jacobson called that the Pygmalion effect, after the artist in Greek mythology who falls in love with a statue he built and asks the gods to bring it to life. Teachers can breathe life into their students, too, but only if the teachers believe the students can succeed.
And if we lower expectations for them, we communicate the opposite: You’re too weak and fragile to get the job done. How can that be good for their development as human beings?
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Even at elite schools, let’s remember, a rising number of people arrive without the skills and knowledge that first-year students formerly possessed. Letting them skate by won’t solve that problem; instead, we will reinforce it.
The only way to help them succeed — and to feel better about themselves — is to ask more of them. Over the past five decades, college students have done progressively less homework even as their grades have gone up.
We need to reverse that trend. Rather than eliminating first-semester grades, we should raise the requirements for earning the top one.
That might mean some students are disappointed with the marks they get. But that, too, can be good for them.
“College should be one of the places where young people learn that evaluation isn’t always pleasant,” psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert said last week, criticizing the new Michigan plan. “These experiences can hurt, but learning that you can tolerate them and move forward prepares you for adulthood.”
I’m not saying we should curve grades to limit the number of A’s, like Harvard did earlier this year. Instead, we should raise the bar and encourage everyone to meet it.
We should raise the bar and encourage everyone to meet it.
That won’t be popular with our students, of course. At Michigan, the student body president praised the elimination of first-semester grades on, yes, mental health grounds. “You’re just figuring out how to be an adult and live on your own,” he said. “It gets extremely stressful having to balance that with also wanting to be a straight-A student.”
I’m sure it does. But that’s why students need to confront the stress, not shrink from it. The science on that is real. The only question is whether we’ll shrink from it, too.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Schooling Citizens: How Education Can Save Democracy,” which will be published next spring by the American Philosophical Society Press.
