Why Michigan Paused Pass/Fail for First-Year Students and What It Says About the Transition to College
The first thing I saw when I picked up the phone was my son’s face, half lit by his laptop screen, half in shadow. It was late October, and he’d called me from his dorm room at the University of Michigan, not for the usual chat about laundry or his roommate’s weird sleep schedule, but because he’d just read an email from his academic advisor. The subject line was something like “Update on LSA Pass/Fail Pilot,” and the gist was that the program was being paused. No more pass/fail option for first-semester students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. He wasn’t upset exactly. He was more confused. “They said it was supposed to help with the transition. Now they’re just… stopping it?”
I didn’t have an answer. But over the next few days, my husband and I found ourselves talking about it at the dinner table, trying to make sense of what the pause meant, not just for our son but for the whole idea of easing kids into college. I remember the pilot had been announced with a lot of confidence the year before. First-year LSA students could take up to one course pass/fail during their first semester, the idea being that a low-stakes grade would let them adjust to college-level work without the panic of a C or a D dragging down their GPA. It sounded reasonable. It sounded merciful, even.
But now, a year in, the university had pulled the plug. An article in the Michigan Daily quoted administrators saying they wanted to “evaluate the data” and “review the impact.” That was it. No scandal, no dramatic failure. Just a quiet pause.
I kept thinking about what that email must have felt like to a nineteen-year-old who had already been told, through a hundred high school counselors and orientation videos, that the first year of college is the hardest. That it’s okay to struggle. That help is available. Then to have the safety net quietly withdrawn? It felt less like a policy change and more like a weather report.
Of course, the pass/fail approach was never going to be a cure-all. My son took a biology class that first semester, and even with the option to take it pass/fail, he still ended up with a B-minus and a lot of late-night flashcards. The pass/fail option didn’t make the content easier. It just changed the way he thought about the grade. And maybe that was the problem. Because what does it mean to “pass” a class you don’t actually understand? You can pass with a D at many schools. You can pass and move on, having learned almost nothing.
I called my sister, who teaches English at a community college, and asked her what she thought. She’s seen the pass/fail experiment from the other side. “We did something similar in our intro courses a few years back,” she said. “Students loved it. But then they’d show up in the next class and be three chapters behind.” She wasn’t against the idea completely. She pointed out that pass/fail can be useful for an elective, or for a subject you’re taking just for exposure, but not for a foundational prerequisite. And that’s exactly what those first-semester courses often are: writing, pre-calc, chemistry. The stuff that everything else builds on.
What struck me in her voice was a kind of tired realism. She wasn’t happy or self-righteous about the pause. She just saw it as something that happens when a feel-good idea hits actual brick walls. Students need time to adjust, yes. But they also need to face the fact that some classes are hard because they’re supposed to be.
I started to think about my own son’s adjustment. He wasn’t a failing student. He was a reasonably diligent kid who occasionally texted me “brain melting” at 11 p.m. The pass/fail option would have been a comfort to him, but would it have changed his study habits? Probably not. He’d still have gone to office hours. He’d still have formed a study group. The option to take a class pass/fail might have actually made him less anxious—but maybe that’s the point. A little anxiety is an information. It tells you you’re not on top of the material.
That’s the thing I started to see as I read more about the decision. What makes the first semester of college hard isn’t just the workload. It’s the moment when a student realizes that no one is going to check their homework, that they are the one responsible for their own understanding. A pass/fail grade can blur that moment. It can let a student coast through a course, pass it, and then hit the wall in the second semester when the professor assumes you already know the basics.
I don’t want to be too harsh on the idea. For some students, a single pass/fail class might be the difference between staying in college and dropping out. But for most, the pause might be a more honest signal: that the transition to college isn’t something to be smoothed over or bypassed. It’s something to be endured, and learned from, and sometimes failed at.
A few days after the email, my son and I were on a video call. He was working on an essay for his writing seminar, something about the concept of “home” in a John Steinbeck novel. He mentioned that his professor had told the class that the pass/fail pilot had been cancelled before he had a chance to use it. “I wasn’t going to use it anyway,” my son said. “I just liked knowing it was there.”
That phrase stayed with me. The security option. The backup plan. It’s the same reason I always keep the number of a towing company in my car even though I’ve only used it once. You don’t need a safety net to fall into it—you need it to feel brave enough to walk the tightrope.
So now what? For parents, the lesson is probably this: don’t rely on institutional policies to take the edge off. The university is doing evaluation. The program is paused. It may come back, or it may not. But our kids are still going to take classes that are too hard, and they’re still going to feel overwhelmed, and they’re still going to need to figure out what to do when they forget an assignment or bomb a midterm.
The practical stuff we can do at home doesn’t require any special pilot program. It means asking questions like, “What’s your plan for this class?” instead of “How’s this class going?” It means helping them schedule a meeting with a professor when they’re confused, rather than telling them to just try harder. It means not rescuing them with solutions when they call home frustrated, but instead asking them what their options are. That’s hard. But it’s also real.
I’m not sure what will happen with the LSA pilot. Maybe in a year or two, they’ll bring it back with adjustments. Maybe they’ll decide that pass/fail is better for certain subjects but not others. The students, meanwhile, will just keep doing what students have always done: staying up too late, drinking too much coffee, learning how to ask for help, and occasionally wondering why the syllabus says the professor’s office hours are only on Tuesday afternoons.
My son’s not upset about the policy anymore. He’s got midterms. He’s writing a paper about a different kind of home that doesn’t have a grade attached to it. And I’m left with my own little lesson: sometimes the best way to help a kid through a hard transition isn’t to make it easier, but to stay on the phone with them while they work through it themselves.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Michigan Paused Pass/Fail for First-Year Students and What It Says About the Transition to College