Why the University of Michigan Paused Its Pass/Fail Pilot for First-Year Students
The text came in around 9:47 on a Tuesday night—a news link from my sister, no message, just the headline. She teaches high school and follows higher-ed news more closely than I do. I was wiping down the kitchen counter with a damp sponge, phone face-up on the open dishwasher door. The headline said that the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts had decided to pause its first-semester pass/fail pilot program.
I read it twice, then walked into the living room, where my daughter was sitting cross-legged on the floor with her laptop open, the dog asleep on her feet.
“You’ll want to see this,” I said, handing her the phone.
She read it, scrolled, read it again. Then she nodded slowly. “Makes sense, actually.”
A year ago, that wouldn’t have been her take. When she left for her first year at Michigan State, pass/fail was all she wanted. She’d been a good student in high school—not perfect, but the kind who managed. She did her homework, studied for tests, kept her grades above water. She was scared of the step up.
In the weeks before move-in, she kept circling the same worry: “What if I get to college and I’m not smart enough anymore?” She meant something narrower—what if I fail? She thought pass/fail would spare her that.
But five months into her freshman year, something shifted. Around the end of October, on the way back from the grocery store, she said, out of nowhere, “I think I’m actually glad I’m getting letter grades.”
I asked why.
“Because I have no idea what I understand in chemistry class, and if there weren’t grades, I’d never find out.”
That line has stayed with me. Understanding what you don’t know—it sounds simple, but it’s an incredibly hard thing for an 18-year-old to do.
The University of Michigan program was trying to solve a real problem. The first semester of college is rough even for students who look fine on paper. The new city, the roommate, the dining hall, and the gap between what high school teachers promised and what actually happens in a lecture hall with 300 people. Pass/fail took the grade pressure off the table so students could settle in. That rationale made sense to a lot of parents.
But the reason Michigan paused it—the university hasn’t said much publicly, just that they’re stepping back to evaluate—reminds me of the reason my daughter stepped back on her own. Pass/fail doesn’t remove the pressure. It just changes its shape.
When the stakes are pass/fail, some students overwork, trying to read invisible signals. Others underwork because the signals aren’t there. There’s no calibration. You don’t know if you’re two chapters behind or right on track. You don’t know if the way you’re studying is actually working or if you’ve been coasting on luck.
Grades, for all their flaws, are feedback. They say where you stand. And for a first-year student in a new town, surrounded by strangers, knowing where you stand can be the difference between floating and swimming.
Partway through that grocery drive, I asked my daughter what she’d tell Michigan if they put her on a committee.
She thought about it. “I’d tell them that pass/fail makes the first semester feel fake. Like everyone knows something I don’t.”
That’s the thing—in a pass/fail system, everyone else appears to know more than you do. You can’t tell who’s struggling, who’s flying, who’s average. The difference between a C student and an A student becomes invisible. And invisibility doesn’t reduce anxiety. It feeds it.
So what did we do? Not much at first. I let her figure it out. But I did start asking a different question when she talked about her classes. Instead of “How did midterms go?” I started asking, “What did midterms tell you about what to change?” That small switch mattered.
Because treating a grade as information rather than judgment is the real skill nobody hands you in college. When she bombed her first chemistry exam—a 68, on a test where the average was 64—she wanted to quit the class. She called home angry, with that flattened-out tone she gets when she’s decided something is hopeless: “I can’t do this. I’m not meant for this. I should have gone somewhere easier.”
But a 68 when the class average is 64 isn’t failure. It’s information. We stayed on the phone a long time, and eventually she went to the professor’s office hours. She told him she didn’t understand how to study for his exams. He said something she still quotes: “Your job isn’t to study more. It’s to study differently.”
He gave her a low-tech suggestion: each day, take her lecture notes, cover them, and write down three things she’d learned without looking. It doesn’t fix everything. But it was a thing to do. That was what she was missing.
And that’s the part of this that feels relevant to Michigan’s pause. The pilot wasn’t a misstep—it was a good idea held up against a complicated reality. Some students probably did thrive without letter grades looming over their first semester. The question is whether many more were like my daughter—not helped by pass/fail, just disoriented. A semester with no grades might give you breathing room, but it also gives you no mirrors.
For parents watching their kids head toward a first semester, the practical pieces don’t have to be dramatic. If your student asks for pass/fail, don’t lecture them. Ask what they’re hoping it protects. Let them have more than one wrong grade—the first C is survivable, and the second one is where you actually learn. Normalize the phrase “I don’t understand what I’m doing right now.” That sentence should start a conversation, not a confession. And when a grade comes back low, slow your own reaction. If you panic first, your kid absorbs the idea that grades are something to escape. If you ask, “What information do we have now?” the lesson becomes about adjusting.
I’m not sure what Michigan will do next. Pass/fail might come back in a different shape, limited to a smaller set of courses, or wrapped around more support. It’s possible the pause is just the university catching its breath. The problem they were trying to fix is still real. And I trust the students more than I trust the policy either way.
My daughter is a sophomore now. She’s in a different dorm, different semester, still studying chemistry. Last week, she told me she made a 91 on her second organic chemistry exam and then spent a good five minutes describing exactly how she’d changed her approach. It didn’t feel like bragging. It felt like a person who knows where she stands.
I didn’t tell her that the Michigan news made me think of her. She probably figured it out. Or maybe she didn’t, and that’s fine. It doesn’t need to be a whole thing.
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