University of Michigan Pauses First-Semester Pass/Fail Pilot: Why This Matters for Incoming Students and Their Parents
The text came through around nine on a Tuesday night. My daughter was sitting on the kitchen floor with her laptop open, textbooks spread across the rug, a half-eaten bagel on the corner of the table. She looked up and said, “They paused the pass/fail thing.”
I did not know what she was talking about. She explained, slowly, like I was a first-year student myself: at the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, there had been a pilot program that let first-semester students take some courses pass/fail. No letter grade. No GPA hit. Just a record of whether you passed or failed. It was supposed to ease the transition into college academics.
“And now they’re pausing it,” she said.
She wasn’t upset. She was confused. She had heard about the pilot as a possible safety net, and while she wasn’t planning to use it, the fact that it was gone made the fall suddenly feel less cushiony. I remember sitting with her in August, looking through the course guide, wondering if pass/fail was a good idea for her first semester. We never landed on an answer. We just filed it away as a possibility.
Now the possibility was gone.
I called my neighbor Beth, who has taught at a community college for twenty years. She has seen every version of this. “Pass/fail is like a parachute,” she said. “It is really useful if you intend to keep flying. But if you treat it like a hammock, you can drift.”
She had a point. The students who benefit most from pass/fail are the ones who show up anyway. They go to class, do the reading, study for the exam—and at the end, they don’t want a low grade to follow them into a major they care about. That is a strategic choice, not a surrender.
But Beth says she has also seen the other version. A student takes a class pass/fail because the professor is intimidating, or because the syllabus looks hard, or because they are scared of failing. Then they stop going. They tell themselves the class doesn’t count. They fall behind quietly. And by the time the withdrawal deadline arrives, they are so lost that pass/fail doesn’t save them—it just hides the fall for a few more weeks.
“The grade is a signal,” Beth said. “It’s not the only way to measure learning, but it is a signal. When you remove it entirely, some kids lose the ability to know that they’re in trouble until it’s too late.”
I thought about that when I read the university’s announcement more carefully. The pilot was, by definition, an experiment. The whole point of a pilot is to test something and see whether it works. Universities run pilots all the time, and sometimes the data doesn’t support continuing. The pause might mean they want to study the results. It might mean they found something concerning. It might mean they aren’t sure whether pass/fail actually helped students or just moved their anxiety to the second semester.
That last part matters more than most parents realize.
Here is the thing about first-semester college grades: they don’t measure what people think they measure. A student’s GPA in August and September reflects how well they adjusted to a new city, roommates, a laundry schedule, and the sudden absence of parents. That is a real and difficult adjustment. But it is not the same as “how smart you are in Introduction to Psychology.”
Pass/fail can take some of that pressure off. It says: focus on adjusting, and let the academics come later. That is humane. But it also delays the moment when a student has to hear the truth about their study habits. And for many teenagers, that moment is the actual point of going to college.
I asked Beth what she would tell parents right now, with the pilot paused and no one sure whether it will come back. She said, “Have the conversation before the semester starts. Not about pass/fail. About what happens when the first exam goes badly.”
Concrete enough to use.
Here is what we did, eventually, in our own house. My daughter and I sat down with the academic calendar and looked at the drop deadline. She circled it. Then we talked about which courses would be hardest to recover from if she fell into a hole. Not which ones she would enjoy most. Which ones had prerequisites. Which ones her major might care about. Which ones would still be available next year.
She picked one course that was likely to be a problem—the one with the huge class and the intimidating professor. We made a plan: by the third week, she would go to office hours. Not in October, after the bad grade. In September, while there was still time. She would mention one idea from class that she didn’t understand, and she would ask one question about the midterm. That was the whole assignment. Not “check in with her teacher.” Something small anyone can do.
Then we talked about what she would do if she actually felt overwhelmed. We talked about a “safe person” to text: one parent, one friend from high school, one upperclassman she already knew. We wrote the drop deadline on the calendar, but we also wrote a second date: two weeks before the drop deadline. If she was still struggling by that second date, she had to talk to an adviser. Not because an adviser would fix everything. Because an adviser would know the exact rules for her specific college, and those rules matter a lot more than anything a parent reads from a thousand miles away.
That is the real work. Not deciding whether pass/fail is good or bad. Pass/fail is just a tool. It can help a student who is already engaged. It can hide a student who is struggling. The same tool works both ways.
The pause at Michigan might mean something simple: the university saw that the policy, as designed, didn’t match what first-semester students actually needed. Or it might mean something more complicated about grades, motivation, and the way teenagers learn to recover from a bad semester. Either way, it is not the end of the story. Pilot programs get paused. Then they get changed. Then they come back in a different form.
My daughter finished her bagel and went back to her laptop. She had already moved on. For her, the pass/fail question wasn’t existential—it was practical. She wanted to know whether a course she was interested in next semester would have seats available. That was the real issue on her mind.
I stayed on the kitchen floor for a few more minutes, thinking about what Beth said. A parachute works if the person wearing it knows how to pull the cord. But you also need to know when the parachute is not the problem. Sometimes the problem is that you aren’t ready to jump. And getting ready to jump is something a policy can’t fix.
The semester will happen anyway. The exams will happen anyway. Students will find office hours or they won’t. They will call home or they won’t. They will learn, slowly, what they can handle and what they can’t. That was true before the pilot, and it will be true after the pause.
I don’t know whether the University of Michigan will bring the pass/fail pilot back. I do know that my daughter will sit on this same floor someday, in October, staring at a grade she didn’t expect. And when that happens, the best thing I can give her is not a grading policy. It’s a plan. And someone to call.
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