What the University of Michigan Pass/Fail Pause Means for College Freshmen (and Their Parents)
My daughter called from Ann Arbor in late September, which usually means one of three things: she forgot her laptop charger, she needs money, or something weird happened in her dorm. This time it was the third one.
“They’re pausing the pass/fail thing,” she said, chewing on something. “The LSA program. The one for first-semester freshmen.”
I had to think for a second. She had mentioned it move-in week, a pilot program through the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts that would let first-semester students take some courses pass/fail instead of earning a traditional letter grade. It sounded like a good idea at the time. A soft landing. A way to settle into college without worrying that one rough physics midterm would wreck an entire GPA.
Now it was being paused, and she wasn’t sure what that meant for her schedule.
“Do you know if your classes are affected?” I asked.
“That’s the thing,” she said. “They aren’t. Mine are all graded anyway. But some kids already switched their classes to pass/fail, and now they’re stuck. And they don’t know what to do.”
I’ve spent enough years in classrooms to understand why a pass/fail option sounds appealing. It reduces anxiety. It encourages exploration. It tells a student that learning matters more than performance. All of that is true, and all of that is helpful—especially for a kid who spent high school carefully building a transcript and now finds herself in a lecture hall with four hundred strangers and no idea where the curve lands.
But I also understand why a program like this would get paused.
Pass/fail changes what a grade tells you. A letter grade is crude, and sometimes unfair, but it is information. A pass/fail grade is just a gate. You either got through or you didn’t. For an 18-year-old who is still figuring out how to study, how much sleep she actually needs, and whether she wants to keep taking chemistry, that information matters.
My daughter has a friend in her dorm who wanted to take a math class pass/fail. She’s a good student, but she was terrified of the first exam. “What if I’m not actually cut out for this?” I remembered my daughter repeating, with a shrug. It’s a real fear. But if that friend takes the class pass/fail and gets a P, she will know she made it through. She won’t know whether her algebra skills are solid enough to carry her into the next course. She won’t know, really, what she learned. That’s not a failure of the pass/fail model. It’s just the nature of a binary grade.
That same week, I talked with my daughter about one of her own classes. She is taking a psychology course with a heavy writing load. The first paper came back with a B-minus and a paragraph of comments from the graduate student instructor. My daughter read the grade first and was disappointed. Then she read the comments and realized the feedback was useful—the argument was clear but the structure kept sliding off toward the end. She knew what to fix.
If that class had been pass/fail, she might not have read the comments at all. Why would she? The grade would have said “satisfactory.” She could have moved on without learning anything about her writing.
That’s the real question for any student, and for any parent trying to support one: What is a grade for? It’s partly about measuring performance. But in the first year of college, it’s also about calibration. Kids need to know where they stand. They need to experience a B-minus and feel what that means, so they can adjust. If they never feel it, because they’re pass/fail, they don’t adjust until much later—often when it’s too late to change a major or sign up for a different course the next term.
When the university announced the pause, the stated reasons were mostly administrative. Pilot programs collect data. Faculty need time to evaluate them. Questions remain about how pass/fail affects students later, especially if they apply to medical school or other programs that want to see actual grades. That all makes sense. But I suspect there was something else going on too. A pause is a chance to ask whether a program meant to protect students was actually helping them see themselves more clearly.
“The thing is,” my daughter said, “one of the girls in my hall said she signed up for a class with pass/fail because she thinks she won’t be able to get an A, so why try?”
Exactly. That’s the dark side of the model. Pass/fail can feel like a permission slip to check out. And I get it—freshman year is exhausting, and if you don’t need to earn a grade, you don’t have to stay up until midnight finishing the reading. But college is also a time to find out what you’re capable of. If you lower the bar for yourself before you even sit down at your desk, you may miss that.
I’m not writing this to say pass/fail is bad. I’m a parent. I know what it feels like to watch your kid struggle in a new city, with a new roommate, in classes that move twice as fast as anything in high school. There are days when a pass/fail period would feel like a mercy.
But when my daughter asked me what I thought she should do if the pilot gets brought back next fall, I didn’t tell her to take it or skip it. I told her to ask herself one question first: What do you want this pass/fail grade to protect you from?
If the answer is “I’m scared of failing,” then that’s worth sitting with, maybe even talking to an academic advisor about. Because being scared of failing isn’t a reason to hide your performance from yourself. It’s a reason to get more feedback, not less. Ask the instructor for specific comments. Meet with a teaching assistant. Look at the rubric. Sometimes an F isn’t as close as you think, and sometimes a B-minus is a gift.
If the answer is “I want to explore a subject outside my major without worrying about my GPA,” then pass/fail might make sense. Taking a difficult philosophy course pass/fail can be a genuine learning experience. It lowers the stakes enough that you can be curious instead of strategic. That’s okay. That’s what it’s for.
What I’ve stopped doing with my daughter is treating grades as final judgments. They’re not. They’re snapshots. A C in calculus at the end of October doesn’t mean she can’t do math. It means the current method—maybe reading the textbook passively, maybe not doing enough practice problems—isn’t working. That’s valuable knowledge. It’s the kind of thing you can actually do something about, if you know it.
By the end of our phone call, my daughter had stopped worrying about whether Michigan would bring the pilot back. She had a paper to revise and a problem set to finish. The pass/fail program might return next year, or it might not. Either way, the lesson she’s learning right now is how to read her own results—not as a stamp of approval or a sentence of failure, but as information about what to do next.
I think that’s what her first semester is really about. And no pass or fail grade can teach her that better than looking at an exam she didn’t ace and deciding, on her own, that she isn’t done yet.
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