Why University of Michigan Paused Its First-Semester Pass/Fail Pilot—and What Parents Should Know
The text came through while I was making dinner. My son, a freshman at the University of Michigan, had forwarded an email from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. “pass/fail pilot is paused,” he wrote. No emoji, no question mark, no explanation. Just a headline.
I read it twice. For anyone who hasn’t been following it, the LSA pass/fail pilot was a small but meaningful idea: first-semester students could take some of their courses pass/fail in the fall. They’d still get credit, but no letter grade would show up on their transcript. It was meant to soften the landing for kids arriving at a big university and suddenly confronting premed chemistry or a 300-person lecture hall. If you got a C in your first semester, it wouldn’t tank your GPA before you even learned where the library was.
Now that option is on hold. The announcement didn’t say the program was a failure. It said the college wanted to review the pilot and think carefully about what happens next. Which, I suppose, is a very university way of saying: we aren’t sure this was a good idea.
I wasn’t sure either.
When we first heard about the pilot, my initial reaction was relief. My son had been a high-strung perfectionist in high school, the kind of kid who would re-read a paragraph five times before underlining it. The thought of him walking into a college chemistry class where the average exam score was a 68 was terrifying. Pass/fail felt like a pressure valve.
But then I thought about what a teacher once told me: grades are information. They’re not a verdict. If you take away grades for the entire first semester, you also take away information. Students might feel less anxious, but they also might not find out how they’re actually doing until the damage is done.
At dinner that night, I asked my son how he felt about the pause.
He shrugged. “I didn’t use it anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you pass/fail a class, it can complicate things later. I didn’t want a P on my transcript for a class I might need to show I could handle. Plus, the way it worked, if you used it, it felt like you admitted you couldn’t do something.” He pushed his food around. “But I know people who used it and it made the first semester survivable.”
That caught my attention. “Survivable.”
“Yeah. Like, you could go to class, do the work, and not have a panic attack before every exam because you knew the grade wouldn’t go on your record. That’s not nothing.”
He had a point. A friend of mine had a daughter named Maya who was a sophomore at Michigan and used the pass/fail pilot in her first semester for a math course. Her mom told me Maya got a C and was still upset about it, but at least it didn’t pull down her GPA. “It just took the edge off,” my friend said. “It didn’t fix the class, but it let her breathe long enough to figure out how to study.”
So the pause is complicated. For every student who might use pass/fail as an escape hatch, there’s another who genuinely needs it as a bridge. The problem is that universities can’t always tell which student is which. And maybe that’s why the pilot got paused—not because pass/fail was harmful, but because the university couldn’t be sure who it was helping.
As parents, we don’t get a vote in this decision. But we do get to decide how we talk about it at the kitchen table.
One thing I’ve learned since my son started college: don’t ask “How are your grades?” the minute the kid walks in the door. It’s the Thanksgiving relative question, and it reduces a whole messy semester to a number. Instead, ask something like “What’s the class that’s hardest for you right now?” or “What’s one thing you understood this week?” Those questions let them tell you something specific without feeling judged.
When your kid says “I think I’m failing,” don’t rush to reassure them. I know it’s tempting to say “You’re not failing” or “It’s fine, everybody struggles.” But sometimes they need to sit with the fear for a minute and figure out what it actually means. Ask them, “How do you know you’re failing?” Usually the answer is that they did badly on one essay or blanked on one exam. That’s a different problem than actually failing a class. Once they say it out loud, they can see it more clearly.
Another useful phrase is: “So what happens next?” Not in a harsh way. More like a curious way. They got a 61 on a biology midterm. What happens next? Do they go to office hours? Do they join a study group? Do they talk to an academic advisor? Pass/fail used to be the answer to that question. Now students need to find another one. The skill of recovering from a bad grade in the middle of the semester is something they’ll need whether or not the school offers pass/fail.
A college counselor once told me to tell parents: encourage your kid to go to office hours early, before there’s anything to feel sorry for. Not after they fall behind, but during the second week of the semester. “Go in and just say, ‘I’m still figuring out this class. What should I focus on?’ It’s low-stakes and it builds a relationship.” That advice feels even more relevant now that the pressure valve is off.
I keep thinking about what the pause actually signals. It’s not a declaration that kids should just toughen up. It’s more like the school saying: we tried something, and we’re not convinced it was working. Maybe the data showed that pass/fail students didn’t learn the material. Maybe it showed that some students took it for the wrong reasons. Or maybe there wasn’t enough data at all, and the honest answer was: we don’t know yet.
That’s a hard place to leave parents and students. Because when you don’t know yet, you have to make do with what you have. The first semester will still be hard. There will still be weird grading curves and 8 a.m. discussion sections and moments when your kid calls and says they don’t know why they’re there. Pass/fail was never going to fix all of that.
For now, my son isn’t losing much sleep over the policy. He’s already planning winter semester classes and thinking about what courses he wants to take. The whole pass/fail conversation, for him, lasted about five minutes. For me, it’s still settling. I don’t know whether the program should come back in a different form, or if something better will replace it. But I do know that the kids walking into that first semester are still the same kids—smart, anxious, full of possibility. They’ll just be doing it with letter grades this time. We’ll see how that goes.
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