The news that the University of Michigan will switch to Pass/Fail grading for incoming freshmen in the fall 2027 semester has generated a lot of national attention.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
The University of Michigan will drop grades for first-semester freshmen next year in an effort to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school.Instead of a letter grade, first-semester transcripts will show “pass or no credit.” The program is designed to help students “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys,” the school said.The program, set to start in fall 2027, applies to students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, which enrolls about half of Michigan’s roughly 8,000 first-year students.A Michigan spokesman declined to comment about how the university reached the decision to enact the pilot. Although grades won’t be recorded on student transcripts or affect grade-point averages, professors will still assign them internally to track eligibility for scholarships and academic awards.Schools including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology have implemented similar “grade-covering” programs in past years.The shift at Michigan, among the nation’s largest and best-known public universities, comes as schools wrestle with grade inflation and the need for remedial instruction for freshmen ill-prepared for college-level classes. University of California math and science professors have urged UC regents to reinstate entrance exams because so many freshmen were unprepared.
I had a chance to talk about this development with Laura Ingraham on The Ingraham Angle:
Partial Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity)
Ingraham:… Now, at this very moment, colleges should be asking whether standards have slipped too far, but they’re doing the opposite, lowering the bar. Here with reaction as William Jacobson, Cornell University Law Prof and Equal Protection Project founder. All right, Professor, I know you’ve seen this, you know this. I have seen this firsthand. What has happened to our students and is the University of Michigan doing them any favors?WAJ:I interact with a lot of students and the vast majority that I find are very motivated, but there is a societal problem. We have to acknowledge that collapse of our K-12 educational system under the weight of leftist indoctrination, critical race theory, DEI, politicization. We see it throughout with standards being lowered. And so really, while the students are on the front line of it, it’s a societal problem. It’s a teacher union problem.It’s an educational system problem where we have dumbed down the curriculum to the point, as you pointed out, the schools are getting students who are completely unprepared.So I think this is a national crisis. If you wanted to destroy our country, what would you do differently than the left over a generation has done to our educational system? This is a national emergency. We’re just seeing the signs of it.Ingraham:I think this is just one metric, right?And one dean who’s a professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Michigan about this new program they’re doing, said, “I believe this pilot program has the potential to not only address the alarming rates of stress, depression, anxiety, but to deliver on our core promise of a liberal arts and sciences college.” Professor, uh, <laugh> the objective knowledge, like knowledge, how to be an independent adult, know the world around you, know how to write, read, you know, the essential math skills, apparently that’s now out the window as long as you’re not stressed.WAJ:Well, if you lower expectations so far that students don’t have to meet any expectations, this is the result you get.I think some students, and I have great empathy for them, do go through a hard time entering college. I mean, we’ve coming off the COVID shutdown. The students who are coming into college now are the ones who grew up in middle school and high school with those COVID lockdowns.So there may be real problems, but this is not the answer. Dumbing down the system even further is not the answer. And when you do that, you harm other students. There are other students who do want to come to college, probably a majority of students, who want to come to college, want to compete, want to excel, want to meet high expectations. And this college reaction seems to be, we’re not going to do that. We’re going take a group of students who maybe have some serious problems and those should be dealt with, and we’re going to, with one blanket change of curriculum, one blanket change of grading, are going to dumb down the whole system.It’s the wrong answer to what might be a real problem.Ingraham:Well, and of course, this is why, you know, we have to bring back the SAT as we’re seeing already the University of California system saying that was a mistake because guess what? The SAT might not be everything, and the ACT, but it is an objective measure of what you know. And it’s everything we get to – It’s a decent indicator of what you know.WAJ:Did you ever think we get to a place where the professors in the UC system are up in arms because they have so dumbed down the system, they don’t even have to take any standardized tests? So the professors, the mostly left-wing professors in the UC system are calling this out and saying, “Enough already.” If they’re doing that – Yeah, maybe this really is an emergency.Ingraham:Professor, you’re 100% correct. Great to see you as always.
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