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The No Grades Initiative

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Clarissa

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The University of Michigan will remove the grades that students receive in their freshman year from the transcripts and the GPA. The stated goal of this exercise is “to curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.”

We keep hearing that mental illness is just like physical illness. But the proponents of this theory clearly don’t believe it themselves. They like to compare what they call mental illness to diabetes. Nobody suggests, however, that hiding my blood sugar readings from me will help alleviate my illness. To the contrary, if I don’t know what my readings are and if I don’t track them carefully on a daily basis, the illness will get worse. It’s only if I know exactly what is happening and share this information with my doctor that I will be able to control my condition. Eating 3 slices of chocolate cake and then pretending that my blood sugar reading is fantastic is not going to cure me. To the contrary, it will end up killing me.

Whatever people mean by this “unfolding mental health crisis”, the idea that hiding from reality will help people feel better about their lives makes no sense. People who are actually healthy in their minds like their lives, even when their grades are not great or when they have diabetes. Mental health is the capacity to accept what is. If you find the idea that you failed calculus devastating, that is not mental health. If you can’t look at your transcript without falling apart, that is anything but healthy.

University of Michigan does not allow students to opt in or out of this initiative. This will be imposed on everybody because if only some people opt in, they will stand out by virtue of not having freshman-year grades. This will “inadvertently become equated with them not doing well in class”, as the explanation provided by the university states. Of course, the reality is that these students are not doing well in class, indeed.

It is disappointing that mental health is now equated with being delusional about yourself and presenting a fake persona to others. This is a university that teaches very young people who are still in their teen years that this is a good life strategy.

10 responses to “The No Grades Initiative”

  1. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Erasing standards helps no one.

    Raymond R

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  2. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Going “no grades” is harder, not easier.

    A healthy happy student can simply study, work and practice for mastery of the subject.

    Tests are benchmark learning opportunities: One goes back to the material until no errors of understanding or execution occur.

    Grades and the Fichte industrial classroom are a fake and degenerate excuse for bureaucrats to replace teachers.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      People don’t really work that way. Individuals who can be autodidacts and actually learn anything this way are one in a million. You are describing people who are extremely unique. For most, this is a road to nowhere.

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  3. Physpostdoc Avatar
    Physpostdoc

    Every time I think academic administrations cannot come with more inane policies, they take it up as a challenge and deliver.

    I have a request for UMich. Next they should try cancel sharing student feedback with faculty — it could be traumatizing for people dealing with all sorts of midlife crises and job pressures to also let some lost mentally fragile youngsters wax eloquent about their teaching (irrespective of the quality or caliber of instruction).

    !!

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  4. Peter Avatar
    Peter

    I don’t know anything about these rules except what you posted, but as a male Brit of a certain age, I’m not averse to the process.

    Certainly for me in the last century, my 3 year BSc had the following grading:
    1st year – pass/fail about whether to continue at uni

    2nd year = 1/3 of the grade

    3rd year – balance, with one project but mostly on final exams.

    Not grading the first year allowed me to understand the change from school teaching to university learning (and in my case to change course from a joint honours maths /physics to a single physics degree – because abstract algebra blew my mind!)

    I don’t know what the alternative is in the US but as an employer I’m more interested in how people finish than how they start their degree courses.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I agree that this could be a very neutral practice, but we would have to be in a very different situation or in a completely different higher education system for that to happen.

      Here is the issue. There is a dwindling number of students entering colleges. The number of applicants who are “diverse” is even lower. In order to keep up the illusion of endlessly growing enrollment numbers, administrators concoct all sorts of schemes to enroll students who have no likelihood of ever graduating. They’ll eventually fail out and remain saddled with the loans they had taken out to pay for the education without having a diploma to show for it. But if you manage to retain them for at least a couple of additional semesters, they end up paying more and they prop up the enrollment numbers.

      This is the only reason why this is being done. In short, it’s a scam. I should have explained this in the post because for people who are not in the United States, this sounds like arrant lunacy, which it is.

      Yes, you make a great, intelligent argument that works with normal, reasonable people. Unfortunately, that is not the situation that currently exists in American higher ed.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        ” the only reason why this is being done. In short, it’s a scam”

        I keep waiting for some new edcucational initiative that isn’t a scam…

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          As always, this is coached in pseudo-psychological language of emotivity and caring. But the actual reason for this is cold hard cash.

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        2. Avatar
          Anonymous

          new initiatives…

          As long as you never settle on the boring thing that works, you can hire expensive consultants forever.

          ethyl

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            My absolute limit was that year when the university was refusing to let me hire a professor of French, yet invited an extremely expensive speaker who was an expert on kindness. That’s how she introduced herself: an expert on kindness. She was supposed to give a whole series of events, but the faculty were so unwelcoming and angry that the administration never called her back.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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