The University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) is scrapping traditional letter grades for first-semester freshmen, shifting instead to a pass/no credit system beginning in fall 2027.
Under the new policy, incoming students will still complete coursework as usual, receiving letter grades and feedback from instructors throughout the semester. But those grades won’t make it onto official transcripts or count toward a student’s GPA. Instead, transcripts will simply mark each first-semester course as either “P” for pass or “NC” for no credit, with a note explaining that the designation was applied automatically. Standard letter grading resumes for all students starting in their second semester.
College administrators frame the change as a response to mounting concerns about student mental health. The policy is intended to help students “establish early momentum” and give them room to adjust to college-level coursework without the fear that early struggles will follow them permanently. According to the college, the goal is to let students explore unfamiliar subjects or take on harder classes without worrying that a rough grade will have lasting consequences, and to build “a culture of connection and collaboration—rather than competition.”
The shift may also reflect broader worries about grade inflation, which has become an increasingly common concern at both public and private universities nationwide.
The program will be mandatory for all incoming LSA freshmen, with no opt-out option. College officials reportedly reasoned that making participation optional could backfire, since students who chose not to use covered grades might feel it implied they were performing poorly. Transfer students and freshmen entering Michigan’s other 18 colleges won’t be part of the pilot.
Even though grades won’t appear on external transcripts, the university will still track them internally. Those records will be used for purposes such as academic advising, determining eligibility for scholarships and honors, athletic eligibility, financial aid decisions, degree progress tracking, and applications to internships or other opportunities. Internal grades will also carry over if a student later switches into a major outside LSA.
The scale of the change is notable given LSA’s size. As the largest of Michigan’s 19 colleges, LSA enrolls somewhere between 18,000 and nearly 20,000 undergraduates and houses some of the university’s most popular majors, including economics, computer science, and psychology. The college offers more than 80 majors and sub-majors, over 100 minors, and coursework spread across 41 academic departments.
Michigan isn’t the first school to try this approach, though the concept has struggled to gain lasting traction elsewhere. Many colleges temporarily adopted pass/fail systems during the COVID-19 pandemic, only to return to conventional grading once campuses reopened. Johns Hopkins University once had a grade-covering policy but later dropped it. Other schools have stuck with similar models: MIT covers grades for the entire first fall semester before reverting to letter grades in spring, while Caltech, Swarthmore, and Wellesley each run their own versions of the practice. Swarthmore, which introduced a mandatory pass/fail first semester in 2018, has reported that the policy eased stress for students transitioning from highly competitive high school environments.
Research on pass/fail grading in medical education has similarly linked the approach to reduced student stress and test anxiety compared with traditional letter grading.
