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“Why don’t we blow up the transcript?” Angela Dillard, vice provost for undergraduate education at the University of Michigan, asked in a 2024 seminar on the future of undergraduate education at the university. Two years later, U-M is moving in that direction.

Starting in fall 2027, the University of Michigan will exclude first-semester grades from overall GPAs for first-year students in its College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, purportedly to curb a “mental health crisis.” The university declined to tell the Wall Street Journal how it decided to launch its “grade covering” pilot program. But university documents suggest that grade covering is part of a larger effort to reshape the university around the students it admits rather than expecting those students to adapt to a demanding academic environment.

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The policy is designed to build “early momentum,” which the university describes as “the most important element in U-M’s campus-wide Student Success Initiative.” A 2023 university report states, unsurprisingly, that students who succeed early in their academic careers are likely to have higher graduation rates. But the university found that “DFW” (D’s, F’s, and withdrawals) rates showed “intersectional patterns of inequity that parallel those seen in graduation rates: wealthy, white, continuing generation students are substantially more likely to complete these courses with passing grades.” DFW rates were the highest in foundational courses that students took in their earlier years.

Most students who attend the University of Michigan will graduate on time. U-M has an 81% four-year and 94 percent six-year graduation rate, well above those of most public universities and comparable with peer institutions. But when broken down by race and ethnicity, there’s great variation. Black and Hispanic students fell 10 to 20% below the overall four-year rate at U-M. The university has seen a 13% decline in white students between 2016 and 2025 while enrolling more black and Hispanic students. The share of black students enrolled at the university remained relatively stable between fall 2016 and fall 2022, but it has markedly grown since then. The Hispanic enrollment share has doubled, from 5% to nearly 11%, over the last decade, with a 1% per-year increase after fall 2022.

Since the pandemic, U-M has not uniformly required standardized tests for admission.

Dillard claims that the Student Success Initiative isn’t about “blaming students for being unprepared” but about placing “blame on institutional systems.” Through its Analytics for Student Success and Equity Transformation (ASSET) — a group of researchers tasked with investigating questions related to equity and student success that informs the work of administrators like Dillard — the university found racial “credit gaps” among students before they enroll at U-M. Credits from high school AP exams, for instance, allow incoming U-M freshmen to “take a lighter credit load, having a credit buffer so they can withdraw from a class if needed, and not having to take some introductory courses.” Whites and Asians were more likely to have such precollegiate credits than Hispanic and black students. U-M’s rationale appears to be that if some students arrive on campus with an academic cushion, then covering grades for the first semester would make sure that everyone else has a cushion, too.

The context of high failure rates in early courses clearly shaped the discussion around grade covering. One session during the February 2024 provost’s seminar, held a day before the university officially announced that it would go test-optional, discussed “radically rethink[ing] grading practices for undergraduates across units, especially in the first one to two years.” Another slide says that the university should “recommend that all courses consider moving away from competitive grading.”

Michigan took inspiration from MIT, which has had a grade-covering policy since 1968, and it will now join a handful of other universities that have such policies for first-year students. But what works at one university may not work at another. Depending on the student population, some may responsibly use such a policy to explore courses they otherwise wouldn’t have tried. Another type of student may see it as an academic free pass. As a Johns Hopkins University student wrote in 2016 about the costs of grade covering, “it demands a certain level of unexpected maturity to be able to bounce back into the scheme of things, into how life at college actually works.”

Prestigious universities are not immune from the downsides of these practices. Johns Hopkins rescinded its 45-year-old policy after professors found that it “delay[ed] development of study skills and adaptation to college-level work,” “negatively impact[ed] students who perform well,” and was “not well-received by graduate schools and potential employers.”

The evidence suggests that the University of Michigan’s main motivation for adopting a grade-covering policy isn’t giving high achievers a boost but instead softening academic expectations to accommodate the consequences of the university’s own admissions decisions.

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This is republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. The original can be found here.

Neetu Arnold is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute.

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