U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’

My neighborhood and social circle have a number of high school age children, some aiming for high ranking universities.

None of them have these grueling 15 hour day schedules you’re describing.

I don’t even know of a high school around me that starts at 7:30AM.

What universities are you targeting with such an extreme schedule?

There are some parallels here to the people who say that everyone in tech is working 80 hour weeks: If you get pulled into one of these bubbles you are surrounded by others doing the same thing and it starts to feel like everyone is doing it. You assume everyone, everywhere is having the same experience. The people outside the bubble are left puzzled by these descriptions.

We are making the kids endure that out of fear of their college, but stats don't back up the grind they make the kids do.

Comparable adult parent things would be up at 6am, prep kids for school day, in the office by 8am, 8 hours of work plus a lunch, departing the office around 5pm, transporting kids to/from some activities, dinner, helping kids with homework, somehow fit in regular shopping needs (food, essentials, etc), maybe some volunteering or hobby things, if lucky in bed by 10pm, and we're easily at 15 hours of "work" on a weekday.

Yes, it's a lot.

In my experience, many freshmen treated their first year as a gap year anyways, especially if they took difficult senior classes. First year classes aren’t always as rigorous as good AP classes (depending on both the high school and the university), so you can skip or cram while partying.

Still baffles me why is that even a thing that's considered at the colleges. I thought it was just a relic of Soviet past but no, apparently it exists in the US and other first world countries as well for some strange reason.

Nor would I, but I'd also accept that she did so and failed a few classes.

Just like I did in the 90s. Although in my case it wasn't burn-out, but system shock at actually having to try to get good grades (Fairfax County PS then UVA).

Did that bombed first semester probably eliminate med school or an elite graduate program? Sure. But I probably wasn't cut out for either anyway. And it was a kick in the pants and got me to pay attention and work.

> she was up at 6:30am, in AP classes by 7:30am (three more to go during the day). Classes were done by 3:00, then sports practice until 5:00.

In other States, high school starts later like 8:45/9am. You can take classes online and start school later if you want or do dual enrollment and skip later periods.

> Gotta have that activity on your college application, not counting other volunteering and clubs in the open spaces.

Mine worked and were in clubs. Kids are remarkably resilient. In some States, work time counts in lieu of volunteer time.

> Then you have test prep (APs and the ACT/SAT), college applications, writing essays and scholarship applications, college tours, sorting decisions, financial aid applications, etc etc etc. And now her college already has a few hours of orientation videos stacked up for her to watch before she moves in.

This sounds like a lot of undue pressure. UCF didn’t make you do that. ACT or SAT works and you have a couple years to do it. Not all at once in Senior year and you usually can composite your score across the highest tests.

Then the never-ending pressure of midterms, finals, and regents exams.

The bar is only high for straight out of high school admissions

If you have intention and a cool life story, no crime record, and evidence of a support system, and an ability to pay, universities would love to have that on campus

So forget the grueling stuff and contrived extracurriculars and just graduate, gain some life experiences - gap year, apprenticeship, endeavor - and then apply to colleges

I attended a prestigious land grant university, like Michigan, and I was totally prepared and performed very strongly right out of the gate. I was competitive with elite students who had attended the most prestigious high schools both in the United States and internationally.

Today, I'm an extremely well compensated engineer. My household income is top 1%. My career is gratifying. I have a rich social life and a loving wife and child. If your children are operating at this caliber, and they're able to sustain this level of effort, they're going to go places, no matter what they chose to do. You are rewarded for this effort.

No, this isn't every high school student. But there are more people in the group I describe than there are in the group you describe.

Here's my point: There is a lot of ground between the two extremes. And both ends of the spectrum are making it into college of some sort. So it you think your child is under too much stress from taking seven AP classes, drop four of them. If they are overwhelmed by tennis practice, ... maybe recognize that removing all friction from a person's life is not necessarily a good thing. Work together to build coping skills. But no child has to be an Olympic medalist neurosurgeon senator CEO all at the same time. Who is "forcing" that on high school students? You?

There is plenty of room for people with 3.2 GPAs and only two AP classes when they graduate. Frankly, with some family support, it is not that hard to have a 3.8 GPA for 60+% of students.

But I've seen high school valedictorians with 3.9 college GPAs graduate and struggle to find a white collar job. What is the plan for that from U Mich?

I did everything you mentioned in the nineties and aughts (my sport was year round and coach expected us to travel on our own dime to tournaments that lasted the entire weekend at least four times in the summer, and during the school year I was out of town most Sat-Sun at tournaments, which take way more time than the couple hours a volleyball game lasts or whatever), and volunteer activities that lasted until 10pm for a few week stretches a few times a year.

I had a blast doing things I loved. Counting travel, 30+ hours a week of sports. School from 6:30 to 3:30 (because I took an extra AP physics class that happened before school officially started). I acted in community theatre. I did martial arts. I quit tennis to teach acting for the YMCA my senior year.

Why doesn't your kid love the sport she plays? Why doesn't she love the volunteer activities? Those are meant to be FUN. Like, that's why the colleges want them: to see why she's an interesting person, not a time-management robot. They can tell these things, so stop gaming the system ad find a hobby she'll be so obsessed with that she'll write a college entrance essay all about how it made her a more interesting person.

There is no adcom in the world that is trying to find a selfless 17yo who does drudgery because it's expected of them. They're trying to find people who LOVE building for Habitat, who want to be chefs and serve at a soup kitchen, who LOVE God and ran tech support during COVID for their church livestream, etc.

lucky she has you who considers this. speaking from experience: think about trying to handle that with parents who dont have time management skills

Is it possible that the kids who have to study very very long hours to get a GPA decent enough to get into college are just not that sharp?

Perhaps I should disregard my own lived experience and substitute it for what this comment on the (dead and AI-generated) internet is telling me to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don’t think kids like yours are having issues but rather kids who didn’t apply themselves academically.

Basically A or even B grades cannot be an average grade. C or 2.0 would be the expected average but of course this hasn’t been close to true since GWB introduced his idiotic policy.

It’s no secret, if you let kids (or people) slack, 80 to 90% will slack off. 10 to 20% will endure out of principle or habit.

I did the whole APs, sports, volunteering thing too, and managed to do just fine in college.

Kids today are just so fucking soft.

This kind of applicant is now treated as table stakes for programs like UMich, and acceptance rates for impacted majors like CS in top programs have dropped to single digits.

It is ridiculously competitive to get into top programs now. I got into an Ivy in the late 2000s to early 2010s. With my stats from back then (13 APs all 4s and 5s, a 4.5+ GPA, varsity wrestling, JV XCountry, NHS, CSF, USAPHO, USAMO, Policy and LD debate, a 2200+ SAT, 35 ACT, 8 SAT Subject test), I would have been lucky to get into CS@UC Davis today and I absolutely wouldn't have gotten into my alma mater.

Our professor assigned us to write a fast fourier transform, and when we had class next week apparently everyone claimed that it was too difficult so he changed the assignment to "find an implementation online and write about it"

I feel really grateful I graduated before the advent of LLMs because it was really easy to stand out as a good student when the standards are apparently so low.

Side tangent but in the same class he caught people zero-citation copy-pasting from Wikipedia on the papers we were assigned to write, and the guys acted like they had no idea you couldn't do that.

First, college can be a very abrupt shift from "someone is watching over you" to "you, and only you, are responsible for yourself." If you slack off in high school, someone--your parents, your teachers, your school administration--is likely to get on your ass to put you back on track, and this is more likely to be the case for people who get into tougher colleges ("helicopter parents" are very real things). But in college, if you sleep in and miss all of your classes... no one is going to care. Well, your parents might, but your parents aren't with you in college to do anything about it. I've seen quite a few people who went from straight A's in high school to failing most of their college courses because of this.

Second, a lot of those accepted are going to be the smartest person in their class, who are now going to a college where they might be average--or even below average.

Finally, college courses are generally more difficult than a high school course, even an AP course, teaching the same material; there's just a lot more that's expected as students. Freshmen courses generally mitigate this somewhat to help ease in students, but by the time you get to a senior-level course, reading multiple research papers a day for per class is considered pretty normal. Of course, if you're a kid with a truckload of AP courses who let you skip your first year of college, now you're dropped into courses that expect you to have already adjusted to college life first.

20 years ago UofM had a 50% acceptance rate, from some light google searching. Apparently they received 115k applications last year vs under 25k in 2005.

The biggest factor is that applying is a lot easier in the age of web applications, common application, and students being advised to send 10-15 applications out. In the 2000s even a good student might apply to 3-5 schools and feel they had covered enough.

Kids will take multiple APs (taking 10+ isn't unheard of, and in a lot of high schools is expected), do multiple extracurriculars (debate, MUN, DECA sports, academic olympiads, theatre), volunteering (NHS, CSF, etc), and even take college classes in high school.

On top of that while tests are optional, most students still submit their SAT and ACT, and the expectation of 1500+ and 35+ still holds.

And even then there's no guarantee you'll get in.

Most applicants who successfully get into Ivies, impacted majors with single digit acceptance rates at Mich or Cal tier programs like EECS or a BBA, and other peer programs are basically burnt out by 17-18 (the age most kids at these programs now matriculate).

And the first semester is not impactful in any shape or form. It's best to take summary and intro classes as P/NP to even the playing field and then throw in a weed-out class (in CS that was historically data structures or OS).

So many HNers complain about how the younger generation is hyper-competitive yet when universities start taking steps to help reduce that they start kvetching.

Heck, with my profile from the late 2000s and early 2010s (right when everything became hyper-competitive and optimized), I actually wouldn't have a shot at most programs at Mich let alone my Alma mater, especially when I compare it to my younger sibling's profile who also attended a Mich tier engineering undergrad in the 2020s.

Nepo babies and affirmative action babies. (Dont @ me about Gratz, lets not pretend its no longer happening)

The students that come out of there are just normal. There is nothing special in the UoM sauce. They have more ego as their state school grad who makes the same money as them.

Sure there is a floor, they didn't let the alcoholic nepo baby in. But the people that made it to entry level Fortune 20 companies were the same tier, or maybe they were worse. Best engineers were people from random schools around the country that just wanted to work there.

Note: This didn't apply to people that had been there for 2 or 3 years. After that, even the UoM grads had their ego destroyed and they were normal people again.

What they are trying to do is keep the kids that would otherwise do well but might freak out in the first semester. Seems pretty fine to me especially since those are grades that if we are being honest really don't matter anyways.

Also, they may need an adjustment period, which makes sense.

I think we need to wait and see how it works, before blindly criticizing a possible good idea

I don't believe that for a moment. Classes exist to force students to learn hard things, and tests exist to verify they learned the things. It's a nice thought but the reality is without verifying students learned things they'd start skipping class and not doing readings.

Every generation has struggled with it, except now it’s discussed heavily on social media and other forums. Hence the impression that it’s unique to this generation.

Are there challenges today that didn’t exist for previous generations? Yes! Are they more complex compared to what the previous generations faced? No!

Money is the easy excuse.

The root of the problem is that many of them simply are not ready for college for a variety of reasons from parent coddling to defunded primary schools to the reduced ability to think abstractly and with foresight due to the lack of long-form reading.

I know on HN, every reflex is to blame money in one form or another. But there's plenty of blame to go around.

It doesn't take much of a logical leap to associate it with the pressure put on the children taking the tests.

Presumably that kind of pressure ia coming to america.

I wonder if U of M is similar. But then they wouldn't be able to ignore grades.

This had pros and cons:

- it was nice to have a bit more of a gradual build

- this would probably avoid some of the issues here

- if you are lazy like me: you do bare minimum effort first and second year and then get crushed by both workload and lack of foundational knowledge in third year

- if you apply to a US company, some will want to see your “full transcript” and don’t accept “I was too busy playing CS (Counterstrike) to study CS (Computer Science)”

The consequence though, was that every single person who stayed on the course actually cared about being there. Staying motivated for the next three and a half years was made so much easier because the first six months were so difficult.

I remember two things about my university.

First, I was a 'provisional' admission. Which meant that I had to maintain at least a C Average for the first year, Had to log a certain number of hours in one of the 'study centers' every week (Although I could technically do whatever, so I wound up reading a lot of books once I had my coursework done,) and there was a 1 hour a week pass/fail that was primarily following up on the study center logs and connecting students with extra help if the needed it.

Second, I remember a -lot- of people pledging a fraternity their first semester, and statistically it seemed to cause a much higher fail rate... In fact, I tried pledging a social fraternity my second year, dropped out in less than a week because I realized the time commitments and requirements would have tanked my grades; sure enough out of the entire group that didn't drop out, less than 10% survived through the full year.

That second point actually got so bad that, for my last year they actually banned Social fraternities from recruiting first semester freshmen... not sure whether it stuck or not after I graduated tho.

However, Caltech and MIT have a reason for this that probably doesn't apply to a large (35000 undergraduate) public university like UM.

Caltech, MIT, and UM all have incoming classes that did very well in high school. Around 88% of the UM class was in the top 10% of high school. It is 96+% for Caltech and MIT.

At all three most students will be going from having been one of the top students at every school they have attended to a school where they are more average. This drop on average will be bigger at Caltech and MIT because their students are clustered more tightly toward the top of their high school class.

Another thing that makes the drop bigger at Caltech (and MIT?) is that UM has a way more flexible schedule. For example if you take physics in your first year, they have I believe three different courses for that. One if for people majoring in life sciences and emphasizes the physics most useful in those areas. Another is for engineers and others doing practical applications. It is more rigorous. The third is for physics majors.

Compare to Caltech. First, there is no "if you take physics". It is a first year requirement. Second, there is just one course. Go to Caltech to major in English (which does occasionally happen! [1]) and your first year you are taking the same required physics and math courses that people there for physics and math are taking. Third, because admissions specifically looked for people with very strong math/science ability, the professors don't have to slow down. Those courses cram a lot into a short time compared to even the courses meant for people majoring in their subject at less specialized schools.

The net effect is that for a top high school student Caltech and MIT are much bigger academic shocks than UM because even though at UM you can find comparable courses structural differences due to its size and its much bigger number of students mean it doesn't make you take a bunch of rigorous courses right from the start at an insane pace.

[1] It is rare. The reasons some have done it include:

• They intend to be science writers or science journalists.

• They intend to go to medical school. Medical school admissions committees like English majors and they like a hard science background.

• They intend to go to law school. An English major with a serious hard science education and a law degree is a good fit for patent law or for going into science policy work.

Then there are Ivies and Stanford which are just soft.

This causes very high levels of stress amongst a large portion of the student body. The counselor hence wished MIT had even softer policies to make it easier for students to walk away from courses with no repercussions.

It lets you actually focus on getting acclimated and into the groove without being worried about the difference between an A and a B.

No, it eliminates the grade and GPA award for excelling. You can still excel, unless you absolutely require external validation for your work. And even then, it's still college, professors notice top performers even if they aren't giving them an A+++++ and have to give them a Pass instead.

My GPA being low, but not failing, gave me the wake up call I needed to make the needed adjustments. A “Pass” wouldn’t have given me that wake up call, and a “Fail” may have just bounced me out, not giving me the chance to right the ship.

it will increase it because in pass/fail classes i have had you do not know if you're passing or failing until the final grade/result. With a grade average you know how far you are from failing but without it you have no idea. Maybe they keep the grading the same but whatever you end up with doesn't affect your GPA (good or bad), I can see that reducing anxiety. However, the students are going to be in for a shock the next semester when it's assumed they learned everything they should have first semester and class takes off from there.

Pass/fail means that whatever was a C before is going to be passing now. It lowers expectations compared to the previous grading scheme (in that a C no longer has a serious impact on your GPA, you still pass). If the majority of the students are getting a C or better, the majority of students would get a passing mark.

I did really well my freshman year and managed to get deans list. Then I transfered to a much more rigorous school and didn't do well. I didn't enjoy my major, I was living in a house far from campus with three other guys I didn't know and didn't really have any shared interests with. By spring, I was on academic probation. I lived like a hermit and wasn't going to class much or studying hard. I was pretty depressed and my undiagnosed ADHD didn't help. I did have some highschool friends at that school but I hadn't seen them in a while so it was hard making the effort to see them. I got on academic suspension at the end of my second year and had to take my next fall off. I waited the whole summer until I had come back to school to tell my parents because I was so ashamed. I remember my dad was trying to figure out why he hadn't gotten a tuition bill yet and called the bursar office while we were at the beach in August. They couldn't say why he hadn't gotten a bill yet so he handed the phone to me and the lady on the other end is saying "you need to tell them you're suspended." That was a gut punch. I was actually suicidal at this point but I kept it together until I wrote them a long email saying how bad things were. My dad visited me and convinced me to see a therapist. This ended up getting me an ADHD diagnosis and a prescription for Adderall. I stayed in my room a lot of that suspended fall semester but I did join a club sport (while lying about my eligibility as a full time student) which lead to making some friends. When I came back the next spring semester under a new major, I felt ready to crush it and I did. I stayed for the summer and crushed some more classes. I moved in with a friend and got along great with those guys. I was also right next to campus so there was no excuse to missing classes. I met my wife and made a huge turn around. But, those grades from my sophmore year were an albatross around my neck. They ruined my GPA. My in-major GPA was decent but I was still graduating with a 2.6 (freshman year grades didn't apply since they were transfer credits). Luckily, my parents had helped me get internships and my wife's father got me in for an interview at my current employer so GPA wasn't a huge burden to employment.

I really wish I could have dropped any of those sophmore grades. Obviously this policy wouldn't have helped me but I can certainly understand how it could help.

If college is supposed to prepare kids for the real world, we should be creating environments that simulate the real world as much as possible.

Creating a consequence free semester is the polar opposite of how the real world works. In the real world, you get a job, and you're on probation for your "first semester" when the scrutiny is at its highest. You don't get the privilege of easing into the job, you're thrown in. Shouldn't be any different for college kids.

The safety bubble we're building around kids + young adults is not going to end well.

As an alum I've observed both:

* kids who partied hard first semester since grades didn't matter only to struggle second semester

* kids who benefited from this transition because they didn't go to Hotchkiss

I ended up in both buckets and I have mixed feelings about this since it helped and hurt me.

In the long run - it really didn't matter.

But then I was just horrified to read apparently they got rid of that system in 2017 [1], and now it's a normal letter grade?! Assuming that Hopkins still skews quite harshly on grading, that's an awful regression.

[1] https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2016/05/university-to-...

Anyways, the biggest tech companies in Michigan are automakers, Dow chemicals, and Whirlpool. These are all respectable places and have different expectations than X or OpenAI or companies like that.

their fix is rampant out of control cheating

That reminds me of this simpsons clip where the elementary school teachers went on strike and Lisa has no one to grade her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h4GD2feZ8Q

For most students college is nothing like high school.

https://ro.umich.edu/sites/default/files/calendar/pdfs/Cal_2...

But both are done. Grading inflation is very real.

The problem is not specific to US uni: in many western EU countries education level is going down the drain at a totally alarming rate. We're talking about kids coming out of primary school and arriving at secondary school with "good grades" although they can barely write, even in their native language.

An official report from the OECD is saying stuff like: "29% of 15-year-old French students failed to reach Level 2 (the baseline level of basic proficiency needed to participate fully in modern society) in mathematics.". We're talking about nearly 1 in 3 people that cannot add and subtract numbers.

And it's not specific to France. It's the same in other western countries. Education in the west is going down the drain while students in Singapore, Japan, China, etc. are hard at work.

People are going to say it's "inhumane" to not grade-inflate. That we should let students pass the first semester without grades. But why stop there? Why not let students who cannot write, cannot add numbers, get their diploma? Neuro-surgeons? Plane pilots? Why not just pick people randomly in the population and assign them a role in society? No more math/physics/chemistry in first year of medicine: anyone can be a doctor.

Really: where do you draw the line? Why stop after that first semester?

It's Idiocracy. And people left and right, just like most in this thread, explaining how all the ideas that let to this state of affair are wonderful ideas that makes lot of sense because school/college/uni is "too difficult psychologically".

The little precious snowflakes, we need to cuddle them.

My anecdotal experience with the University of California system was that course load was a step down from Highschool university prep (which wasn't that bad). Classes were easier than their AP counterparts, and most students who struggled had an issue with attending morning classes after late nights socializing.

My impression from family going through this process now is that the high school prep has only gotten more intense, so what is the gap? Has college gotten significantly harder in the last 20 years?

Which did you find to be the case?

They aren't a meaningful signal for how capable a person is by the end of the program. But maybe the fix would be to not count them towards the GPA/permanent transcript, while still providing the achieved grade to the students so they have a measure of how they did.

They really ought to do a follow up for 2026. From what I gather talking to faculty and professors, this problem became noticeably worse since COVID and the years following. A follow up book or study would be very interesting to read.