To Grade or Not to Grade … Is the Wrong Question

College students across the United States report having suicidal thoughts at more than twice the rate of the overall adult population. And that’s not just a blip in the data—numerous studies point to a mental health crisis affecting college students nationwide.

Despite some recent improvements in survey findings, one in three college students continues to report experiencing moderate or severe symptoms of depression, according to the latest Healthy Minds Study, which is based at the University of Michigan and includes responses from more than 84,000 students across 135 colleges and universities. Findings from the 2024–25 study also show that one-third of students experience moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety.

As a clinical psychologist and dean of the largest college at Michigan, I believe higher education has a responsibility to take bold, decisive action to confront this crisis.

For many students, transitioning from high school to college is like driving in New York City for the first time when you learned to drive on a country road in Maine. The result? A significant number of students experience mental health challenges as they approach the new demands of a highly competitive college campus. I believe Michigan’s new pilot policy of covering first-semester grades will help students establish early momentum, encourage academic exploration and alleviate mental health challenges from their very first days in college.

While grade-covering policies differ across institutions, the central concept is that students receive constructive feedback and grades from their instructors as usual, but those grades are not displayed on external transcripts, which only record whether a student passed or failed a course. Grade-covering policies are not a cure-all, but they can help first-year students adjust to college and pursue learning for the sake of learning.

Establishing early momentum is crucial. Students who struggle in their first year of college are statistically less likely to recover academically or graduate on time. Nearly seven in 10 students with a first-year GPA of at least 3.0 graduate within four years, according to an analysis from the College Board, while only 28 percent of students with a first-year GPA between 2.0 and 2.49 graduate in the same time frame. With just one semester of covered grades, universities can help students build early momentum and launch them into successful college careers.

A liberal arts and sciences education relies on teaching students critical and complex reasoning across a wide range of disciplines. Academic exploration is a key component of our educational model. At Wellesley College, which implemented a similar grading policy for first-year students, 49 percent of students reported that they were more likely to choose courses that were more demanding, in which they did not expect to do well. And 92 percent of students reported that they were more likely to stay in a challenging course rather than drop it entirely.

Grade covering can help cultivate a healthy learning environment for students, rather than one that breeds chronic stress and anxiety. For example, in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, a myopic focus on GPA has led to a notable rise in grade grievances for an A-minus. Many students believe a single “bad” grade will ruin their futures.

During the major life transition from high school to college, a few months of grade covering provides students with a brief opportunity to acclimate to new academic, social and sometimes financial demands. Grade covering encourages students to engage in true intellectual exploration, to learn about something unfamiliar, to tackle a subject that doesn’t come easily to them and to embrace the joy of learning. And if students do not perform well in a course, they will be less likely to interpret that experience as a failure from which they can never recover.

In the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, we are exploring a first-semester grade-covering pilot for future students for all these reasons. The pilot is projected to launch alongside a broader effort to support students’ early momentum, encourage challenging course loads and provide opportunities for more first-year seminars and advising.

We cannot possibly eliminate all the stress that students will face during their transition to college. Nor should we aim to do so. Learning to cope with stress is an important part of life. Yet, while some stress is inevitable, chronic levels of stress, as many students report today, are neither normal nor healthy.

Students arrive on our campus for the first time with a mixture of hope, nerves, excitement and fear. The right question is: How do we best support the academic success of college students in today’s world? We owe it to them to create an environment that supports rigorous yet healthy academic engagement, intellectual exploration and collaborative—rather than merely competitive—learning, all of which are critical components of a liberal arts and sciences education.