The stated reason for doing this seems suspicious. A pass/fail dynamic would likely maintain student anxiety, if not increase it.
What I think is more likely is that this move will help them hire less qualified teachers and reduce administrative oversight as now they no longer have to worry about all the issues that come with grading, such as consistency, or the grades accurately reflecting performance. The quality of curriculum will likely drop significantly and this will be reflected in the student’s second year grades.
Hire less qualified teachers, move to even larger class sizes with less support, and move more teachers into administrative roles, furthering the decline of education.
I would have anxiety if I was a first year student who wanted to transfer out to another school or program and not know if my 'pass' would be sufficient to get prior recognition of learning or advanced standing.
The resolution to this anxiety, like for all transfer students, is to contact the academic advisors at your next institution and work with them. That's what I did, I had taken a break to work during college and when I returned it was to a new institution. I sat down with one of the advisors and worked out what transferred, what didn't, and what paperwork was needed so I didn't have to take 1st year courses that I already knew but didn't have a clear correspondence to past academics. For instance, linear algebra was mostly covered in my calculus 2 course previously, but was a separate required course at that institution. The advisor discussed it with me (he was a math professor, almost all the advisors were professors) and was satisfied I knew it well enough, I just had to take a different math course to get sufficient math credits but it was a substitution.
> A pass/fail dynamic would likely maintain student anxiety, if not increase it.
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.
> A pass/fail dynamic would likely maintain student anxiety, if not increase it.
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.
That is an excellent book that describes the changes higher education is facing in its students around 2014-2018. I have read it about a year ago.
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.
It sounds okay at first glance, but how many people are going to get saddled with an extra semester of debt now because they didn't figure out they weren't suite/ready for college yet but were just passed along through the first semester anyways?
Completely agree. My first semester of university was straight up hazing, which at the time felt like crap.
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.
People called them "weeder" classes in my university.
But it's better earlier rather than later. The consequences aren't severe and you can change majors, lessen your course load, or stop those volunteer opportunities. That's part of learning how to be an adult.
I knew a few people my freshmen year that were put on academic probation. They turned out all right after making some drastic changes. Others simply disappeared during the break.
Apart from the notion of a moral obligation that may now seem quaint and old-fashioned, you’re talking about their customers who are paying for an education. The responsibility rests partly on the school for solving these challenges. Declaring students “weeds” would tell you all you need to know about the place.
If it's simply pay to win then the value of a degree from an institution falls to absolutely zero. If the product a student is buying is a credential that's supposed to say "I know and can do things, pay me money please" then in order for that credential to fulfill its objective then low performing and mediocre students ("weeds") need to be filtered out. Otherwise, employers and the wider world will quickly realize the credential is meaningless.
Failing to teach a student ≠> the student is mediocre.
The student is mediocre ≠ the student is irredeemable and didn’t deserve an education in the first place.
Honestly, it’s wild to me how reluctant people are to accept that teachers have a responsibility to teach their students.
They will charge you $2000 a credit hour to have a teacher teach you — as if the teacher alone is the gatekeeper of an education — and then claim that the teacher is not in any way responsible for the student’s success or failure in being taught.
How is saying some students get weeded out the same thing as saying the teacher has zero responsibility to teach any of their students? Whether or not you pay or get paid to be at an educational institution, you should be weeded out (early, preferably) if you aren't going to put in your part.
A portion of the educator's role is weeding out students who are not wanting/able to engage with the material before they spend a massive amount of time and money towards stepping stone classes to something they won't try/be able to complete. A portion of the student's role is weeding out the teachers and institutions which are more interested in maximizing the money out of the student instead of teaching them well. The two weeding processes actually reinforce the right outcome together - students getting educated instead of wasting their resources.
Why take money from someone you know you can’t teach?
The reality is that prestigious universities routinely take money from incredibly talented people who are fully capable of learning calculus with or without a good teacher, the university gives them a careless or actively harmful teacher, and then the student is deemed a “weed” that was rightfully put in their proper place.
When you look at it this way, it’s clear that people are being scammed. Maybe that’s why universities are so reluctant to accept accountability for their teaching quality, blaming the students first and foremost.
I'm sorry but this is straight up a non serious reply. If you want to be in STEM you need to pass calculus, then the specific majors have their own "weed out" courses which is good. There should be some base level of competence and if you can't pass, say, Abstract Algebra then you can't get a degree in mathematics.
There needs to be some sort of academic baseline for university otherwise what is the difference between a youtube playlist and a semester worth of credits?
Can the school teach its students calculus or does it take money from people, fail to teach them calculus, call them “weeds,” and kick them to the curb? The responsibility runs both ways.
I am definitely not saying that students should pass without learning the material. I am emphasizing that schools and instructors also have a responsibility to teach their students, both morally and financially. Just because the norm is to behave amorally and with greed, that doesn’t make it proper.
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.
The same amount of people maybe that will not have quit and would go on to thrive. Two sides of the same coin. If you want to go to the bottom of it, it's wrong answers only.
Huh, I never considered that grades might be intended to help the person learning. I always assumed they were just intended as a signal to the rest of the world that they had learned something.
Yeah, the students are being graded like meat. It's not for the cow's sake, it's for the consumer. I say this as someone who had to maintain a set gpa through to keep a scholarship.
I think that's possibly one of the main problems with grades and why they inevitably lead to the grade inflation crisis. From the article:
> In May, Harvard University faculty voted to approve a 20% cap on the number of A’s per undergraduate course in an effort to curb grade inflation. It won’t apply to A-minuses, which committee members predicted would become the most awarded grade.
> At the University of Michigan, a review by the news site MLive found that 74.1% of all undergraduate grades in 2022 were an A+, A or A-. A decade earlier, that percentage was 57.6%.
For the most part, the only people that see the grades are you, your parents, your teacher, and maybe your friends. Most of the world will just see a pass/fail result (degree or not), unless you also earn special awards.
It's been a while since I was in college, but mine gave the bare minimum credit hours (3 classes) to qualify as a full time student and the classes were brain-dead easy. That seemed like a good compromise to get students used to the college life.
Michigan also dropped their mandate for ACT / SAT to obtain admission. So, yes, I would say that's pretty broken. Combined with systematic grade inflation American universities as a whole are removing any real feedback about student preparation, level of effort, or ability.
The UC system and many other of the top universities in the country have also stopped looking at SAT scores.
Growing up with no one in my family having gone to college I had no idea how any of this stuff worked or anybody to tell me its important. Eventually I moved to a middle class suburb and saw kids hire private tutors for it. Meanwhile I remember 2 days before I had mine scheduled and had to find someone to beg to drive me there. I'm quite thankful that universities acknowledge how silly it is to assess a student's aptitudes from a single test score like that.
I think personal essays and a more holistic assessment is a great alternative but I'm worried about the LLM age and the limits it introduces to that as well. Perhaps interviews are the future. It would certainly better prepare students for the real world
ACT/SAT is still needed for merit based scholarships though so if you fall in the income bracket between homeless and owning your own island those tests are very very important.
Caltech, too. It was the entire first year when I was there but they have since changed to to the first two terms then normal grades for third term.
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.
Coincidentally just last week a relative recounted a conversation with someone who used to be a student counselor (or psychiatrist?) at MIT who said MIT should be even softer on students. WTF, right? The dynamic, the counselor explained, is that MIT is already extremely hyper-competitive to get into and so it already selects for students who are very self-driven and competitive. Hence they tend to take on a much harder workload than they can handle, especially because MIT courses are no joke either no matter how smart you are.
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.
When you force high school kids to work days that are significantly longer than a normal adult to achieve a good GPA and get into a good college, you can expect that they are going to throttle back once they're away from home with way more free time than is normal.
From my kid's experience: 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. Gotta have that activity on your college application, not counting other volunteering and clubs in the open spaces. Then homework after dinner until 10:00 or so, sometimes much later. Homework assigned over weekends. Homework assigned over breaks.
That's 15+ hours a day, every weekday, for an entire school year. 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.
Personally, I don't blame her if she checks out for a few weeks. Or a semester.
Personally, I don't blame her if she checks out for a few weeks. Or a semester.
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.
Yes, same here, for me high school was easy and I failed (or effectively failed, a D counted the same as an F) a couple classes right out of the gate. It was a lesson to myself that I never learned to study in high school and had to learn that skill ASAP.
Michigan and its apologists here would rob these kids of real-world experience, reducing them to infants. And then we're all disappointed when these adults act like infants.
Robbing the students of that experience would be to hand them an inflated letter grade. If anything this encourages instructors not to be gentle in grading first semester students. Students who eke out a low C grade will get the warning and can calibrate the level of effort needed (or switch fields) without the impact on grad school admissions or intern/new grad job search.
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.
Then why is getting into M.S programs much easier? The GRE is barely an exam and it's not like you need to go to an IIT or do any olympiads to get into columbia or a good UC. Yes in principle you have fewer applicants than bachelors, but that would be compensated by the fact that indians and chinese students also apply no?
> Then why is getting into M.S programs much easier?
Because domestic undergrads applying to a research-oriented grad program are advised to apply directly to a PhD program.
MS/MA programs are expected to remediate deficiencies at the undergrad level, and most undergrads will take 1st year MS/MA classes as part of their senior year doing a bachelors. Alternatively, the MS/MA is awarded if a PhD candidate failed Quals.
Outside the US, the expected path is BA/BSc/BEng/BTech to MS/MA/MTech/MPhil to PhD.
In the US, the expected path is SB/AB to PhD and MS/MA if you fail quals or are looking for a professional program to remediate coursework deficiencies.
Policy/LD debate, especially if you were good, might as well be a minus these days. That just tells everyone you're going to spread "post-modern neo-marxism" / fashionable nonsense wherever you go, and/or be more slimy than the worst memes about lawyers could ever imagine.
Debate is actually dying, and for a reason. Good riddance, don't let the door kick your ass on the way out.
I'm pretty sure you would get into Berkeley with that profile. Also you can just major in math and get a job as a software engineer anyways. I agree that the system has reached the point of absurdity though. ETH Zurich and KU Leuven have the best solution to this issue in my mind, which is to let everyone in but make the classes ridiculously hard so that 50% leave in the first year.
This schedule is no different than my schedule from 30 years ago and I don't consider it problematic at all. You frame it as 15+ hour days by including all aspects of their day as "work" but no normal adult includes their workout time and their social engagements as part of their work day. Time spent in sports is fun, not work. If it is work, then quit. Time spent in gym class and lunch is not work. Remove all that bloat from your framing and it is a very reasonable workload.
Indeed. At uni, starting in my second year, I worked as a programmer (no remote work, office at 1hr commute from uni dorm) on top of my studies. It was hard, but doable. My major was applied math, so the CS part was the easier bit, but the math, especially Analysis, Numerical Methods, Linear Algebra, and Analytic Geometry they kicked my butt. We also had a really bad prof for the Math Logic class and no textbook, only lecture notes and his lectures were unstructured shit :(
The biggest problem wasn't the workload itself, but how inefficient learning was back then. It was the early days of the Internet, no coursera, no Google indexed uni sites, no LLMs, no online tutors. I only had a mediocre textbook and some notes I borrowed from friends when I couldn't attend lectures or labs. It took ages. I’d burn hours trying to parse two paragraphs in the textbook, only to ask mates who didn't understand it either.
Now, we have an incredible amount of information & tech at our fingertips: LLMs, Google NotebookLM, online tutors, dozens of textbooks, and sites like Anna's Archive packed with high-quality "free" material. With all this technology, the time it takes to understand, prepare, and master a topic is a fraction of what it used to be. It still takes work and discipline, but man... you can feed textbooks into an LLM and use targeted prompts to debug your exact knowledge gaps on the practice test you get from the LLM.
So I reckon it's easier now than before, simply because learning can be done so much more efficiently. After all these years, I still remember the hardest classes and the most stringent professors with great affection - even though I hated those bastards back then. My Group Theory prof once invalidated a definition I wrote because of a single missing word. At the time, I thought it was an injustice, but later I realized that word was crucial.
University is where young people must face hard work and reality, because it teaches them what true meritocracy is. It should be hard, it's the same way a gym workout should be hard or it’s ineffective.
Yes, if you go to a junior college or night school, you will discover what an actual busy schedule looks like and it's not sports clubs and volunteer activities taken for the sole purpose of inflating your college admissions letter.
Some of those students have 40 hour jobs, some night shift, that they can't skip or else they don't have a home or school anymore. Others have kids that can't be neglected.
It is fun when it is fun, when you can skip it or do it purely because you want to. If you go to sports club because you have to, it is work and not fun.
If you go volunteer or have to join the club for college application, they become work. They are not fun stuff.
> Time spent in gym class and lunch is not work
Gym class is work. Kids are not there voluntarily.
Sports club and volunteering are neither restorative nor relax. Sports are another competitive activity you are supposed to excel at. You dont do it to rest and relax.
You come in and do what you are told. You don't chat with friends or play around, you focus on whatever trainer told you to focus at. You dont do what you want to do, but what trainer thinks will make you more performant. And if it hurts or you are tired or just really want to do something else, you still do it.
Absolutely. I can barely sleep when I feel pressure of what I am have to do next day, especially if it is something stressful. When somebody would be measuring performance of my sleep the idea of sleep would be stressing me out.
Are normal adults not "working" in a similar way to your kid for 15+ hours per weekday?
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.
Naw. Adult life is so much easier with regards to competitive pressure compared to getting into a good college. The real world is Pass/Fail, much to the chagrin of plenty of HNers.
Your comment specifically compared it to the normal adult, my point is the normal adult who is a parent is very likely doing even more than your example of your kid. Even for adults who aren't in the elite high earner category, heck people who make less money are likely working even more hours per day just to make ends meet.
How, exactly, are they working more? How many low-paying jobs offer overtime, if they are full time at all? Any clue how many jobs won't let you work a part-time job or won't work around another job? Can't exactly work for Uber if you can't afford a decent enough car. And this is assuming you have older children that don't need childcare.
The fact is that they aren't working extra, not for a job anyway. The extra work comes in the time making dried beans instead of buying canned, in repairing stuff poorly, in shopping around for a doctor that takes the state health insurance or an affordable option if you have none at all, in taking busses (if they are available), and other unpaid things. Your child will be lucky to afford the activities that gets them a 'good' education, especially if they have to work.
That is exactly OP's point: for OP, if a child's "working hours" includes university prep and resume-padding sports activities, then an adult's "working hours" includes housework, grocery shopping, dealing with insurance and taxes, and commute/family chauffeur time.
As adult with job and kids, I honestly don't work as much as a kid described in that comment. It is in fact way less competitive. I get a good pay, my job is reasonably interesting (ai can make it sux and probably will, but we are not there yet). There are parts that sux or where I am under pressure, but overall, it is better to be an adult then to be teenager trying to get to competitive school.
And for the record, I had to work less to get to good school back then.
"It takes a ton of pressure to make a diamond". I read that in a game when I was a kid and took it as a guiding principle in my life.
Overcoming hard times absolutely made me a better person, but as I've grown I've seen many examples of the fallout you're referring to. Sometimes people just break.
Why should we change the practice of putting people to work to build civilization when they’re at their physical and energetic peak? In his early 20s my dad helped overthrow the Pakistani government, and by his late 20s and early 30s he was helping tackle the astronomical infant and maternal mortality in the country. Why shouldn’t our young people in America work?
I have several hobbies that are popular with kids (mountain biking, rock climbing, and some others).
I can assure you that there are plenty of kids with more time than I have to dedicate to these hobbies at every popular spot I go to. Many of them are ambitious, smart, and working toward top universities, too. It’s actually fun energy to be around.
The parent comment about students getting up at 6:30AM and working 15 hour days is highly unusual.
Sometimes I wonder where all these HNers work. The majority of "slightly below top companies" seem to consist of mediocre workers, which is fine. Employees are just doing their job and if they fuck up, even badly, it's not too difficult for them to get a new job. Meanwhile a student getting a few subpar grades, often for reasons beyond their control, should somehow be punished forever.
I don't get all this existential talk about college acceptance. Yes, elite schools should expect elite applicants.
Meanwhile, the state school down the road is a fraction the cost, teaches a lot of the same content, and will accept anyone with a pulse. In my state, at least. State universities are somewhat competitive to get into, but state colleges... wide open.
All of which is very real-world. Certain top firms recruit only top candidates. Everyone else works somewhere further along the spectrum.
> I don't get all this existential talk about college acceptance. Yes, elite schools should expect elite applicants.
As a non-US person who's worked for a bunch of US companies, my belief is that the Ivy League et al act as a class system, rather than a symbol of educational attainment.
I’ve known a lot of Ivy League graduates and they were all very smart. Most of them were very good people, too. A lot of them came from backgrounds that didn’t include wealth or social connections.
This goes against the stereotypes you read online, but many of them are motivated by a desire to sneer and cut down others’ achievements. Look up “tall poppy syndrome” for one phrase describing this phenomenon.
> I’ve known a lot of Ivy League graduates and they were all very smart. Most of them were very good people, too. A lot of them came from backgrounds that didn’t include wealth or social connections.
Again, the fact that entry to the class system can be meritocratic is entirely disconnected from the fact of it operating as a class system.
When I worked at Big tech I remember recruiters (US-based) talking about hiring from approved schools, which were mostly Ivy League.
Additionally, when we were hiring a candidate in Europe, our director wanted to know what school she had gone to. Fortunately, she was an Oxbridge graduate so all was well.
Again, even if all Ivy League graduates were in the top 1% of objective merit, the use of this credential in hiring/firing/other decisions is what makes it a class system.
I have worked with many Ivy League graduates and they were all super smart and mostly effective, but that doesn't change my point.
Your original argument appeared to imply that it was a system designed to separate people by class, not by merit or educational attainment.
In my experience the people who are that selective about university pedigree are either doing it out of laziness (outsourcing selection process to the university filtering mechanism) or they have a degree from that system and believe that hiring people from it will automatically grant them more allies, thereby improving their own power.
I strongly disagree. I knew a number of people who were accepted into those elite schools (two at MIT, two at Harvard, one at Brown). All but one of them were lower-to-lower middle class and only able to attend due to the grants given by the school itself. The thing they all had in common was they were incredibly intelligent and hard working. The elitism definitely exists, but it's not the way you describe in my experience
All of the AI companies are what I would consider top companies and all of them have had consistent outages because of bugs. OpenAI resets Codex limits almost weekly because of a major outage. Top companies have plenty of average employees.
HN is centered around venture capital, which in college terms is the subtopic of branch Finance under Business Administration. SJSU, a top business school half an hour south of YC Palo Alto, has an intensely competitive Investment program that admits very few applicants for which students directly manage an investment fund; meanwhile, their Accounting under B.A. program is admitting anyone with a GPA of 2.2 or higher. That duality can be deeply confusing to people on the glamorous side of the fence: why would SJSU cheapen itself by admitting literally everyone it possibly can into Accounting by, when being highly selective results in such a high quality Investment program? That confusion fades rapidly when considered from the other direction: Investment is where the glory is, for those who seek that, and for the rest of us, there’s Accounting and Finance.
While HN, VCs, SJSU, and Tech are obviously not composed of the same population or applying the same restrictions, it’s certainly reasonable to highlight one similarity: the potential glory of one’s role at work directly impacts how competitive it is. That we’re currently in a nightmarish layoff cycle due to the ZIRP bubble popping and due to businesses replacing costly (and glorious) creative roles with more economical PREs (prompt reliability engineers) is amplifying this effect more strongly in Tech than in other industries, because Tech — just like the Investing industry that’s underpinned it for so long — has been saturated with glory and competitiveness.
I spent my career in tech working in the roles that do not offer glory — IT, rather than Product; Cost Centers, rather than Profit Centers — but even within IT, there were a couple of roles that had more glory and were much more competitive in their selection and evaluation criteria than others. At my final IT job, we were less strict about credentials and competitiveness with directors and vice presidents than we were about the high-glory role of enterprise architect. So while I do empathize with HN’s bias, having myself once pursued glory in tech, such competitiveness is abnormal in most jobs in most fields.
Only if you make it so. Good college/university means little in many jobs. The best devs for example (and most paid correspondingly since they knew their value very well) I've ever met were either coming out of subpar schools or skipped university altogether.
I myself went through mediocre noname university in eastern Europe with OK grades and it didn't matter at all, now I get perm salary thats better than 99% of devs in whole Europe while doing just that and nothing more, while sporting 10 weeks of paid vacation yearly. Quality of life further down the line, success and happiness are extremely non-correlated with all this academic stuff.
Its just control freak helicopter parents, which, albeit with good underlying intentions, fuck up everything they touch, including mental health of their kids. So kids compete just to endlessly compete while winning less than nothing. This is how deep regrets later in life are made.
> Adult life is so much easier with regards to competitive pressure compared to getting into a good college
You’re competing apples and oranges. Getting into a top college is similar to grinding to get into Big Tech jobs and then climb the ladder there.
Good colleges are easy. The top few colleges are very hard.
> The real world is Pass/Fail, much to the chagrin of plenty of HNers.
If by “fail” you mean lose your job in the next round of layoffs and have your career derailed, possibly.
You’re still comparing apples and oranges. The people who compete for top college spots usually continue competing for promotions and better paying jobs. The people who coast through high school look for jobs where they can coast and then get comfortable with whatever salary that provides them.
Very challenging at times, but for example I sleep with my kid hugging me, or I chat with them while in the car, or we do chores while watching tv or something like that.
And not every day is packed like that, you can tell your kids "no more than 3 times per week of activties, the other 2 days are for playdates", and that should be acceptable.
There are horrible days of the week, but it's not daily 15 hours of work. That's training for slavery.
Homework for break and homework for weekend should be STRONGLY ILLEGAL.
That is a weird (modern?) delusion. Without children, our species disappears in <100 years. And the last of those years would be painful for those still alive.
Those who are having and raising children are the ones doing the most for the next generation.
we wake up at 7, prep the kids to school, they walk there alone then, we have coffee together, then I drive to the office by usually 9:30. have a proper lunch break with colleagues, then in the office until 6pm or so, then drive home, have dinner, put the kids in bed by 8, then we can watch a movie/do hobbies/etc.
while I work, my wife can do the shopping and take care of other household chores if needed.
I've known many families around that age (+/- 5 years) with a stay at home spouse taking care of multiple kids. It really shapes their lifestyle in a lot of ways (smaller/older house, rarely eat out, rarely big family vacations, clothes/toys often from secondhand consignment stores, fewer/cheaper vehicles, etc.), but that's what's important to them so that's how they've set their priorities. Most didn't come from extremely wealthy backgrounds so its not necessarily like other wealthy people are propping them up, although a few are like that.
It may very well be impossible in certain markets but I wouldn't say its true across every family with the parents being around 30 years old.
Most of the stay at home spouses I know come from lower middle class households and they’ve made their lifestyle, living location, and other spending decisions fit their desired work arrangement. Even many of the construction contractors I’ve talked to recently (which is a decent number due to some remodel work) have stay at home wives.
What most people can’t afford is to maintain their desired lifestyle and only have one parent working. It’s similar to how people earning 3-4X the median wages for an area will think they’re barely getting by, while someone earning 1/4 of what they do is raising a family with two kids.
> What most people can’t afford is to maintain their desired lifestyle
True, goes without saying. I see most of the time when lifestyle is not even considered making a choice but simply as "everyone does it".
I might turn into most odd person in some sense among friends, colleagues, family/ relatives because I just happen to say things explicitly which makes for weird conversation.
Everyone around me expects these between the lines.
this is mostly the norm in Switzerland in my social circle for families with children - husband works in tech, mom stays home until all the kids are old that they don't need mom around so much and/or you don't need to spend a fortune on them.
school launch + supervision for the 11:30 - 13:30 period is ~42 USD per day per kid, kita (pre-kindergarten) is easily ~3100 USD/month or more per kid. (I've put the numbers here in USD as most of the audience is outside of Switzerland for easier comparability), so for a lot of families, if mom works, mom's salary is spent on these costs.
We need to normalize a gap year, or at least a gap semester. Young adults need a break after the pressure of graduation and college admissions, and whether it’s work or travel, some perspective helps ground the college experience and make it a choice instead of an obligation.
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.
I wish the US had mandatory conscription. Not necessarily military conscription, but kind of like the German model where you either do military service or public service (if I remember correctly).
I sure could have used the maturity, the money, and the time when I was younger. I learned the hard way that attending college when you have no idea what you want to do only delays your graduation date (major change absolutely fucked me).
Sorry if this seems naive but do students in America actually work that hard these days? Modern television and social media seem to suggest they are all on drugs and doing God knows what
This is fairly representative experience for high achieving students. When I was in high school, I was typically up at 6:30 AM to get to my 7:00 AM AP class. Classes can end anywhere from 3-4 pm, depending on your course work. After school clubs and activities ranged from commitment. But we were under the assumption that it mattered a lot for college admissions, so many of us participated in 2-3. Once you got home, you had a considerably amount of homework from each class. If you were prepping for standardized exams, you probably dedicated some time to study that as well. Overall, I felt the amount of time spent working in high school was taxing. But also it worked out for me - went to a good college and got a good job and life.
I remember waking around 7am and leaving school around 3pm, then no more than on average ~2 hours of extracurriculars and ~2 hours of homework.
I think the quantity was reasonable, except too much busywork, I wish I could replace it with subjects I was passionate about (i.e. tech).
I also had the entire summer between senior year and college to decompress.
Nowadays I hear that most public schools are giving less work. With all due respect, I believe GP is an anomaly and/or it wasn't the school, but their own pressure.
Is she typical or atypical of the kids having issues? My bet is the kids having issues are ones that were less academically inclined. Perhaps they were misled throughout primary education (trophies for everyone, equality of results rather than opportunity, dumbed down mathematics, skipping physics as a req., etc.)
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.
A lot of this is just inflicted by parent culture and anxiety. Unless your kid applying to an elite school, most college/university accept between 60-80% of their applicants. If they have decent GPA.
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.
> sports practice until 5:00. Gotta have that activity on your college application, not counting other volunteering and clubs in the open spaces.
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.
I have heard that it began to try to keep certain ethnic groups out of university and continued because sports bring in scholarship and (for D1 schools) sponsor money.
Not just ethnic groups. Schools mostly can't say "we only want rich people" but they definitely want to prefer students who will contribute to the donation revenue stream either themselves or through their parents. Signals like "doesn't have a job to take up their time in high school" and "parents can afford (and have the free time to enable) expensive, time-consuming activities" are really good proxies for that.
> 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.
7:30 is consistent with my experience in Oregon. Work does not count in lieu of volunteer time if you're writing an essay about your involvement with the community. I don't think schools NEED both ACT or SAT but you only have so many shots and may have an affinity for one or the other, so people like to take both.
Okay it sounds definitely regional/State specific. Some states are more flexible such as counting work hours towards volunteer hours and allowing ACT/SAT/alternatives.
Just to present another reality... a lot of kids coast through high school academically. They sleep through classes or play video games on their school-provided laptops, or play on their phones all day. They know about "minimum-F" policies where submitting 0 work earns them 50%. And they don't really care about getting Ds. Then some community support program assigns them a counselor who drags them over some finish line to get them admitted to a community college.
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?
When you are contrasting a hypothetical example against an anecdotal example, it is polite to provide some sort of evidence your hypothetical example actually exists.
> 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?
they've optimized for a highly stratified educational environment. The real world don't work like that.
Unless you stay in academia no one cares about your GPA 2 years after you leave.
I am still traumatizes from high school after almost 30 years. I had no extra-curricular activities but I had to travel far for the school of choice (I was an ESL student). Waking up at 5:45, 90 minute travel one way, then 8-9 periods ending at around 5PM. Get home at 7 and then do homework.
Then the never-ending pressure of midterms, finals, and regents exams.
That blows my mind. It seems so unnecessary. It also doesn't seem to work given where the US ranks globally in education. Is the problem what the admission process? In the UK, even to get into the most prestigious universities you do the same exams as everyone else, maybe a little extra-curricular stuff, and interview with the university. The amount of studying in the evening is no different than anyone else trying to get a good grade, and there are certainly no extra classes you can take (never mind starting the schooldays before the normal time).
> It also doesn't seem to work given where the US ranks globally in education.
This is true because this isn't necessarily "the norm". Its very common to have this kind of life, but there are also a ton of kids who aren't as focused on their academics, who don't take AP classes, who aren't involved in clubs and sports. Only a little over a third of students take any AP exams, and only a bit over half of those end up taking multiple AP exams.
If the sports and clubs are stressful, your kid should find other activities.
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.
I'm not sure that you understand how competitive, say, youth sports are. It's not seen as purely recreation, it is seen as a necessary pillar of advancement. Parents don't spend all this time and money sending their kids on travel teams for no reason.
> When you force high school kids to work days that are significantly longer than a normal adult to achieve a good GPA and get into a good college,
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.
I think magnet school and/or outside school /rec-league sports can easily bring that 15h number.
Overall I think you are right it is indeed bubble and once one is in, it is difficult to see not everyone is doing that.
I have a friend in town both husband, wife work from home and extremely busy with their elementary/middle school kids school/activities that I haven't seen him in years.
Being out of their bubble I only know whats happening but don't get to be tutored in how all these activities are essential. And even rare back out once in a while can be serious digression that affects child's future.
For the 7.30 start, its possible its a 0 period class( class before school starts, what a blast these were) and they start earlier then the rest of the student body.
> 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.
Hate to break it to you mate but none of them are getting in. Anyone who lives in a neighborhood with a high proportion of kids making it to the Ivy league and other top schools knows exactly what this guy is talking about. If you think it's a fib just because you're not aware of it that's not exactly robust social commentary.
Like, ivies and whatever are great. But overscheduling and overstessing to get into one isn't.
Many states have a guaranteed acceptance path to a state school and/or a path where you do two years at community college and can transfer into a state school to do two more and get a bachelors.
A great school on your degree can open doors at the beginning of your career, but missing out on that isn't some terrible tragedy.
Apologies, I didn't meat to be overly combative or suggest a moral judgement. And I agree with you. I didn't go to those schools. That doesn't mean the environments the original comment that started this chain mentioned don't exist. That was my only point. Whether they are desirable is another question.
It's also not an easy question for parents. Yes, you don't want to stress out your kids. But I'm not sure it's so easy to blame parents from those hypercompetitive neighborhoods. After all they have done well, and we are living in a world of self interest were increasingly everyone has a college degree, thereby devaluing the credential at a basic supply/demand level. The very best schools are in a class all their own, and (rightly or wrongly) have been largely immune to this downward pressure.
Talk about bubbles is also not really useful. Wealth is a bubble. Software engineering is a bubble. A neighborhood where everyone goes to a state school is a bubble. But at the macro level if people don't think the world is getting more cooperative and is just getting more competitive, doing whatever they can to keep or send their kids to the best bubble possible makes sense at some level. I think there are also a lot of parents who don't seem to have a robust concept of the future. I assume anyone being born today is entering a far more competitive and frankly, brutal world by the time they are college age. The world is getting smaller. And not enough people seem willing to do the work required to make sure all kids do well. In such a world, pushing your kids in high school so they can get the best shot makes sense. This can be true even if it doesn't make other people morally wrong. In the same way wealth doesn't make you a better person. But let's not pretend that in a world where (in the United States at least) many people among us if they lose their job won't be able to afford healthcare, that wealth is entirely without virtue.
Suggesting that is indicative of the same sort of "they'll be fine" thinking that frankly, strikes me as the most "bubble" idea possible. From where I sit, it's simply the case that the world is not getting easier.
> I don’t even know of a high school around me that starts at 7:30AM.
Local high school runs 7:30 to 2:30. It's one of the better scoring high schools in the state, so we have some students who commute 45min-1hour to attend here (at least I had friends who did that when I went there).
When I was younger I lived in Albuquerque, and I believe that high school started at 7am, they had staggered start times of 9am for elementary, 8am for middle school, and 7am for high school.
It’s been a while, but when I was in high school, I was up at 6:30 so that I could run through the shower, get to 7AM jazz band late, be at school until 4ish, then off to my minimum-ish wage job until it was time to go to evening jazz/symphony/other bands. Home at 8 or 9; bullshit some homework for a passable grade; and then do it again (I was often doing homework during band practices). Weekends were music events.
I did not go to a top tier school, and I did not live in a top tier place. The stories I’ve heard from others indicates to me that my experience was not unique. I wasn’t even the most busy of the people I knew.
This wasn’t every single day, but it was more on days than off days. Contrarily, I had a great time in college because the pressure of classes actually felt like less than I was doing in high school.
this closely matches my experience graduating with a C average and getting accepted to a branch campus of a public university. I then crashed hard out of that school because, as you said, suddenly I actually had a lot more agency and a lot less responsibility.
I was at school from 6:45 AM to about 4:30 PM every day, and had extracurriculars and homework on top of that. This wasn't considered an extra stressful or difficult schedule, it was just what you did.
Same with my kids. At the bus stop by 6:30am, out doing sports and extra-curriculars until 8pm, then dinner+homework until 11pm or so, rinse and repeat.
I'm 32. In my senior year of high school, I woke up at 5:30 AM, my first class (zero hour) was at 6:30 AM, regular school started at 7:35 AM. school let out at 2:30 PM. I had extracurriculars until 6:00 PM most days. Go home, eat dinner while studying, go to bed at 11:00 PM. I took 8 AP classes and had straight A's. 5 on every test. strong ACT.
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.
Having put two kids through college now: this makes sense. First semester grades are a shitshow anyways, and aren't especially predictive. The first semester at an R1 is utterly unlike any ordinary high school experience and a lot of what you're measuring is just kids getting their sea legs. What's the point? If it's causing drama, just get rid of it.
Maybe. Maybe not. In my case, that first semester of near-failing grades was the kick in the pants I needed to start exerting myself. I entered college assuming it was just as easy as high school. It wasn't. Not even close. And a semester of pass/fail wouldn't have taught me that lesson because I did pass, just barely.
I was initially thinking they were being too coddling, but you're right, my first semester grades weren't all that good either. I was working hard, but it takes a lot to adapt to the much higher expectations of a decent uni.
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.
Do you see this as a self management issue or a course intensity issue.
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?
I've worked in colleges for 2 decades. It's rarely purely academic issues that cause bad grades, in my experience.
It's everything else with self regulation. Where most college prep goes wrong is at home, in not allowing appropriate agency for the child to make decisions before college. When you go from having to ask to go to the bathroom to being entirely independent in 2 months, bad shit happens.
This lesson has held true everywhere I've worked, from small junior colleges to D1 state schools.
Subsequently, college has gotten harder, but so has k-12, so proportionately, no it's not more difficult now
Given that 75% of all grades in 2022 were A's, grade inflation has already made the indicator value of grades pretty meaningless. I think this take from a student captures it well:
> Louth, 20 years old, said he earned all A’s and one B in his first semester and doubted he would have worked as hard had the classes been pass/fail. But he thinks he would have learned more from his classes without the pressure of earning high marks.
The first semester should help students explore and engage their curiosity. I think it's a good move and hope the experiment succeeds
But it's not true. Cute to say that, but I wouldn't believe it. Just like most students, given the opportunity to use AI to essentially cheat will often do so (look at the stunning percentages professors are detecting when they bother to try to figure it out), the same applies here; given the option to study these things more deeply or fire up Tinder, Facebook, Minecraft or whatever, they're going to do the latter.
I was about to post the same; they adopted the pass/fail first semester policy in 1971.
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.
Companies don't expect interns or new graduates to perform at the level of a senior engineer. They expect and plan that they have to ease them into the "professional workforce" somewhat.
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.
This has the knock-on effect that it becomes impossible to excel in your first semester.
Both of my kids worked hard and were prepared for college, and they did very well their first years, as they were used to the pace and level of information. It's something they are proud of, and it gave them confidence in their future lives. By eliminating the chance to excel, we make life worse for students who should be standing out.
> This has the knock-on effect that it becomes impossible to excel in your first semester.
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.
In my opinion you are under-appreciating the external validation. Removing grades disincentives excelling. Why work any harder than getting a "pass"?
At the larger schools (like Michigan), professors (if a professor is actually grading the class, and not an adjunct or grad student) are hardly going to remember individual performances on freshman exams, or even pay much attention.
This is one semester, not all, and they still will be getting individual marks (necessary to determine final grade). They can excel if they want to, and they'll have external signals if that's what they need. It just won't be reflected in their GPA for that semester. Oh no, the horror.
Classes in college aren't everything, I found that extracurriculars in college were more important than straight A's.
I have only had one company ask for my transcripts and GPA. Ever! And guess what, they were the one company I never wanted to work for after the interviews.
You know what the best companies I ever worked for cared more about? That I got the degree, and a million questions about my skills and projects that I engaged in.
Kids can absolutely still excel. This just means their "excellence" isn't reduced to a 1-dimensional score. Excelling by writing a phenomenal essay that you still think about or creating a relationship with a professor that stays with you beyond the class is probably an even more meaningful way to excel than achieving some test score
I struggled my freshman year. In high school, I never had to study or do much of anything outside of class. College was a huge adjustment. My high school also had an experimental math program that didn’t help anything. I’m a decent test taker, so I placed into classes my high school did not prepare me for.
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.
My university let us take 3-4 courses, up to 12 credits total, as Pass/Fail, but only for electives.
I ended up taking just one that way. The policy was really designed for the breadth year because in upper years, you had much less room for electives, but you could try a difficult or unfamiliar subject without worrying too much about your GPA. If you discovered you liked it enough to switch into that major, the course would then be converted to a regular graded course.
I think allowing 3-4 Pass/Fail courses in the first year strikes a good balance. It gives students room to challenge themselves and explore unfamiliar subjects, while still preserving grades as a useful signal of whether they're prepared for college-level work.
On the one hand, this is good for people who need time to adapt to college. It's a big change, especially for young people who are living apart from family for the first time. You have to adapt to living alone AND an entirely new social environment AND a much more independent/rigorous academic environment all at once.
On the other, it may just delay the same result. If someone knows their first semester doesn't really count, they may not put in the time to adapt, then crash out anyway in the second semester when it becomes real. I also feel our society tries a little too hard to insulate young people from failure, and I wonder whether that means people avoid learning important lessons earlier.
I guess the biggest advantage is it lets someone spread the growth out over a little more time rather than getting railroaded at once. This approach is probably most useful for someone who is genuinely trying and struggling, rather than for someone who is not really putting in any effort. It's probably better to help the former, so overall it's probably a reasonable approach.
I think there's a way to make it work. If you do poorly first semester, you go on academic probation and must improve by your second semester or you are suspended for the next fall. If you successfully get off academic probation at the end of second semester, you can drop those freshman fall grades. Same with suspension but either way, you must have one successful semester under your belt to drop that first semester.
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.
No one's mentioning it, but also the disease factor.
I remember the first semester in the dorms was mostly the sound of coughing.
Building up the immune system takes disease exposure and that takes time.
Addnib all the immune system depressants and increased exposure events there at Michigan - booze, pot, late nights, hookups, crowds, stress, etc - and you get a perfect storm for the immune system to take a beating.
> Better than lowering grading standards, I guess.
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.
"Our findings reveal that gradeless learning can increase motivation and reduce surface learning but has no significant effect on students’ later academic achievements."
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.
Genuine take: maybe it would be more efficient for the economy and society, as well as better for everyone involved individuall, to make room for the ease in period as well, with a clearly communicated end towards the same, so people can acclimatize?
Speaking as someone who grew up in a slightly more cruel world, but still received way more kindness than previous generations (did not die of previously deadly respiratory complications in childhood, got accepted into gifted children program for enthousiasm, not IQ, got recommendation letters for the same reasons, short sighted, ADHD) in my self evaluation, each time I got a break it spurned me to work harder and try more to "pay it back", and every time I powered through strict evaluation and scrutiny it left scars that overall impede my productivity/would do so if I had not gotten therapy to overcome them .
Nature is cruel, but also inefficient. We have long since started building a "rela world" full of safety bubbles that let us thrive. Why not continue with this one?
Because that's not reality in the least. And all you are doing is creating a clutch of children/students who have no experience with things that are difficult.
The majority of US jobs are offered by small businesses.
The idea of “ease in” periods is nice, but it’s incredibly challenging when the business is understaffed (and hence hiring) for a specific role. You don’t have a lot of extra bandwidth on the existing team to cover for the new guy while he settles in.
I never went through school of any level that tried honestly to prepare me for real world (TM). Absurd academic directions, insisting on stuff that basically nobody ever used regardless of job later, ROTA ad nauseum. Where is communication, some basic psychology, leading, team work, stress management and so on, which is what each of us needs desperately every day? Or ie taxation and social/medical systems, to which each of us exposed extremely directly?
It should be the mission of every school, but somehow they all missed that. Given, teachers were often abysmal themselves in these topics, but things can be learned just like other stuff.
> 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.
Would you take a motorcycle safety course where the first thing they do is chuck you into "simulated" traffic? It feels too obvious to say, but just throwing people in the deep-end isn't necessarily the most consistent or effective teaching tool for every situation.
Starting your first semester in college shouldn't feel like "being thrown in the deep end". You just spent 4 years of high school preparing for it!
But I agree that kids are awfully unprepared for the real world, so maybe coddling kids into early adulthood is unfortunately necessary? The whole situation makes me very sad.
You don't actually have any idea how different high school and college are, do you? Unless the kid went to boarding school, the environmental change is immense.
I think there's an odd disconnect that a lot of older people have where they forget the goals of institutions, and assume the goals are the experience they remember rather than something else.
For example: what would you say is the point of college, generally? Is it learning? Is it producing functional adults? Or is the goal, itself, to accumulate large numbers of grades that are as close to 100 as possible?
That last one isn't a goal, it's a means to an end.
Human learning is in fact something that can be studied and measured, and not something that was perfected at any point in the last 50 years. If it can be shown that not giving grades the first semester improves the actual goals of learning and adult success, then that's what should be done.
If you get over yourself and your "back and my day" and "consequences", you will see that what is being done is what will help create the world you actually want.
MIT does pass/fail for first semester, but the reason they give is "to allow students to adjust to collegiate workload" -- I'm 100% aligned and support with that.
What I'm not in favor of is a college doing the same thing, but using "mental health" as the motivator. If mental health is really the issue, maybe the kids they're trying to help aren't actually ready for college.
In what way is "allowing students to adjust to the collegiate workload" not "mental health"?
I see no difference in this vs the MIT program in terms of reasoning aside from a slight difference in wording.
Is the term "mental health" really such a blinding political football? Like "I hate Obamacare, but I love the ACA" and "Welfare is bad, but we need more assistance to the poor"?
Back when I went to University of Rochester in the early 90's, the entire first year was not included in your GPA. So we still got grades, but they didn't count for anything. But in my junior year, the state of NY told the school that they would lose their accreditation if they kept it up, because they saw it as unfairly raising the GPA of UR graduates versus all other NY universities. So while my class was grandfathered in, the practice was stopped the next year for the incoming freshman class.
Studying my 4 year BSc in Scotland: the first two years didn’t “count” to your overall grade and had more “required” modules/classes (e.g. maths for CS degrees).
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 University of Michigan has around a 15% acceptance rate. How is it possible that they’re letting in kids who aren’t ready to do college level work? What are they selecting for?
It's a pretty different environment going from high school to college. There's a dynamic change that's pretty sudden where your parents are no long really in the picture for support.
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.
No, you would have to worry about your job being sent/lost to Mexico, Japan, China, etc. Now those jobs are already lost and we have a different vulnerability. Same story, different clothes.
Downsizing and outsourcing hit all non-management positions, the only moat against it was technical expertise, but that's been eroded for quite a while. How much moaning about development being outsourced to India have we heard in the past decade?
No, in the past you just had the possibility of childhood illness and death, the death of siblings, war, famine, drought, none of which are real problems for university students these days.
When I was in a CS program in the US in 2005 I heard from dozens of people as well as media pundits that it's a bad choice because all the tech jobs would be outsourced to india.
On all fronts we are having a easier time than before.
Healthcare, safety, life expectancy, disease, mental health (yes, you disagree, but it not being existant in the past kinda sets tue bar).
It’s not actually less certain now than it was then. It’s just the media has gotten louder. Cuban missilie crisis, civil rights, world wars, nuclear weapons, it has all been happening for a while.
When you look at real wages vs cost of living and the trend line is down and showing no signs of ever going back up, the question will I be able to afford the resources to survive and have a family, will my kids be able to afford a home, that's the growing uncertainty.
Yes? When I started college 16-ish years ago the '08 financial crisis was still fresh in my mind. Many of my peers were deeply concerned about the kinds of jobs and wages they could expect to find after graduation.
There is a real issue that housing is unreasonably expensive in many areas, which we could fix via the innovative strategy of not making it illegal to build housing.
Now plot that wage plot against productivity, or corporate profit, or any US stock index, or as you said: housing costs. Real wages are not keeping up with anything. It's not just housing.
Household income is not wages. If people work more hours income goes up while wages are flat. That series only includes full-time workers. High earners are doing better, that's the k-shaped economy. The upside of going to college is being carved out by changes in the labor market. A more representative measure would be average wage for non supervisory roles which is flat since the 1970s. Lower earners face higher inflation than the CPI because more of their paycheck goes to necessities. CPI shelter is what I'm interested in.
He just said: they freaked out, dropped out and did some less qualified work. Meanwhile inept kids from money who were taught that form them effort is not required went on to get lucrative jobs without merit, and now Trump is president.
The coddling is a big problem these days, and this focus on mental health is itself unhealthy. The assessment that "they would otherwise do well" is speculative, at best.
> this focus on mental health is itself unhealthy.
Yes. We should ignore things like school shootings, which have long been described as the result of mental health issues. Ignore PTSD. Soldiers can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. By all means, ignore the mental health of a rape victim or a child abuse victim. They can just tough it out. Clearly, that's the better strategy.
Oh, and you've been working in this field for how long?
I've never cared about where the degree of someone comes from. You really think and employer is going to look at UofM and say "Oh, they gave their students a 1 semester reprieve, obviously they are of lower quality"?
> Hiring practices expanding to include multiple take-home exercises to prove competency.
Why would the policy of UofM change the hiring practices of companies that are not UofM? Where's the connection?
> Students not fully learning foundational knowledge they’ll need later because the class is an easy pass.
This may be a real harm, but ultimately they'll have to learn the foundational knowledge to continue going to UofM. Plenty of students fail to learn foundational knowledge outside of UofM, I know because I had to tutor them.
As a student: Grades are one of the clearest signals on whether you're a good fit for a major or topic you're interested in, you need more work, or you need to trim down the number of classes.
Not providing that clear, cumulative signal is a major disservice to the students.
Also, UofM is expensive so dragging it benefits only the financials for the school.
I think this touches on a real potential harm. I guess my counter is that it'd be hard to make that adjustment after the first semester anyways. Particularly because these will all be intro classes anyways which can all be overly easy. Some of my engineering 3 credit courses really should have been like 6 credits whereas some of my generals 3 credit hours were more like 1 credit. It's hard to know that without getting a feel for the classes and professors.
Yes.. and that friction, too, served a purpose. There it a reason it tends to be referred to as a filter, because by first year you find out whether you have what it takes to survive that environment or not. The good news for everyone is that now we get to find out in 2nd year, where our sunk cost is much greater. Hurray for winning.
First semester, not first year. And I suspect that the filter will still be in play for students because they'll still have coursework to complete. They simply don't get the grade feedback reducing the stress of perfecting that semester while they are still learning the ropes.
We all know how it goes. Minimal adjustment is made to accommodate someone in some way only crazies like me would object to and soon the entire school is pass/fail depending on whether you show up with your own pencil; just to ensure we do not induce stress. Naturally, then stress will be first experienced in first real job, but lets have private ( non-school ) sector worry about that. Maybe they can institute their own stress-free policy. And so it will go on.
> That's the slippery slope fallacy. That's not what's being proposed and not what's going to happen.
They have proposed 1 semester, if they propose extending it then I'll be right along side you saying that's ridiculous. However, it's just as likely that they'll say "Actually, 1 semester was too long, we'll just do it for 1/2 a semester".
It is genuinely hard to argue slippery slope fallacy when we have years upon years of examples like social promotion, resulting grade inflation and such. Own your argument man. If you are ok with end result, say so.
> It is genuinely hard to argue slippery slope fallacy when we have years upon years of examples like social promotion
No it's not, because that's a tangentially related thing. You can't say "because social promotion is widely practiced, colleges will eventually eliminate grades" That's a non-sequitur. It'd be just as silly as me making the argument that "because some classes at my college were pass/fail, eventually they'll all be pass fail". That's the slippery slope argument.
> Own your argument man
That's not my argument, dude. And claiming it is is bad faith bro.
> If you are ok with end result, say so.
The end result of a single semester not being graded? Yeah, I'm fine with that. Because it's just as likely the university finds it's a mistake and rolls it back as it is that they expand it. It's also likely that they don't do anything with it.
That's my argument. That this policy is probably positive and worth trying. My argument isn't "nobody should ever be graded ever". That's a straw-man that you've cooked up.
MIT has had this policy for years and years. Did they fall down this slippery slope such that everybody is slacking off and nobody is getting meaningfully evaluated?
Do you know what it takes to get admitted into Mich tier programs in 2026?
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.
Seriously, and how many HNers would cite MIT as one of the best around?
Well I learned over a decade ago that they have had Pass/no-credit for the first year implemented for years... So at this point it wouldn't surprise me if you said it's been going on for two decades (at min.)
Again, I think people are having the same reaction I had "what, MIT just gets off scotch free for the first year?!". Decade later, watching it help relieve the stress from their rat race of 110% from their childhoods... Man is it worth it. And everyone still loves hiring people out of MIT
> giving you time to adjust to factors like increased workloads and variations in academic preparation and teaching methods.
> curb a mental health crisis
In this context, both have the exact same meaning, of "stop freshmen who are used to overachieving their entire lives from taking a header off the tallest buildings on campus because they're not used to being less than the top 5% at everything"
> And even then there's no guarantee you'll get in.
> yet when universities start taking steps to help reduce that they start kvetching
Your argument is hard to follow. It is prohibitively hard, to the point of being unhealthy, to getting admitted to the University of Michigan. Okay, but how does this policy solve for or address that in any way? Wouldn’t the solution be to increase capacity to meet demand, thus relieving those pressures that create the conditions for them to admit young adults that are suffering from health issues that the universities admissions policies itself precipitated?
But, again, the University of Michigan’s own admissions policies created the need for the students to “chill out”. Is this not treating a symptom of the problem, not the motivator?
Also 32,000 undergrads is not “massive” by any measurement[0], especially when accounting for the population of the state of Michigan, much less the broader United States.
Michigan admissions create opportunities for students that found success within the challenging conditions. Umich treats the problem by educating future policy makers about those systems. Then occasionally yields to powerful lobby groups and clandestine operations of fascist administration.
"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."
Dropping a semester of grades is a cover up for the symptoms, not a fix. A better fix would be stress management and realistic expectations. Building your identity or self-worth around going to a particular school is the insane part. It's great to have big goals, but you have to separate those goals from defining you. It seems many kids today don't make that distinction. Pick a cheap state school with a decent program, get a scholarship, and start living life. All this prestige and pedigree is the type of stuff we should be trying to destroy.
You can handle all of that in high school, but suddenly can't handle the mental stress of a grade report your first semester of college? Give me a break.
Yes, it doesn't transfer. This is because the type of work required to perform in school is completely different from the type of work required to perform in college. This means first sem performance often dives even for a diligent student. The stress is not about the first few course themselves rather it is that they can terribly impact your entire GPA. Considering how relatively unimportant the first sem courses are relative to the whole degree, it makes sense to drop it from the GPA. You could also assign them much fewer credits, that would be an alternative solution I suppose.
> 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
You're right about this one. I'd never get accepted today at the state university I went to back in the 90s. Back then, applying to college meant taking the SAT, filling out an application, and maybe submitting an essay. That was it. Then you figured out how you'd pay for it. They didn't care that much about AP courses, extracurricular activities, career shadowing, volunteering, college level credits, or anything like that. Sure, they were nice bonuses but nobody treated them as hard requirements like they do today. Hell, my high school didn't even offer AP courses, so I couldn't take one even if I wanted to.
Now, my kid is approaching college age, and all these college admissions coaches are breathing down my neck to get her to take 40 AP courses, join the debate club and chess club, play Sportsball every year, take 4 years of a foreign language, do volunteering, tutor other kids, and then take extra courses at the local community college, and that doing all that will only improve her already-low chances of acceptance. Good grief!
The University I went to has like an 80% acceptance rate so it's not comparable, but I was surprised when I got into 400-level CS classes and there were people who didn't know how to program at all.
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.
I went to a state school. The quality varied wildly depending on the department. It was very eye opening in the general English/writing classes when encountering people who couldn't read or write above a 4th grade level. The difference between they're, their, and there was like a riddle to some of them. Of course many didn't make it more than a semester or two.
That's the big thing - the college might be dropping the first semester grades so they can squeeze a second semester of tuition out of kids.
> The quality varied wildly depending on the department.
I feel like it has always been this way. I went to a small private university. The natural sciences and especially the pre-med students had their days fully packed, like the only time you could even have a moment to talk about anything was at the cafeteria during meals.
Then there was the business department. The college athletes apparently picked business as a major because you have to pick something. You couldn't guess what was their preferred minor and why... The overwhelming preferred minor was music because the buildings for department of business and music were adjacent.
Compare that to the pre meds who were always worried about getting a B and somehow "ruining their chances at med school".
> The college athletes apparently picked business as a major because you have to pick something.
I actually think it makes a lot of sense to go for some kind of basic business degree if you're angling to go into professional sports. Having some basic concepts of basic business law, finance, etc. seems pretty important for someone looking to shop their abilities and likeness around and have some understanding of the contract negotiations they'll hopefully be a part of. Outside of the gym its probably the most relevant kind of skills being taught on a college campus for that career path.
I feel like the prevailing story you would hear “back in the day” was always the star quarterback or the kid of a rich donor getting white-glove treatment. Instead my experience matched GP, handful of students complaining that a tree-balancing exercise is “too harsh” and getting the entire assignment slashed by the professor being pressed to increase the size of the department.
> That's the big thing - the college might be dropping the first semester grades so they can squeeze a second semester of tuition out of kids.
This seems most likely. If you think of college as yet another extractive business (and you can bet the administrators at colleges think this way), then students that drop out are simply cu$tomers you are failing to retain: Pure lost revenue.
> 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"
that sounds unbelievable. Not calling you out by any means i'm just shocked! I can comprehend tuning down the difficulty but not to the level of find some code online and write about it.
In almost any program, it is entirely possible to navigate your degree so that you are allowed to come away with a high GPA but knowing largely nothing useful. There's enough burned out adjuncts, overworked pre-tenure profs, and coasting/research-oriented tenured profs that with some help from upperclassmen and the ability to detect lax professors, that you can manage to get through largely unscathed by learning. Typically to your chagrin/despair as you then begin interviewing.
Because in America, Ivy versus non-Ivy isn't the distinction.
What matters is your major and whether it is a well respected program.
A CS@Texas student will have the ability to open the exact same doors professionally and prestige wise as a CS@Brown student.
You have Ivies, Ivy Tier Privates (Stanford, Chicago, Duke, USC, Caltech, MIT, NYU, Northwestern, Georgetown, CMU), and Public Ivies (Cal, UCLA, UCSD, Mich, UIUC, UW, UT, GT, Purdue, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA) that all recruit the same kind of applicant and place in the same careers and employers.
They ain't. A non-trivial amount of people have not heard of Brown or Dartmouth, and confuse UPenn with Penn State. Hell, I didn't hear about Brown until high school and I ended up attending an Ivy lol.
And employers and us alums of these programs know the difference is marginal.
I don't think anyone on the west coast of the US cares if you're an Ivy grad. Now, Stanford grads on the other hand, every employer seems to cream their jeans over them, for whatever reason. I knew a tech company that sorted their resumes into "Stanford" and "Everyone else". Having not gone there, I don't understand what the fuss is all about.
The Northeast isn't the rest of America, the same way someone in Maine isn't necessarily going to think about CMC or Harvey Mudd similarly Brown or Dartmouth doesn't come up much or at all.
The acceptance rate is sort of a weird criteria for NYU when you compare it to the other schools it is listed with. It is a very popular school so it gets more applicants than 3-4 of the other colleges it is listed with combined, it has a slightly higher rate than most of those schools. It also accepts more students than probably all of those schools. I went there it is a good school. I don't think most people would put it in the same category as MIT. I certainly do not think it is as prestigious.
If you are using acceptance rates as a proxy for difficulty of schools in a given year, you need to adjust by desirability of location and perceived seriousness of degree programs.
And across time you have to adjust acceptance rates for the fact they are all way lower now because kids send out 2-3x as many apps.
A lot of kids even 20 years ago were applying to schools in NYC/Boston/DC on east coast because they wanted to be in NYC/Boston/DC. Many of my friends went to said schools for psychology/film/etc type programs at schools that as an engineering major were decidedly for me "safety schools". Many of these were 50% admit then and 10% admit now. I don't think they suddenly became as difficult as MIT.
Meanwhile many engineering schools (the types with Institute in the name) that were in cold rural boring areas had higher acceptance rates than my "safety schools" in Boston.
This trend has seemingly only accelerated. For example picking 3 schools in Boston to isolate just the difficulty feature:
* In 2005 MIT acceptance was ~16% vs 4% now (1/4).
* BC was ~30% vs 15% now (1/2).
* BU was ~68% vs 11% now (1/6).
So theres an argument that the harder the school the less dramatically its acceptance rate has compressed, while desirable good but not super hard schools (which have fluffy majors available) have had a larger effect.
The longer I live, the less I'm impressed by fancy schools.
They don't make great labor. They are normal labor with egos until the age of ~25. Then they become normal labor without egos as the system killed their ego.
I really expected some secret sauce in Ivys/UoM, and nope. Electrical Engineers there didn't know how to figure out mass of a part given density(based on material) and volume.
Exactly. They're rejecting 85% of applicants because they're not qualified, but the 15% they admit are, by and large, not qualified either. I'm at one of Michigan's peer institutions, and we have the same problem.
College is a pretty large step up for most people even if they're good at high school and go to a relatively decent one. It's a sudden promotion to full adult in charge of yourself and your success in a way that's hard to prepare for living at home.
There are, I think, three big hurdles for freshmen in college:
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.
"Freshmen courses generally mitigate this somewhat to help ease in students"
Interesting, that's not my observation at all. Instead freshman classes were the most grueling experiences, intentionally weed-out classes to try to detect and, well, weed-out early those who wouldn't have the combination of grit, intelligence and organization skills to make it to the end of the degree.
I speak somewhat hyperbolically, it was never _unfair_, but the classes absolutely were paced and had homework/exam loads that you would simply be unable to cope with if you were trying to half-ass it. At my college, Calc I and Physics 1 were the big freshman showstoppers. I tested out of calc 1, but my IB HL was chemistry and as such I had a chemist's disdain (and begrudging respect) for the more academic science of physics, and while the actual topics weren't difficult, there was a LOT of homework and the exams left no stone unturned.
Comparatively, jr+ classes tended to be much more relaxed, focused more on learning the material than ensuring you are willing to do 8-10 hours of physics homework per week.
This was a few decades ago but we had 2 tiers of weed outs. The first was the intro classes that most everyone took their freshman year. Then there was another wave that was major specific and tended to show up 2nd semester of sophomore year into 1st semester of junior year, essentially the point where coursework was shifting almost entirely to be major specific.
So for instance, one of the notorious freshman weed out classes was a class that *every* engineering student took. But then each individual engineering major had their own handful of pain in the ass classes that showed up as the engineering curriculum diverged.
Same experience in 2000s. I’ll never forget there was a kid on his third try to pass the mandatory Intro to Engineering class. I sure hope he moved on to a new major.
As someone who lives in this area... Sorry for saying this.. Ready for it:
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.
> How many kids are "Nepo", and aren't they usually donating some kind of money to the University
Plenty of kids are small-town nepo. Daddy threatens to call his lawyer every time they get a C or get in trouble, and teachers and administrators cave.
If you are an old like me, I don't think you can use current acceptance rates. They are artificially low compared to old rates because kids just send so many applications out now.
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.
In the US the problem starts in late middle school/early high school. For whatever reason, not having a remedial high school and not giving teachers the authority to push underperforming students to such high schools causes problems.
Then I guess you think MIT students don't learn in their first year? And havent learned in over two decades during that first year. I guess we should stop valuing MIT education as the peak of STEM education in the world!
I think this is a long time coming given the trends in education. Students just aren't learning and able to receive feedback in ways that would have been commonplace before.
Soon the whole US academia reputation will go down the drain and the degrees we all worked so hard for will have no meaning. How to shoot oneself in the foot 101.
I honestly support the downfall of this system. The truly great and exceptional will continue to be such. Degrees are nothing more than a signal, and a weak one at that.
If it is meant sincerely, it is the kind of idea that falls apart in the actual world - especially if someone wants to graduate with Honors in a degree program that requires higher maths.
That isn't to deny there is a lot of societal bullshit involving higher education, but that's true in many aspects of life.
that's pretty funny and i bet you're exactly right. It will drive high achieving kids crazy to go without a rank or grade and not knowing where they stand relative to their peers.
Fwiw, afaik in most Oxford and Cambridge degrees the only exams that count towards your grade are in the final year or the final two years. Everything before that is basically preparation, and the colleges doing weekly supervision and regular mock exams to keep tabs who is on track to pass and who needs extra attention. I've never heard there was a problem with a lack of rigor or recognition for the degrees awarded there. So U of Michigan taking a small step in that direction shouldn't be the end of the world either.
I did my undergraduate degree at Oxford. My degree class was entirely determined by my performance on eight 3-hour exams in the final weeks of the final term. These covered topics studied in the final two years.
I honestly support this. At least at face value for the devil is always in the details. I have had a similar discussion with many of my friends that are academics. We all, more or less, agree that grades do not really serve their purported purpose.
Grades in their current form might be the purest incarnation of Goodhart's Law.
I don't know. Why are they lowering the standards again? Maybe they should raise the standard of high schools instead?
Or maybe they can help them by giving access to mental health practitioners, or maybe set some mandatory sessions to help them for the transition.
Anyway I think dropping first semester grades is a huge band-aid that they should never use. If we keep lowering the standards, maybe the whole education system is failing our children.
Thinking more about this, I feel a good solution might be to let students decide whether they want to keep the first semester letter grades once they receive them, or simplify them down to a pass/no-pass.
That way there's still an incentive to do good work, and students who do well still get to receive the benefit of keeping the letter grade. Students who do poorly receive the letter grade as feedback, but have a one-off chance to reduce the impact and try again the next semester.
I grew up in the UK. When I started working full time, I had three academic things on my CV:
- 11 GCSE grades
- 4 A level grades
- 1 University degree
For virtually all of these, the grades/results were determined by exams taken at the end of a period of study:
- GCSE exams taken at ~16yo
- A level exams taken at ~18yo
- University finals taken at ~21yo
At the time, I thought it was very very strange that my GCSE grades for English Language and English Literature were not based on exams, but on a bunch of essays I had written over a two year period.
It seemed strange because those past essays did not measure my current capability, but something else.
But this (measuring students on performance over multiple years) is the norm here in the US. Sure, many students take the SAT or ACT or various AP exams. But many students enter university with their academic performance measured on their high school GPA, which seemingly doesn't even attempt to measure mastery.
If a large enough proportion of incoming students need an adjustment period, surely it’s better to have one than not.
Also, it’s misdirected. If incoming students aren’t prepared for college, that’s a problem at the high school level (possibly earlier, too). A university is going to do better for its students if it adjusts to reality rather than expecting it to adjust to tradition.
Grades and academic performance are outcomes. They're indirect stressors at best; why would one generation suddenly be unable to cope?
The real story is what has changed to increase the stakes of grades. I suspect freshmen are taking out historic debt to contend with food, housing, and tuition costs meanwhile the entry-level job market is extraordinarily competitive. There is no room for error.
My personal opinion is that grades are one aspect of a filter that decides which college and subsequently which network a certain individual will have access to. It has a high correlation with intelligence but not linked via causation.
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!
Famously places like china/india/japan/etc have extremely traumatic final exams. There was just an article about suicides from some kind of (indian?) final exam screw up.
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.
American culture incorporates a sense of institutional nihilism that India and China do not have (at a large scale). As globalism winds down and population contraction starts to take hold, it seems far more likely to me that the resulting labor dynamics will end up killing the post-war approach to higher education, particularly as white collar jobs end up constituting less of the economy.
The real story is what has changed to increase the stakes of grades. I suspect freshmen are taking out historic debt to contend with food, housing, and tuition costs meanwhile the entry-level job market is extraordinarily competitive.
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.
is one generation suddenly unable to cope or did we just recognize that this has been a long-standing source of stress and maladaptive behavior and finally decide to do something about it?
They're not getting rid of grades, they're just moving everything to pass/fail rather than letter grades. Afaic this is really just a reflection of the reality on the ground. You either get a C or better and move on to the next level, or you don't. Passing with a C fulfills the prerequisite just as well as passing with an A. Then eventually you either get a C or better in all the classes you need to graduate, or you don't. Cs get degrees. Then you go to the job market and you either have a degree or you don't. Outside of some extremely competitive internships no one cares how you graduated, only whether you did.
I was intensely stressed through high school and undergrad, then later in grad school, postdoc, full time job as computer scientist, then as a SWE. It wasn't pleasant but it drove me to achieve at far higher levels, in ways that paid off well in the long run (like financial stability and earlier retirement). Note: in undergrad, I specifically went to a school that did not have grades but still felt all the stress to perform.
I suspect that as unpleasant as stress is, it ultimately can make us better people.
speak_plainly | a day ago
What I think is more likely is that this move will help them hire less qualified teachers and reduce administrative oversight as now they no longer have to worry about all the issues that come with grading, such as consistency, or the grades accurately reflecting performance. The quality of curriculum will likely drop significantly and this will be reflected in the student’s second year grades.
eclipticplane | a day ago
nemomarx | a day ago
speak_plainly | a day ago
Jtsummers | a day ago
Jtsummers | a day ago
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.
doctorwho42 | 3 hours ago
chasd00 | 2 hours ago
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.
quaddoggy | a day ago
SamuelAdams | a day ago
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.
AngryData | a day ago
dtj1123 | a day ago
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.
jerlam | a day ago
But it's better earlier rather than later. The consequences aren't severe and you can change majors, lessen your course load, or stop those volunteer opportunities. That's part of learning how to be an adult.
I knew a few people my freshmen year that were put on academic probation. They turned out all right after making some drastic changes. Others simply disappeared during the break.
odyssey7 | 5 hours ago
mrngld | 5 hours ago
See the problem here?
red-iron-pine | 3 hours ago
odyssey7 | 3 hours ago
Failing to teach a student ≠> the student is mediocre.
The student is mediocre ≠ the student is irredeemable and didn’t deserve an education in the first place.
Honestly, it’s wild to me how reluctant people are to accept that teachers have a responsibility to teach their students.
They will charge you $2000 a credit hour to have a teacher teach you — as if the teacher alone is the gatekeeper of an education — and then claim that the teacher is not in any way responsible for the student’s success or failure in being taught.
zamadatix | 3 hours ago
A portion of the educator's role is weeding out students who are not wanting/able to engage with the material before they spend a massive amount of time and money towards stepping stone classes to something they won't try/be able to complete. A portion of the student's role is weeding out the teachers and institutions which are more interested in maximizing the money out of the student instead of teaching them well. The two weeding processes actually reinforce the right outcome together - students getting educated instead of wasting their resources.
odyssey7 | 2 hours ago
The reality is that prestigious universities routinely take money from incredibly talented people who are fully capable of learning calculus with or without a good teacher, the university gives them a careless or actively harmful teacher, and then the student is deemed a “weed” that was rightfully put in their proper place.
When you look at it this way, it’s clear that people are being scammed. Maybe that’s why universities are so reluctant to accept accountability for their teaching quality, blaming the students first and foremost.
shimman | 4 hours ago
There needs to be some sort of academic baseline for university otherwise what is the difference between a youtube playlist and a semester worth of credits?
odyssey7 | 3 hours ago
I am definitely not saying that students should pass without learning the material. I am emphasizing that schools and instructors also have a responsibility to teach their students, both morally and financially. Just because the norm is to behave amorally and with greed, that doesn’t make it proper.
to11mtm | a day ago
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.
locallost | 3 hours ago
quaverquaver | a day ago
harimau777 | a day ago
morkalork | a day ago
culi | a day ago
> In May, Harvard University faculty voted to approve a 20% cap on the number of A’s per undergraduate course in an effort to curb grade inflation. It won’t apply to A-minuses, which committee members predicted would become the most awarded grade.
> At the University of Michigan, a review by the news site MLive found that 74.1% of all undergraduate grades in 2022 were an A+, A or A-. A decade earlier, that percentage was 57.6%.
dpkirchner | a day ago
otoburb | a day ago
If one doesn't plan on applying to grad school immediately after undergrad then hopefully there is less self-imposed grade pressure.
fhdkweig | a day ago
michaelfm1211 | a day ago
ilc | a day ago
If you want to say MIT is soft. Feel free.
hodgesrm | a day ago
culi | 22 hours ago
Growing up with no one in my family having gone to college I had no idea how any of this stuff worked or anybody to tell me its important. Eventually I moved to a middle class suburb and saw kids hire private tutors for it. Meanwhile I remember 2 days before I had mine scheduled and had to find someone to beg to drive me there. I'm quite thankful that universities acknowledge how silly it is to assess a student's aptitudes from a single test score like that.
I think personal essays and a more holistic assessment is a great alternative but I'm worried about the LLM age and the limits it introduces to that as well. Perhaps interviews are the future. It would certainly better prepare students for the real world
criddell | 5 hours ago
ghaff | 4 hours ago
SideQuark | 5 hours ago
Which led to a spectacular failure of incoming students to do basic math, lead to massive increases in failures in first year math courses.
Maybe removing signal loses knowledge about who is ready for standard classes?
zwily | 4 hours ago
t3hTao | 3 hours ago
chasd00 | 2 hours ago
samiwami | a day ago
It lets you actually focus on getting acclimated and into the groove without being worried about the difference between an A and a B.
tzs | 22 hours ago
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.
keeda | 21 minutes ago
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.
joezydeco | a day ago
From my kid's experience: 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. Gotta have that activity on your college application, not counting other volunteering and clubs in the open spaces. Then homework after dinner until 10:00 or so, sometimes much later. Homework assigned over weekends. Homework assigned over breaks.
That's 15+ hours a day, every weekday, for an entire school year. 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.
Personally, I don't blame her if she checks out for a few weeks. Or a semester.
SlightlyLeftPad | a day ago
alistairSH | a day ago
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.
mrngld | 5 hours ago
Michigan and its apologists here would rob these kids of real-world experience, reducing them to infants. And then we're all disappointed when these adults act like infants.
skillina | 4 hours ago
alephnerd | a day ago
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.
porridgeraisin | 21 hours ago
alephnerd | 20 hours ago
Because domestic undergrads applying to a research-oriented grad program are advised to apply directly to a PhD program.
MS/MA programs are expected to remediate deficiencies at the undergrad level, and most undergrads will take 1st year MS/MA classes as part of their senior year doing a bachelors. Alternatively, the MS/MA is awarded if a PhD candidate failed Quals.
Outside the US, the expected path is BA/BSc/BEng/BTech to MS/MA/MTech/MPhil to PhD.
In the US, the expected path is SB/AB to PhD and MS/MA if you fail quals or are looking for a professional program to remediate coursework deficiencies.
porridgeraisin | 20 hours ago
Der_Einzige | an hour ago
Debate is actually dying, and for a reason. Good riddance, don't let the door kick your ass on the way out.
costco | 22 minutes ago
mae3x | a day ago
freefaler | a day ago
The biggest problem wasn't the workload itself, but how inefficient learning was back then. It was the early days of the Internet, no coursera, no Google indexed uni sites, no LLMs, no online tutors. I only had a mediocre textbook and some notes I borrowed from friends when I couldn't attend lectures or labs. It took ages. I’d burn hours trying to parse two paragraphs in the textbook, only to ask mates who didn't understand it either.
Now, we have an incredible amount of information & tech at our fingertips: LLMs, Google NotebookLM, online tutors, dozens of textbooks, and sites like Anna's Archive packed with high-quality "free" material. With all this technology, the time it takes to understand, prepare, and master a topic is a fraction of what it used to be. It still takes work and discipline, but man... you can feed textbooks into an LLM and use targeted prompts to debug your exact knowledge gaps on the practice test you get from the LLM.
So I reckon it's easier now than before, simply because learning can be done so much more efficiently. After all these years, I still remember the hardest classes and the most stringent professors with great affection - even though I hated those bastards back then. My Group Theory prof once invalidated a definition I wrote because of a single missing word. At the time, I thought it was an injustice, but later I realized that word was crucial.
University is where young people must face hard work and reality, because it teaches them what true meritocracy is. It should be hard, it's the same way a gym workout should be hard or it’s ineffective.
jerlam | 23 hours ago
Some of those students have 40 hour jobs, some night shift, that they can't skip or else they don't have a home or school anymore. Others have kids that can't be neglected.
watwut | 4 hours ago
It is fun when it is fun, when you can skip it or do it purely because you want to. If you go to sports club because you have to, it is work and not fun.
If you go volunteer or have to join the club for college application, they become work. They are not fun stuff.
> Time spent in gym class and lunch is not work
Gym class is work. Kids are not there voluntarily.
yrjrjjrjjtjjr | 4 hours ago
watwut | 4 hours ago
You come in and do what you are told. You don't chat with friends or play around, you focus on whatever trainer told you to focus at. You dont do what you want to do, but what trainer thinks will make you more performant. And if it hurts or you are tired or just really want to do something else, you still do it.
general1465 | 4 hours ago
doctorwho42 | 3 hours ago
Like can you honestly say you'd feel rested if you had to wear a Fitbit like device to bed owned by your company to track your sleep?
bradfa | a day ago
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.
alephnerd | a day ago
joezydeco | a day ago
bradfa | a day ago
Broken_Hippo | 5 hours ago
The fact is that they aren't working extra, not for a job anyway. The extra work comes in the time making dried beans instead of buying canned, in repairing stuff poorly, in shopping around for a doctor that takes the state health insurance or an affordable option if you have none at all, in taking busses (if they are available), and other unpaid things. Your child will be lucky to afford the activities that gets them a 'good' education, especially if they have to work.
tetromino_ | 4 hours ago
That is exactly OP's point: for OP, if a child's "working hours" includes university prep and resume-padding sports activities, then an adult's "working hours" includes housework, grocery shopping, dealing with insurance and taxes, and commute/family chauffeur time.
watwut | 5 hours ago
And for the record, I had to work less to get to good school back then.
alephnerd | a day ago
Pressure makes diamonds, but it also crushes everything else.
speff | 4 hours ago
Overcoming hard times absolutely made me a better person, but as I've grown I've seen many examples of the fallout you're referring to. Sometimes people just break.
rayiner | 4 hours ago
basisword | 4 hours ago
rayiner | 4 hours ago
Aurornis | 4 hours ago
I have several hobbies that are popular with kids (mountain biking, rock climbing, and some others).
I can assure you that there are plenty of kids with more time than I have to dedicate to these hobbies at every popular spot I go to. Many of them are ambitious, smart, and working toward top universities, too. It’s actually fun energy to be around.
The parent comment about students getting up at 6:30AM and working 15 hour days is highly unusual.
boelboel | 23 hours ago
lotsofpulp | 5 hours ago
This might be news to many people. Or do you mean it’s not too difficult to get a new job at Walmart?
geodel | 2 hours ago
boelboel | 2 hours ago
mrngld | 5 hours ago
Meanwhile, the state school down the road is a fraction the cost, teaches a lot of the same content, and will accept anyone with a pulse. In my state, at least. State universities are somewhat competitive to get into, but state colleges... wide open.
All of which is very real-world. Certain top firms recruit only top candidates. Everyone else works somewhere further along the spectrum.
disgruntledphd2 | 4 hours ago
As a non-US person who's worked for a bunch of US companies, my belief is that the Ivy League et al act as a class system, rather than a symbol of educational attainment.
Aurornis | 4 hours ago
This goes against the stereotypes you read online, but many of them are motivated by a desire to sneer and cut down others’ achievements. Look up “tall poppy syndrome” for one phrase describing this phenomenon.
disgruntledphd2 | 2 hours ago
Again, the fact that entry to the class system can be meritocratic is entirely disconnected from the fact of it operating as a class system.
When I worked at Big tech I remember recruiters (US-based) talking about hiring from approved schools, which were mostly Ivy League.
Additionally, when we were hiring a candidate in Europe, our director wanted to know what school she had gone to. Fortunately, she was an Oxbridge graduate so all was well.
Again, even if all Ivy League graduates were in the top 1% of objective merit, the use of this credential in hiring/firing/other decisions is what makes it a class system.
I have worked with many Ivy League graduates and they were all super smart and mostly effective, but that doesn't change my point.
Aurornis | 2 hours ago
> rather than a symbol of educational attainment.
Your original argument appeared to imply that it was a system designed to separate people by class, not by merit or educational attainment.
In my experience the people who are that selective about university pedigree are either doing it out of laziness (outsourcing selection process to the university filtering mechanism) or they have a degree from that system and believe that hiring people from it will automatically grant them more allies, thereby improving their own power.
apocalyptic0n3 | 3 hours ago
cactusplant7374 | 5 hours ago
altairprime | 4 hours ago
While HN, VCs, SJSU, and Tech are obviously not composed of the same population or applying the same restrictions, it’s certainly reasonable to highlight one similarity: the potential glory of one’s role at work directly impacts how competitive it is. That we’re currently in a nightmarish layoff cycle due to the ZIRP bubble popping and due to businesses replacing costly (and glorious) creative roles with more economical PREs (prompt reliability engineers) is amplifying this effect more strongly in Tech than in other industries, because Tech — just like the Investing industry that’s underpinned it for so long — has been saturated with glory and competitiveness.
I spent my career in tech working in the roles that do not offer glory — IT, rather than Product; Cost Centers, rather than Profit Centers — but even within IT, there were a couple of roles that had more glory and were much more competitive in their selection and evaluation criteria than others. At my final IT job, we were less strict about credentials and competitiveness with directors and vice presidents than we were about the high-glory role of enterprise architect. So while I do empathize with HN’s bias, having myself once pursued glory in tech, such competitiveness is abnormal in most jobs in most fields.
kakacik | 5 hours ago
I myself went through mediocre noname university in eastern Europe with OK grades and it didn't matter at all, now I get perm salary thats better than 99% of devs in whole Europe while doing just that and nothing more, while sporting 10 weeks of paid vacation yearly. Quality of life further down the line, success and happiness are extremely non-correlated with all this academic stuff.
Its just control freak helicopter parents, which, albeit with good underlying intentions, fuck up everything they touch, including mental health of their kids. So kids compete just to endlessly compete while winning less than nothing. This is how deep regrets later in life are made.
Aurornis | 4 hours ago
You’re competing apples and oranges. Getting into a top college is similar to grinding to get into Big Tech jobs and then climb the ladder there.
Good colleges are easy. The top few colleges are very hard.
> The real world is Pass/Fail, much to the chagrin of plenty of HNers.
If by “fail” you mean lose your job in the next round of layoffs and have your career derailed, possibly.
You’re still comparing apples and oranges. The people who compete for top college spots usually continue competing for promotions and better paying jobs. The people who coast through high school look for jobs where they can coast and then get comfortable with whatever salary that provides them.
techjamie | a day ago
b0rtb0rt | 16 hours ago
pirates | 5 hours ago
Fire-Dragon-DoL | 11 hours ago
Very challenging at times, but for example I sleep with my kid hugging me, or I chat with them while in the car, or we do chores while watching tv or something like that. And not every day is packed like that, you can tell your kids "no more than 3 times per week of activties, the other 2 days are for playdates", and that should be acceptable.
There are horrible days of the week, but it's not daily 15 hours of work. That's training for slavery.
Homework for break and homework for weekend should be STRONGLY ILLEGAL.
davidgay | 4 hours ago
That is a weird (modern?) delusion. Without children, our species disappears in <100 years. And the last of those years would be painful for those still alive.
Those who are having and raising children are the ones doing the most for the next generation.
Aurornis | 4 hours ago
It wasn’t saying that children are hobbies. It’s saying that time spent with children is enjoyable and time spent with them is not an enjoyable chore.
_zoltan_ | 5 hours ago
while I work, my wife can do the shopping and take care of other household chores if needed.
bakies | 4 hours ago
firesteelrain | 4 hours ago
bakies | 3 hours ago
firesteelrain | 3 hours ago
bakies | 2 hours ago
vel0city | 2 hours ago
It may very well be impossible in certain markets but I wouldn't say its true across every family with the parents being around 30 years old.
bakies | 45 minutes ago
_zoltan_ | 2 hours ago
bakies | 46 minutes ago
Aurornis | 4 hours ago
What most people can’t afford is to maintain their desired lifestyle and only have one parent working. It’s similar to how people earning 3-4X the median wages for an area will think they’re barely getting by, while someone earning 1/4 of what they do is raising a family with two kids.
geodel | 2 hours ago
True, goes without saying. I see most of the time when lifestyle is not even considered making a choice but simply as "everyone does it".
I might turn into most odd person in some sense among friends, colleagues, family/ relatives because I just happen to say things explicitly which makes for weird conversation.
Everyone around me expects these between the lines.
disgruntledphd2 | 4 hours ago
If you work in tech, this is possible. It's gonna suck, and you'll feel poor relative to your peers, but it's entirely possible.
_zoltan_ | 2 hours ago
school launch + supervision for the 11:30 - 13:30 period is ~42 USD per day per kid, kita (pre-kindergarten) is easily ~3100 USD/month or more per kid. (I've put the numbers here in USD as most of the audience is outside of Switzerland for easier comparability), so for a lot of families, if mom works, mom's salary is spent on these costs.
krupan | 8 minutes ago
iamnothere | a day ago
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.
hirvi74 | 3 hours ago
I sure could have used the maturity, the money, and the time when I was younger. I learned the hard way that attending college when you have no idea what you want to do only delays your graduation date (major change absolutely fucked me).
TiredOfLife | 21 hours ago
b0rtb0rt | 16 hours ago
ackbar03 | 5 hours ago
TimDotC | 5 hours ago
armchairhacker | 5 hours ago
I think the quantity was reasonable, except too much busywork, I wish I could replace it with subjects I was passionate about (i.e. tech).
I also had the entire summer between senior year and college to decompress.
Nowadays I hear that most public schools are giving less work. With all due respect, I believe GP is an anomaly and/or it wasn't the school, but their own pressure.
axus | 4 hours ago
triceratops | 4 hours ago
WarmWash | 3 hours ago
Wouldn't exactly make the most compelling content, would it?
g8oz | 3 hours ago
smcg | 2 hours ago
mc32 | 5 hours ago
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.
kalcode | 5 hours ago
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.
michaelbuckbee | 4 hours ago
Thlom | 4 hours ago
geodel | 3 hours ago
Joker_vD | 4 hours ago
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.
tdeck | 4 hours ago
InitialLastName | 2 hours ago
codedokode | 42 minutes ago
firesteelrain | 4 hours ago
> 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.
danilafe | 3 hours ago
firesteelrain | 3 hours ago
freeopinion | 4 hours ago
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?
SiempreViernes | 4 hours ago
red-iron-pine | 4 hours ago
they've optimized for a highly stratified educational environment. The real world don't work like that.
Unless you stay in academia no one cares about your GPA 2 years after you leave.
renegade-otter | 4 hours ago
Then the never-ending pressure of midterms, finals, and regents exams.
basisword | 4 hours ago
vel0city | 2 hours ago
This is true because this isn't necessarily "the norm". Its very common to have this kind of life, but there are also a ton of kids who aren't as focused on their academics, who don't take AP classes, who aren't involved in clubs and sports. Only a little over a third of students take any AP exams, and only a bit over half of those end up taking multiple AP exams.
KPGv2 | 4 hours ago
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.
smcg | an hour ago
Aurornis | 4 hours ago
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.
geodel | 3 hours ago
Overall I think you are right it is indeed bubble and once one is in, it is difficult to see not everyone is doing that.
I have a friend in town both husband, wife work from home and extremely busy with their elementary/middle school kids school/activities that I haven't seen him in years.
Being out of their bubble I only know whats happening but don't get to be tutored in how all these activities are essential. And even rare back out once in a while can be serious digression that affects child's future.
mylies43 | 3 hours ago
jorts | 3 hours ago
godwinson__4-8 | 3 hours ago
> None of them have these grueling 15 hour day schedules you’re describing.
Hate to break it to you mate but none of them are getting in. Anyone who lives in a neighborhood with a high proportion of kids making it to the Ivy league and other top schools knows exactly what this guy is talking about. If you think it's a fib just because you're not aware of it that's not exactly robust social commentary.
toast0 | an hour ago
Many states have a guaranteed acceptance path to a state school and/or a path where you do two years at community college and can transfer into a state school to do two more and get a bachelors.
A great school on your degree can open doors at the beginning of your career, but missing out on that isn't some terrible tragedy.
godwinson__4-8 | an hour ago
It's also not an easy question for parents. Yes, you don't want to stress out your kids. But I'm not sure it's so easy to blame parents from those hypercompetitive neighborhoods. After all they have done well, and we are living in a world of self interest were increasingly everyone has a college degree, thereby devaluing the credential at a basic supply/demand level. The very best schools are in a class all their own, and (rightly or wrongly) have been largely immune to this downward pressure.
Talk about bubbles is also not really useful. Wealth is a bubble. Software engineering is a bubble. A neighborhood where everyone goes to a state school is a bubble. But at the macro level if people don't think the world is getting more cooperative and is just getting more competitive, doing whatever they can to keep or send their kids to the best bubble possible makes sense at some level. I think there are also a lot of parents who don't seem to have a robust concept of the future. I assume anyone being born today is entering a far more competitive and frankly, brutal world by the time they are college age. The world is getting smaller. And not enough people seem willing to do the work required to make sure all kids do well. In such a world, pushing your kids in high school so they can get the best shot makes sense. This can be true even if it doesn't make other people morally wrong. In the same way wealth doesn't make you a better person. But let's not pretend that in a world where (in the United States at least) many people among us if they lose their job won't be able to afford healthcare, that wealth is entirely without virtue.
Suggesting that is indicative of the same sort of "they'll be fine" thinking that frankly, strikes me as the most "bubble" idea possible. From where I sit, it's simply the case that the world is not getting easier.
mitkebes | 2 hours ago
Local high school runs 7:30 to 2:30. It's one of the better scoring high schools in the state, so we have some students who commute 45min-1hour to attend here (at least I had friends who did that when I went there).
When I was younger I lived in Albuquerque, and I believe that high school started at 7am, they had staggered start times of 9am for elementary, 8am for middle school, and 7am for high school.
peterlk | 2 hours ago
I did not go to a top tier school, and I did not live in a top tier place. The stories I’ve heard from others indicates to me that my experience was not unique. I wasn’t even the most busy of the people I knew.
This wasn’t every single day, but it was more on days than off days. Contrarily, I had a great time in college because the pressure of classes actually felt like less than I was doing in high school.
ratelimitsteve | 47 minutes ago
a34729t | an hour ago
ratelimitsteve | an hour ago
GPerson | 35 minutes ago
rpdillon | 4 hours ago
PyWoody | 4 hours ago
smcg | 2 hours ago
andsoitis | 4 hours ago
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?
oarla | 2 hours ago
SubmarineClub | 3 hours ago
I did the whole APs, sports, volunteering thing too, and managed to do just fine in college.
Kids today are just so fucking soft.
boogieknite | 2 hours ago
lucky she has you who considers this. speaking from experience: think about trying to handle that with parents who dont have time management skills
atniomn | an hour ago
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.
tptacek | a day ago
alistairSH | a day ago
tptacek | a day ago
red-iron-pine | 2 hours ago
hgoel | a day ago
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.
s1artibartfast | 21 hours ago
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?
Loughla | 19 hours ago
It's everything else with self regulation. Where most college prep goes wrong is at home, in not allowing appropriate agency for the child to make decisions before college. When you go from having to ask to go to the bathroom to being entirely independent in 2 months, bad shit happens.
This lesson has held true everywhere I've worked, from small junior colleges to D1 state schools.
Subsequently, college has gotten harder, but so has k-12, so proportionately, no it's not more difficult now
culi | a day ago
Given that 75% of all grades in 2022 were A's, grade inflation has already made the indicator value of grades pretty meaningless. I think this take from a student captures it well:
> Louth, 20 years old, said he earned all A’s and one B in his first semester and doubted he would have worked as hard had the classes been pass/fail. But he thinks he would have learned more from his classes without the pressure of earning high marks.
The first semester should help students explore and engage their curiosity. I think it's a good move and hope the experiment succeeds
mrngld | 5 hours ago
everdrive | a day ago
timcobb | a day ago
evanelias | 22 hours ago
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-...
timcobb | 22 hours ago
skt5 | 4 hours ago
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.
nodesocket | a day ago
amanaplanacanal | a day ago
claudiulodro | 22 hours ago
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.
GlibMonkeyDeath | a day ago
Both of my kids worked hard and were prepared for college, and they did very well their first years, as they were used to the pace and level of information. It's something they are proud of, and it gave them confidence in their future lives. By eliminating the chance to excel, we make life worse for students who should be standing out.
Jtsummers | a day ago
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.
GlibMonkeyDeath | 22 hours ago
At the larger schools (like Michigan), professors (if a professor is actually grading the class, and not an adjunct or grad student) are hardly going to remember individual performances on freshman exams, or even pay much attention.
Jtsummers | 18 hours ago
doctorwho42 | 3 hours ago
I have only had one company ask for my transcripts and GPA. Ever! And guess what, they were the one company I never wanted to work for after the interviews.
You know what the best companies I ever worked for cared more about? That I got the degree, and a million questions about my skills and projects that I engaged in.
culi | 22 hours ago
al_borland | 18 hours ago
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.
spelk | 23 hours ago
I ended up taking just one that way. The policy was really designed for the breadth year because in upper years, you had much less room for electives, but you could try a difficult or unfamiliar subject without worrying too much about your GPA. If you discovered you liked it enough to switch into that major, the course would then be converted to a regular graded course.
I think allowing 3-4 Pass/Fail courses in the first year strikes a good balance. It gives students room to challenge themselves and explore unfamiliar subjects, while still preserving grades as a useful signal of whether they're prepared for college-level work.
SteveMqz | 22 hours ago
Chinjut | 2 hours ago
dividefuel | 20 hours ago
On the one hand, this is good for people who need time to adapt to college. It's a big change, especially for young people who are living apart from family for the first time. You have to adapt to living alone AND an entirely new social environment AND a much more independent/rigorous academic environment all at once.
On the other, it may just delay the same result. If someone knows their first semester doesn't really count, they may not put in the time to adapt, then crash out anyway in the second semester when it becomes real. I also feel our society tries a little too hard to insulate young people from failure, and I wonder whether that means people avoid learning important lessons earlier.
I guess the biggest advantage is it lets someone spread the growth out over a little more time rather than getting railroaded at once. This approach is probably most useful for someone who is genuinely trying and struggling, rather than for someone who is not really putting in any effort. It's probably better to help the former, so overall it's probably a reasonable approach.
wildzzz | 4 hours ago
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.
RickJWagner | 19 hours ago
Eventually this will lower the bar for everyone.
b0rtb0rt | 16 hours ago
duxup | 15 hours ago
For most students college is nothing like high school.
duxup | 15 hours ago
But this also seems like it is just kicking the can down the road.
Balgair | 14 hours ago
I remember the first semester in the dorms was mostly the sound of coughing.
Building up the immune system takes disease exposure and that takes time.
Addnib all the immune system depressants and increased exposure events there at Michigan - booze, pot, late nights, hookups, crowds, stress, etc - and you get a perfect storm for the immune system to take a beating.
red_admiral | 5 hours ago
TacticalCoder | 4 hours ago
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.
Otterly99 | 5 hours ago
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2023.2...
"Our findings reveal that gradeless learning can increase motivation and reduce surface learning but has no significant effect on students’ later academic achievements."
cj | 5 hours ago
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.
igorkraw | 4 hours ago
Speaking as someone who grew up in a slightly more cruel world, but still received way more kindness than previous generations (did not die of previously deadly respiratory complications in childhood, got accepted into gifted children program for enthousiasm, not IQ, got recommendation letters for the same reasons, short sighted, ADHD) in my self evaluation, each time I got a break it spurned me to work harder and try more to "pay it back", and every time I powered through strict evaluation and scrutiny it left scars that overall impede my productivity/would do so if I had not gotten therapy to overcome them .
Nature is cruel, but also inefficient. We have long since started building a "rela world" full of safety bubbles that let us thrive. Why not continue with this one?
pjm331 | 4 hours ago
How about we work on making things not suck
x86_64Ubuntu | 3 hours ago
cj | 4 hours ago
The idea of “ease in” periods is nice, but it’s incredibly challenging when the business is understaffed (and hence hiring) for a specific role. You don’t have a lot of extra bandwidth on the existing team to cover for the new guy while he settles in.
kakacik | 4 hours ago
It should be the mission of every school, but somehow they all missed that. Given, teachers were often abysmal themselves in these topics, but things can be learned just like other stuff.
enragedcacti | 4 hours ago
Would you take a motorcycle safety course where the first thing they do is chuck you into "simulated" traffic? It feels too obvious to say, but just throwing people in the deep-end isn't necessarily the most consistent or effective teaching tool for every situation.
cj | 4 hours ago
But I agree that kids are awfully unprepared for the real world, so maybe coddling kids into early adulthood is unfortunately necessary? The whole situation makes me very sad.
margalabargala | 4 hours ago
cj | 2 hours ago
Do I think a consequence free first semester is needed to address that? No..
margalabargala | 2 hours ago
For example: what would you say is the point of college, generally? Is it learning? Is it producing functional adults? Or is the goal, itself, to accumulate large numbers of grades that are as close to 100 as possible?
That last one isn't a goal, it's a means to an end.
Human learning is in fact something that can be studied and measured, and not something that was perfected at any point in the last 50 years. If it can be shown that not giving grades the first semester improves the actual goals of learning and adult success, then that's what should be done.
If you get over yourself and your "back and my day" and "consequences", you will see that what is being done is what will help create the world you actually want.
cj | an hour ago
What I'm not in favor of is a college doing the same thing, but using "mental health" as the motivator. If mental health is really the issue, maybe the kids they're trying to help aren't actually ready for college.
syrrim | an hour ago
margalabargala | an hour ago
I see no difference in this vs the MIT program in terms of reasoning aside from a slight difference in wording.
Is the term "mental health" really such a blinding political football? Like "I hate Obamacare, but I love the ACA" and "Welfare is bad, but we need more assistance to the poor"?
brunoborges | 5 hours ago
Octoth0rpe | 4 hours ago
bell-cot | 4 hours ago
https://ro.umich.edu/sites/default/files/calendar/pdfs/Cal_2...
ta20240528 | 5 hours ago
red-iron-pine | 2 hours ago
their fix is rampant out of control cheating
technothrasher | 4 hours ago
nuclearnicer | 4 hours ago
mikemcquaid | 4 hours ago
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)”
ungreased0675 | 4 hours ago
cogman10 | 4 hours ago
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.
cm2187 | 4 hours ago
wolttam | 4 hours ago
naasking | 4 hours ago
Uncle_Brumpus | 4 hours ago
t-3 | 3 hours ago
freejazz | 3 hours ago
t-3 | 3 hours ago
giantg2 | 3 hours ago
naasking | 2 hours ago
UltraSane | 2 hours ago
IncreasePosts | 2 hours ago
rayiner | 4 hours ago
mg794613 | 4 hours ago
So what do you mean with "uncertain environment"?
anself | 3 hours ago
halls-940 | 3 hours ago
colpabar | 3 hours ago
brendoelfrendo | 3 hours ago
orangecat | 3 hours ago
There is a real issue that housing is unreasonably expensive in many areas, which we could fix via the innovative strategy of not making it illegal to build housing.
ryandrake | 2 hours ago
mitchdoogle | 2 hours ago
halls-940 | 25 minutes ago
UltraSane | 2 hours ago
SiempreViernes | 4 hours ago
red-iron-pine | 4 hours ago
cogman10 | 3 hours ago
Kids have "managed" this by dropping out of college.
hirvi74 | 3 hours ago
naasking | 4 hours ago
jasonlotito | 3 hours ago
Yes. We should ignore things like school shootings, which have long been described as the result of mental health issues. Ignore PTSD. Soldiers can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. By all means, ignore the mental health of a rape victim or a child abuse victim. They can just tough it out. Clearly, that's the better strategy.
Oh, and you've been working in this field for how long?
iugtmkbdfil834 | 3 hours ago
naasking | 2 hours ago
"Is raising mental health awareness causing more harm than good?", https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/analyst-comment/is-raisi...
"Are We Overdoing Mental Health Awareness?", https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/silicon-psyche/20250...
nobodyandproud | 3 hours ago
Once you're on your own nobody coddles you and it can be brutal.
cogman10 | 3 hours ago
colpabar | 3 hours ago
cogman10 | 3 hours ago
So again I ask. What's the harm?
ungreased0675 | 3 hours ago
Hiring practices expanding to include multiple take-home exercises to prove competency.
Students not fully learning foundational knowledge they’ll need later because the class is an easy pass.
cogman10 | 3 hours ago
I've never cared about where the degree of someone comes from. You really think and employer is going to look at UofM and say "Oh, they gave their students a 1 semester reprieve, obviously they are of lower quality"?
> Hiring practices expanding to include multiple take-home exercises to prove competency.
Why would the policy of UofM change the hiring practices of companies that are not UofM? Where's the connection?
> Students not fully learning foundational knowledge they’ll need later because the class is an easy pass.
This may be a real harm, but ultimately they'll have to learn the foundational knowledge to continue going to UofM. Plenty of students fail to learn foundational knowledge outside of UofM, I know because I had to tutor them.
mitchdoogle | 2 hours ago
UncleMeat | 19 minutes ago
nobodyandproud | 3 hours ago
As a student: Grades are one of the clearest signals on whether you're a good fit for a major or topic you're interested in, you need more work, or you need to trim down the number of classes.
Not providing that clear, cumulative signal is a major disservice to the students.
Also, UofM is expensive so dragging it benefits only the financials for the school.
cogman10 | 2 hours ago
nobodyandproud | an hour ago
It sounds harsh but it’s an important reality check for the student.
iugtmkbdfil834 | 3 hours ago
cogman10 | 3 hours ago
iugtmkbdfil834 | 3 hours ago
cogman10 | 3 hours ago
> That's the slippery slope fallacy. That's not what's being proposed and not what's going to happen.
They have proposed 1 semester, if they propose extending it then I'll be right along side you saying that's ridiculous. However, it's just as likely that they'll say "Actually, 1 semester was too long, we'll just do it for 1/2 a semester".
iugtmkbdfil834 | 2 hours ago
cogman10 | 2 hours ago
No it's not, because that's a tangentially related thing. You can't say "because social promotion is widely practiced, colleges will eventually eliminate grades" That's a non-sequitur. It'd be just as silly as me making the argument that "because some classes at my college were pass/fail, eventually they'll all be pass fail". That's the slippery slope argument.
> Own your argument man
That's not my argument, dude. And claiming it is is bad faith bro.
> If you are ok with end result, say so.
The end result of a single semester not being graded? Yeah, I'm fine with that. Because it's just as likely the university finds it's a mistake and rolls it back as it is that they expand it. It's also likely that they don't do anything with it.
That's my argument. That this policy is probably positive and worth trying. My argument isn't "nobody should ever be graded ever". That's a straw-man that you've cooked up.
UncleMeat | 19 minutes ago
account42 | 3 hours ago
cogman10 | 3 hours ago
It's just 1 semester and also gives students time to switch majors if they determine it's not for them (which is also common).
alephnerd | 4 hours ago
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.
doctorwho42 | 3 hours ago
Well I learned over a decade ago that they have had Pass/no-credit for the first year implemented for years... So at this point it wouldn't surprise me if you said it's been going on for two decades (at min.)
Again, I think people are having the same reaction I had "what, MIT just gets off scotch free for the first year?!". Decade later, watching it help relieve the stress from their rat race of 110% from their childhoods... Man is it worth it. And everyone still loves hiring people out of MIT
cj | 2 hours ago
> giving you time to adjust to factors like increased workloads and variations in academic preparation and teaching methods. [0]
I can 100% get behind that logic.
I can't get behind a college saying they're doing it to "curb a mental health crisis".
[0] https://registrar.mit.edu/classes-grades-evaluations/grades/...
OkayPhysicist | an hour ago
> curb a mental health crisis
In this context, both have the exact same meaning, of "stop freshmen who are used to overachieving their entire lives from taking a header off the tallest buildings on campus because they're not used to being less than the top 5% at everything"
ajcp | 3 hours ago
> yet when universities start taking steps to help reduce that they start kvetching
Your argument is hard to follow. It is prohibitively hard, to the point of being unhealthy, to getting admitted to the University of Michigan. Okay, but how does this policy solve for or address that in any way? Wouldn’t the solution be to increase capacity to meet demand, thus relieving those pressures that create the conditions for them to admit young adults that are suffering from health issues that the universities admissions policies itself precipitated?
alephnerd | 3 hours ago
And UMich Ann Arbor is already massive - 8,000 students enroll a year.
ajcp | 3 hours ago
Also 32,000 undergrads is not “massive” by any measurement[0], especially when accounting for the population of the state of Michigan, much less the broader United States.
O. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_public_u...
steele | 3 hours ago
ajcp | 2 hours ago
giantg2 | 3 hours ago
Dropping a semester of grades is a cover up for the symptoms, not a fix. A better fix would be stress management and realistic expectations. Building your identity or self-worth around going to a particular school is the insane part. It's great to have big goals, but you have to separate those goals from defining you. It seems many kids today don't make that distinction. Pick a cheap state school with a decent program, get a scholarship, and start living life. All this prestige and pedigree is the type of stuff we should be trying to destroy.
cpburns2009 | 3 hours ago
porridgeraisin | 2 hours ago
hirvi74 | 3 hours ago
ryandrake | 2 hours ago
You're right about this one. I'd never get accepted today at the state university I went to back in the 90s. Back then, applying to college meant taking the SAT, filling out an application, and maybe submitting an essay. That was it. Then you figured out how you'd pay for it. They didn't care that much about AP courses, extracurricular activities, career shadowing, volunteering, college level credits, or anything like that. Sure, they were nice bonuses but nobody treated them as hard requirements like they do today. Hell, my high school didn't even offer AP courses, so I couldn't take one even if I wanted to.
Now, my kid is approaching college age, and all these college admissions coaches are breathing down my neck to get her to take 40 AP courses, join the debate club and chess club, play Sportsball every year, take 4 years of a foreign language, do volunteering, tutor other kids, and then take extra courses at the local community college, and that doing all that will only improve her already-low chances of acceptance. Good grief!
Der_Einzige | an hour ago
dbvn | 4 hours ago
hbn | 4 hours ago
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.
giantg2 | 3 hours ago
That's the big thing - the college might be dropping the first semester grades so they can squeeze a second semester of tuition out of kids.
collabs | 3 hours ago
I feel like it has always been this way. I went to a small private university. The natural sciences and especially the pre-med students had their days fully packed, like the only time you could even have a moment to talk about anything was at the cafeteria during meals.
Then there was the business department. The college athletes apparently picked business as a major because you have to pick something. You couldn't guess what was their preferred minor and why... The overwhelming preferred minor was music because the buildings for department of business and music were adjacent.
Compare that to the pre meds who were always worried about getting a B and somehow "ruining their chances at med school".
vel0city | 3 hours ago
I actually think it makes a lot of sense to go for some kind of basic business degree if you're angling to go into professional sports. Having some basic concepts of basic business law, finance, etc. seems pretty important for someone looking to shop their abilities and likeness around and have some understanding of the contract negotiations they'll hopefully be a part of. Outside of the gym its probably the most relevant kind of skills being taught on a college campus for that career path.
antonymoose | 57 minutes ago
everybodyknows | 2 hours ago
Propitiated, in many cases, by the unnoticed run-up of their student loan debt balance.
ryandrake | 2 hours ago
This seems most likely. If you think of college as yet another extractive business (and you can bet the administrators at colleges think this way), then students that drop out are simply cu$tomers you are failing to retain: Pure lost revenue.
chasd00 | 3 hours ago
that sounds unbelievable. Not calling you out by any means i'm just shocked! I can comprehend tuning down the difficulty but not to the level of find some code online and write about it.
atomicnumber3 | 2 hours ago
giantg2 | 4 hours ago
alephnerd | 3 hours ago
What matters is your major and whether it is a well respected program.
A CS@Texas student will have the ability to open the exact same doors professionally and prestige wise as a CS@Brown student.
You have Ivies, Ivy Tier Privates (Stanford, Chicago, Duke, USC, Caltech, MIT, NYU, Northwestern, Georgetown, CMU), and Public Ivies (Cal, UCLA, UCSD, Mich, UIUC, UW, UT, GT, Purdue, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA) that all recruit the same kind of applicant and place in the same careers and employers.
giantg2 | 3 hours ago
alephnerd | 3 hours ago
And employers and us alums of these programs know the difference is marginal.
ryandrake | 2 hours ago
smcg | 2 hours ago
alephnerd | 26 minutes ago
kaladin-jasnah | 3 hours ago
alephnerd | 3 hours ago
The "NYU/USC is a party school" trope is from back in the 1990s (aka 2 generations ago).
tarentel | 3 hours ago
steveBK123 | 2 hours ago
And across time you have to adjust acceptance rates for the fact they are all way lower now because kids send out 2-3x as many apps.
A lot of kids even 20 years ago were applying to schools in NYC/Boston/DC on east coast because they wanted to be in NYC/Boston/DC. Many of my friends went to said schools for psychology/film/etc type programs at schools that as an engineering major were decidedly for me "safety schools". Many of these were 50% admit then and 10% admit now. I don't think they suddenly became as difficult as MIT.
Meanwhile many engineering schools (the types with Institute in the name) that were in cold rural boring areas had higher acceptance rates than my "safety schools" in Boston.
This trend has seemingly only accelerated. For example picking 3 schools in Boston to isolate just the difficulty feature:
* In 2005 MIT acceptance was ~16% vs 4% now (1/4).
* BC was ~30% vs 15% now (1/2).
* BU was ~68% vs 11% now (1/6).
So theres an argument that the harder the school the less dramatically its acceptance rate has compressed, while desirable good but not super hard schools (which have fluffy majors available) have had a larger effect.
t3hTao | 3 hours ago
They don't make great labor. They are normal labor with egos until the age of ~25. Then they become normal labor without egos as the system killed their ego.
I really expected some secret sauce in Ivys/UoM, and nope. Electrical Engineers there didn't know how to figure out mass of a part given density(based on material) and volume.
giantg2 | 2 hours ago
The secret sauce seems to be that many come from money, which means they have connections.
vehemenz | 3 hours ago
rtkwe | 3 hours ago
chasd00 | 3 hours ago
but it's always been this way since forever. Why would it need to change now and not a hundred years ago? What circumstances are different?
rtkwe | 42 minutes ago
jcranmer | 3 hours ago
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.
atomicnumber3 | 3 hours ago
Interesting, that's not my observation at all. Instead freshman classes were the most grueling experiences, intentionally weed-out classes to try to detect and, well, weed-out early those who wouldn't have the combination of grit, intelligence and organization skills to make it to the end of the degree.
I speak somewhat hyperbolically, it was never _unfair_, but the classes absolutely were paced and had homework/exam loads that you would simply be unable to cope with if you were trying to half-ass it. At my college, Calc I and Physics 1 were the big freshman showstoppers. I tested out of calc 1, but my IB HL was chemistry and as such I had a chemist's disdain (and begrudging respect) for the more academic science of physics, and while the actual topics weren't difficult, there was a LOT of homework and the exams left no stone unturned.
Comparatively, jr+ classes tended to be much more relaxed, focused more on learning the material than ensuring you are willing to do 8-10 hours of physics homework per week.
Every college is different though, I suppose.
jghn | 2 hours ago
So for instance, one of the notorious freshman weed out classes was a class that *every* engineering student took. But then each individual engineering major had their own handful of pain in the ass classes that showed up as the engineering curriculum diverged.
thedougd | an hour ago
AndrewKemendo | 3 hours ago
That’s what college life was like for me in a top 10 US school in 2003-2008 and was true of that school since 1954.
pj_mukh | 3 hours ago
okaram | 3 hours ago
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
t3hTao | 3 hours ago
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.
vondur | an hour ago
JumpCrisscross | an hour ago
Plenty of kids are small-town nepo. Daddy threatens to call his lawyer every time they get a C or get in trouble, and teachers and administrators cave.
steveBK123 | 2 hours ago
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.
nobodyandproud | 4 hours ago
dbvn | 4 hours ago
doctorwho42 | 3 hours ago
sauceontheside | 3 hours ago
storus | 3 hours ago
hirvi74 | 3 hours ago
thomassmith65 | 2 hours ago
If it is meant sincerely, it is the kind of idea that falls apart in the actual world - especially if someone wants to graduate with Honors in a degree program that requires higher maths.
That isn't to deny there is a lot of societal bullshit involving higher education, but that's true in many aspects of life.
OkayPhysicist | an hour ago
stack_framer | 3 hours ago
chasd00 | 2 hours ago
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
throwawaypath | 3 hours ago
c7b | 3 hours ago
rahimnathwani | 2 hours ago
throw7 | 3 hours ago
hirvi74 | 3 hours ago
Grades in their current form might be the purest incarnation of Goodhart's Law.
fucktheMs | 3 hours ago
Weird that trying to appease children, giving them no boundaries, and acting like entitled assholes isn’t a good way to raise a human.
Not that beating them into submission is good either, but the pendulum swung wildly wrong.
smcg | an hour ago
baggy_trough | 3 hours ago
markus_zhang | 3 hours ago
Or maybe they can help them by giving access to mental health practitioners, or maybe set some mandatory sessions to help them for the transition.
Anyway I think dropping first semester grades is a huge band-aid that they should never use. If we keep lowering the standards, maybe the whole education system is failing our children.
dividefuel | 2 hours ago
That way there's still an incentive to do good work, and students who do well still get to receive the benefit of keeping the letter grade. Students who do poorly receive the letter grade as feedback, but have a one-off chance to reduce the impact and try again the next semester.
rahimnathwani | 2 hours ago
- 11 GCSE grades
- 4 A level grades
- 1 University degree
For virtually all of these, the grades/results were determined by exams taken at the end of a period of study:
- GCSE exams taken at ~16yo
- A level exams taken at ~18yo
- University finals taken at ~21yo
At the time, I thought it was very very strange that my GCSE grades for English Language and English Literature were not based on exams, but on a bunch of essays I had written over a two year period.
It seemed strange because those past essays did not measure my current capability, but something else.
But this (measuring students on performance over multiple years) is the norm here in the US. Sure, many students take the SAT or ACT or various AP exams. But many students enter university with their academic performance measured on their high school GPA, which seemingly doesn't even attempt to measure mastery.
jmull | 2 hours ago
If a large enough proportion of incoming students need an adjustment period, surely it’s better to have one than not.
Also, it’s misdirected. If incoming students aren’t prepared for college, that’s a problem at the high school level (possibly earlier, too). A university is going to do better for its students if it adjusts to reality rather than expecting it to adjust to tradition.
randusername | 2 hours ago
Grades and academic performance are outcomes. They're indirect stressors at best; why would one generation suddenly be unable to cope?
The real story is what has changed to increase the stakes of grades. I suspect freshmen are taking out historic debt to contend with food, housing, and tuition costs meanwhile the entry-level job market is extraordinarily competitive. There is no room for error.
oarla | 2 hours ago
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!
wredcoll | an hour ago
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.
7402 | 49 minutes ago
Showing my age here, I guess. Fifty years ago, 18-year-olds in college were referred to as "men" and "women."
nobodyandproud | 41 minutes ago
Nevermind that actual findings like https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260218031606.h... and https://scitechdaily.com/your-brain-doesnt-magically-finish-... say something completely different.
Though auto-insurance claims do show some truth to late teens and early twenties drivers being...not mentally ready.
ux266478 | 41 minutes ago
reaperducer | an hour ago
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.
ratelimitsteve | an hour ago
jbs789 | 2 hours ago
If for potential employers, then first semester doesn’t matter a whole lot.
If for students, then sounds like they are getting the feedback they need w this approach.
I guess the question is one of comparability across schools.
ratelimitsteve | an hour ago
dekhn | 51 minutes ago
I was intensely stressed through high school and undergrad, then later in grad school, postdoc, full time job as computer scientist, then as a SWE. It wasn't pleasant but it drove me to achieve at far higher levels, in ways that paid off well in the long run (like financial stability and earlier retirement). Note: in undergrad, I specifically went to a school that did not have grades but still felt all the stress to perform.
I suspect that as unpleasant as stress is, it ultimately can make us better people.