Why Is the University of Michigan Hiding Grades?
Its “grade covering” policy seems less motivated by helping students than by accommodating bad admissions decisions.
“Why don’t we blow up the transcript?” Angela Dillard, vice provost for undergraduate education at the University of Michigan, asked in a 2024 seminar on the future of undergraduate education at the university. Two years later, U-M is moving in that direction.
Starting in fall 2027, the University of Michigan will exclude first-semester grades from overall GPAs for first-year students in its College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, purportedly to curb a “mental health crisis.” The university declined to tell the Wall Street Journal how it decided to launch its “grade covering” pilot program. But university documents suggest that grade covering is part of a larger effort to reshape the university around the students it admits rather than expecting those students to adapt to a demanding academic environment.
The policy is designed to build “early momentum,” which the university describes as “the most important element in U-M’s campus-wide Student Success Initiative.” A 2023 university report states, unsurprisingly, that students who succeed early in their academic careers are likely to have higher graduation rates. But the university found that “DFW” (D’s, F’s, and withdrawals) rates showed “intersectional patterns of inequity that parallel those seen in graduation rates: wealthy, white, continuing generation students are substantially more likely to complete these courses with passing grades.” DFW rates were the highest in foundational courses that students took in their earlier years.
Most students who attend the University of Michigan will graduate on time. U-M has an 81 percent four-year and 94 percent six-year graduation rate, well above those of most public universities and comparable with peer institutions. But when broken down by race and ethnicity, there’s great variation. Black and Hispanic students fell 10 to 20 percent below the overall four-year rate at U-M. The university has seen a 13 percent decline in white students between 2016 and 2025 while enrolling more black and Hispanic students. The share of black students enrolled at the university remained relatively stable between fall 2016 and fall 2022, but it has markedly grown since then. The Hispanic enrollment share has doubled, from 5 percent to nearly 11 percent, over the last decade, with a 1 percent per-year increase after fall 2022.
Since the pandemic, U-M has not uniformly required standardized tests for admission.
