College students across the country are getting ready to head back to campus. As a new academic year approaches, universities face a daunting challenge: How to encourage genuine learning while preparing graduates for a workforce being reshaped by artificial intelligence.
The University of Michigan is thinking outside the box. Beginning in fall 2027, some freshman students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts will receive pass or no-credit marks during their first semester instead of traditional letter grades.
We can understand the impulse. Colleges are under immense pressure to uphold academic standards at a time when students are using AI to produce polished work without ever showing up to class.
In Texas, some colleges are experimenting with "ungrading," where students agree to contractual terms for a particular letter grade or are evaluated in more qualitative ways like through self-assessments or course benchmarks. Baylor University and the University of Texas at Austin provide information about ungrading for faculty members.
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These experiments show a genuine effort on the part of colleges to grapple with a broken grading system, but dropping letter grades altogether is not the answer.
Grades are still a useful measure of student performance. Parents want to know whether students are making progress. Employers, graduate programs and scholarship committees need a clear way to compare applicants. And students themselves need an honest accounting of how they stand in their courses. A transcript filled with broad pass marks can't communicate whether a student produced exceptional work or just barely got by.
Letter grades also establish that distinctions matter. An A is for exceptional work that exceeds standards. Not everyone can or should receive an A.
The larger problem is not the existence of letter grades; it's a campus culture that too often treats an A as an entitlement rather than something to be earned. Grade inflation was rising long before AI arrived, cheating is widespread, and too many students are entering college expecting to coast through their classes putting in minimal effort while still getting straight A's.
Dropping letter grades won't solve any of these problems.
Letter grades for traditional exams don't need to be the only form of evaluation. Colleges can supplement these grades with other types of evaluation like oral exams, in-class assignments and group work. These methods develop critical thinking skills and teamwork. They also make it harder to outsource learning to AI.
As college campuses and workplaces change, grading practices will have to evolve as well. Letter grades should remain the prevailing measure of academic performance. The challenge is to make these grades more rigorous and meaningful while still encouraging students to develop skills that a transcript alone can't capture.
