Universities love a clean solution. Remove grades, reduce anxiety, level the playing field. The logic is tidy. The problem is messier than the fix.
News that University of Michigan will drop letter grades for some freshmen next fall joins a growing chorus of institutions softening their grading infrastructure. The consensus building around this shift feels reasonable: grades stress students, grades sort students by privilege as much as merit, grades fail to measure what actually matters in learning.
All of that might be true. And yet the obvious answer—let's just stop grading so harshly—is too comfortable. The real question isn't whether grades hurt students. It's what removing grades will break next, and whether we're prepared for those consequences.
Consider the ecosystem grades actually serve. They're a currency. Employers use them. Grad schools use them. Scholarships depend on them. Transfer applications pivot around them. When University of Michigan stops issuing letter grades to freshmen, those students don't experience some frictionless paradise of learning for its own sake. They experience a translation problem. Their transcript becomes harder to read. Their competitiveness in external markets gets cloudier. Their parents, who are paying tuition, lose a clear metric for return on investment.
This isn't to say grades are perfect instruments. They aren't. But they're legible in ways that alternatives rarely are.
The institutions promoting these changes are usually selective enough to absorb the friction themselves. Michigan's reputation means employers and grad programs will still court its graduates. But what happens when less-resourced institutions follow? A mid-tier state university or regional college can't absorb opacity the way an elite school can. When grading becomes obscure, their students get hurt.
There's also the small matter of what gets measured instead. Pass/fail systems don't eliminate judgment—they just relocate it. Faculty still decide who passes. They just do it with less documentation, less consistency, and less appeal. Is that actually more equitable? Or does it simply make bias quieter?
The real sting here is that everyone involved knows what grades are. They're imperfect, but they're shared language. When we replace them with something friendlier, we're gambling that the replacement will be equally transparent. It won't be. And the students with the least institutional capital to navigate ambiguity will pay that price first.
None of this means universities should keep current grading systems frozen in amber. But the reforms worth pursuing are harder than removing grades. They're about making grades more meaningful—not less visible. They're about training faculty to evaluate deeper skills. They're about connecting assessment to actual learning outcomes instead of bell curves.
That work is exhausting. It requires institutional commitment that survives budget cycles and leadership changes. It demands intellectual honesty about what we're actually measuring and why.
Dropping letter grades is easier. It feels progressive. It tests well with students and parents initially. But it's a form of institutional theater—the appearance of change without the weight of transformation.
Universities are right to ask whether their grading practices serve students. They should ask harder questions about what happens when those practices dissolve. What gets exposed? What gets hidden? Who benefits from opacity, and who gets damaged by it?
Until we can answer those questions, we're not reforming higher ed. We're just making it harder to see what we've actually built.