My contempt for administrators who come up with such foolishness knows no bounds. I also find this one hard to believe. It’s not enough that our institutions of higher education indoctrinate their students, they have to infantilize them as well.
Get this: The University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) is seeking to avoid mental health issues in the incoming freshmen class by abolishing the reporting of first-semester grades. Students will still earn letter grades, see, and receive instructor feedback in every course, but those grades will remain “internal,” as in “secret,”and will not appear on official transcripts, and won’t affect first-semester GPAs. This is part of a pilot program to reduce student stress and deal with a “mental health crisis”.
Increasingly, I do not understand the thought processes of the school administrators who come up with such crack-brain schemes. These are young adults being treated as children. Such coddling retards character and emotional development, and has dubious pedagogical value for students in middle school. College? I have a sneaking suspicion this scheme has DEI roots, but I can’t confirm that. Whatever the reason, it is an excellent way to raise a generation of weenies.
If you can’t handle the “stress” of college, go to a less competitive college, or a trade school. Life is stressful. Deal with it.
Ethics Alarms 
DEI roots? Probably. But I also think that there are financial ones. Students are already being sold a bill of goods that they cannot compete in the job market without a college degree. They are handed an insane amount of cash for people their age to spend on high-tuition colleges in order to pursue useless degrees.
Students who don’t do well their first semester are more likely to drop out. They may return later when they are more mature or they may not. Sometimes money for school is tied to grades. By not counting the grades in the first semester, they keep unprepared students in college and that money keeps coming.
DEI is certainly a desired outcome for them, but ideology is almost always secondary to cash flow in any organization.
I meantby “DEI roots” that the minority tribes favored by DEI have been ostentatiously falling behind in the first year, so to artificially bolster their self-esteem and be “anti-racist” the school has eliminated the likely evidence that they were improvidently admitted with the assistance of anti-white discrimination.
Exactly.
If you were admitted to Michigan, you should be an all-star and given rampant grade inflation, fully capable of acing any course. If you’re not, you don’t belong there and something is out of whack.
Of that I have no doubt.
This is absurd participation trophy kind of psychological coddling. This has got nothing to do with properly educating the students and everything to do with keeping them in the indoctrination environment.
What happens when a student fails to pass a course the first semester that is a prerequisite for the next level of that course? Do they let the failing student enroll and participate in the next level of that class knowing full well that the prerequisite hasn’t been met?
Just another in a long line of absurd policies coming out of the so called “progressive” hive minded collective. These people are irretrievably broken from reality.
Stunningly awful.
So far many of my grandchildren have done well in school, three with masters, one in nursing school. Most are employed and/or in school full time. They are aspirational and hard working. I am so proud of them and happy that they will be self-reliant, successful adults. We and their parents have been involved and supportive, but never coddling. No helicopter parents here, either. When they needed it someone said ‘buck up’ or ‘grow a pair.’
The degradation of education has been in play for decades, part of the insidious process to weaken the population, erode America’s work ethic, and produce a compliant, government dependent population. It is now on steroids. Buckle up …