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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Yes, it's a lot.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.
This must be a State thing.

> 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.

Did she ever have time to just go outside and hang out with friends?
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?
This is a bewildering article and discussion.

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.

https://archive.ph/FBFjJ

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

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.
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?
To those saying this is soft: https://registrar.mit.edu/classes-grades-evaluations/grades/...

If you want to say MIT is soft. Feel free.

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.

My college (Caltech) was pass/fail (no quantified grades) for the first couple of terms, and I thought it worked very well. It did alleviate the some of the stress of beginning a higher-expectations environment, but it also let students explore classes they wouldn't have if they had to worry about GPA. I know a few people that changed their whole field as a result; the geology department was known to pick up students this way.
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.

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 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.

I'm not sure how to feel about this.

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.

One if the worst discussion I've seen on HN:

I did this... Well I did this... My experience was .. Me me me... anecdote anecdote anecdote.

Nothing but humblebrags, dismissals of others experiences with their experiences and reminiscings.

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.
Soon they will start a program where you can either take a failing grade, or pay double tuition for those credit hours to get a pass in that class.

When I has in school we had a similar semester during covid. The school offered the entire student body to either take their letter grade, or take a PASS/FAIL (Which in some cases would improve GPA).

The idea is probably that if you give students good grades, they're happy to pay more in tuition. High drop-out classes and difficult coursework will go the way of the dodo.

"The tyranny of soft expectations"

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.

Breaking news: student anxiety peaks in the second semester.
As a "foody" I stop anywhere and everwhere there is groceries/food for sale, which means a lot of mom and pop family places,farms, farm markets, road side, etc, which means kids and others, making it up as they go along, involving heavy equipment, much manual labour, a wide variety of food processing equipment, sharp knives and money, often simultainiously. One local place seems to be staffed entirely with kids, that has an ice cream stand, bakery, fresh produce that they get strait from the field and clean and process right there, and a wide variety of local cheese, meat, etc, with a significant portion of the clentel, other kids sent to pick stuff up, cash bieng normal, no pause while figuring out change. Lets just say that the general level of competency displayed in these places is far far higher than what I see(and hear about) everywhere else.
I think the consternation here isn’t warranted.

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.

For people that find this controversial:

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."

I was a straight A student all through high school; first year of college I got Bs and Cs, couple As, and failed one class. Next three years I got my shit together and was back to straight As, including retaking the class I failed. I would have appreciated this lol
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.

I get the justification, don't necessarily disagree.

But this also seems like it is just kicking the can down the road.

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.
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.
If nobody is failing, nobody is learning
A few years ago a teacher was fired for passing out 0% grades when the stated school policy was a minimum of 50%. "Zero work, zero grade."

50% was the old zero, now zero grades are 100%?

https://www.wmtv15news.com/content/news/Florida-teacher-fire...

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 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.
Johns Hopkins has had this since forever
I see this akin to what the great Thomas Sowell calls ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’.

Eventually this will lower the bar for everyone.

This sort of coddling and weak policy is setting students up for a rude awaking when they get into the professional workforce.
research tilts towards grades not helping learners in contrast to non-quantitative feedback so there's that.
At MIT first semester grades for freshman have been pass/no-record for several years now
What are grades for?

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.

The competency crisis is coming faster than anyone expected.
I think messing up teaches people to straighten up. But hey I’m a Millenial, maybe I’m out of touch now.