The University of Michigan is preparing to shield first-semester grades from student transcripts, a move internal documents reveal is designed to address racial “credit gaps” and what administrators call “intersectional patterns of inequity” in academic performance.
Starting in fall 2027, the flagship public university will exclude first-semester grades from overall GPAs for freshmen in its College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Officials publicly frame the policy as a response to a “mental health crisis,” but university records tell a different story: administrators are restructuring academic standards around the students they admit rather than expecting those students to rise to the challenge of a demanding institution, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The “grade covering” pilot program emerges from the university’s Student Success Initiative, which identifies “early momentum” as its most important element. A 2023 university report found that high rates of D’s, F’s, and withdrawals showed what administrators described as “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.”
U-M boasts an 81% four-year graduation rate and 94% six-year rate, numbers that compare favorably with peer institutions. But the data shifts dramatically when broken down by race. Black and Hispanic students fall 10 to 20 percentage points below the overall four-year rate.
The university’s demographics have changed considerably in recent years. White enrollment dropped 13% between 2016 and 2025, while Hispanic enrollment doubled from 5% to nearly 11% over the last decade. Black student enrollment remained relatively stable between fall 2016 and fall 2022 but has grown markedly since then.
Since the pandemic, U-M has not uniformly required standardized tests for admission.
White and Asian students were more likely to bring those precollegiate credits than Hispanic and black students.
The university’s apparent logic: if some students arrive with an academic cushion, covering first-semester grades gives everyone else a cushion too.
The context of high failure rates in early courses clearly shaped internal discussions. A session during a February 2024 provost’s seminar, held one day before U-M officially announced it would go test-optional, discussed “radically rethink[ing] grading practices for undergraduates across units, especially in the first one to two years.”
