If you've heard that some colleges "hide" your first-semester grades, that's close but not quite right. What's actually happening has a name -- grade covering -- and it's more specific, more common than you'd think, and backed by more real evidence (for and against) than most grading-policy debates. It's a different question from grade inflation and deflation: covering hides an assigned grade from your transcript; inflation and deflation are about what grade gets assigned in the first place.

What grade covering actually is

Under a grade covering policy, your instructor still grades your work normally -- you get a real letter grade, and in most versions of this policy, you (and sometimes your advisor) can see it. What changes is what shows up on your official transcript: instead of that letter grade, the transcript shows only Pass or No Credit (sometimes "No Record") for the term. The grade isn't erased -- it's covered. It typically doesn't count toward your GPA either.

This is different from an ordinary elective pass/fail option, which most schools already offer and which you opt into course by course. Grade covering is usually mandatory and automatic for an entire defined group of students -- almost always first-year students in their very first semester -- not something you choose.

MIT runs one of the oldest and most specific versions of this, in place since 1968: first-semester grades of C or better show as "P" (Pass) on both your internal and external transcript, while a D or F doesn't even appear as an attempted course on your external transcript at all -- it's genuinely invisible outside the university, not just softened. MIT then switches back to ordinary letter grades starting that same first year's spring term.

Wellesley's "shadow grading" works a bit differently: students are privately told their real letter grade, but the transcript shows Pass for anything A through D, and Fail only for an actual F.

Swarthmore introduced a mandatory pass/fail first semester in 2018. Caltech has run a similar first-term policy for years. All of these are small, highly selective private schools -- which is part of why the newest adopter is a bigger story than it might otherwise be.

The new, much bigger case: University of Michigan

Every school above is a small private college. That changed in 2026: the University of Michigan's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) -- one of the largest colleges at one of the largest public research universities in the country -- announced a "First-Semester Grade Covering Pilot Program," first proposed by Dean Rosario Ceballo in her 2025 State of the College address, with town halls held through fall 2026 ahead of a planned fall 2027 launch. It would cover first-semester grades for LSA's entire first-year class -- a scale no school with this policy has attempted before.

Why colleges say they're doing it

The stated rationale is consistent across every school that's adopted this: helping students adjust to college-level work without the fear of a bad first semester following them permanently. Michigan LSA's own language describes the goal as helping first-year students "acclimate to the demands of college" and letting "intrinsic motivations... guide personally meaningful academic journeys" -- explicitly framed around the ongoing mental health strain reported among college-age students, and around giving students room to try a genuinely hard course (or four) without a rough transition semester wrecking their GPA before they've found their footing.

What an actual study of this found

This is the part most coverage skips: economists have actually measured what happens under a mandatory pass/fail first semester, using Wellesley's own policy as a natural experiment. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper (Butcher, McEwan, and Weerapana) used a regression-discontinuity design around the policy's Fall 2014 start date and found that students' underlying letter grades declined by 0.13 grade points -- about 23% of a standard deviation -- during the covered semester. Students didn't durably shift into harder STEM courses they'd otherwise have avoided; a follow-up faculty survey pointed instead to reduced student effort -- less attendance, less preparation -- as the more likely explanation. In other words, on the evidence from one real policy, "you don't have to worry about the grade" measurably translated into some students working less hard, not just less anxiously.

The pushback

Grade covering isn't universally adopted, and it isn't permanent where it does exist. Johns Hopkins had its own version of this policy and reversed it, with two of the university's deans stating plainly that "covered grades merely delay development of study skills and adaptation to college-level work." The criticism from outside academia has been sharper: Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, has argued that treating 18- and 19-year-olds as too fragile for direct feedback on their work "strikes me as missing a pretty significant element of the purpose of higher education." Michigan's announcement in particular drew both support and considerable public pushback along similar lines.

What this means for you

  • It's not "no grades." Your instructor knows exactly how you performed, and in most versions of this policy, so do you and your advisor -- it just isn't on the transcript colleges, employers, or scholarship committees will eventually see.
  • It's short and temporary. Every version of this policy covers one semester (usually the very first), not your whole first year and definitely not all four years. Normal letter grading resumes quickly.
  • Check whether it actually protects you for what you care about. If you're eyeing a major or program with competitive internal admission (common in engineering, business, or nursing programs, for example), ask directly whether your covered-semester performance still factors into that decision -- a covered transcript grade doesn't necessarily mean every internal gatekeeper ignores the real one.
  • Don't treat it as a free semester. The Wellesley research is a real, specific data point suggesting some students respond to a covered grade by doing less work, not just by feeling less anxious. If your school offers this, the honest use of it is exploring genuinely challenging courses you'd otherwise have avoided -- not coasting because it "doesn't count."

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