Why first-year courses should be pass/fail – and how to make the case at your institution

If you teach or support first-year undergraduates, you know the pattern. Students arrive in September excited and confident. By November, a significant minority are struggling with sleep, missing classes and questioning whether they belong. By exam season, your inbox fills with extension requests, mitigating circumstances forms and confessions of burnout.

We tend to treat this as a well-being problem, to be solved with counselling services, mindfulness apps and resilience workshops. But a growing body of evidence suggests the problem is partly structural. One of the most effective interventions sits inside our own course design: shifting first-year assessment to pass/fail.

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This is not a new idea, but the most recent evidence reframes it. Pass/fail is not a soft-touch concession. It is a targeted intervention for the year of study where stress causes the most damage.

The evidence for pass/fail

First-year stress is not a brief adjustment phase. Nearly 80 per cent of first-year students fall into the “high-rebound” group: stress starts high, dips briefly, then climbs sharply again before exams, according to a 2025 study. Over 90 per cent of students see their grades drop in the transition from secondary to post-secondary education and anxiety, more than any personality trait or resilience measure, was the variable most strongly linked to that GPA decline.

There is a clear, beneficial trend in the scientific literature towards the pass/fail system, with showing it does not affect students’ performance. It can also reduce competition and promote intrinsic motivation widely considered the key to self-directed, lifelong learning. This autonomous motivation leads to better grades, the evidence shows. 

Even in STEM, where pass/fail has been slowest to take root, recent mixed-methods research showed statistically significant drops in student anxiety after introducing alternative grading in a molecular biology course. 

In one study, students said lower-stakes assessment let them ask questions, make mistakes and seek feedback without fear – exactly the conditions needed for early learning.

This matters because curriculum debates often happen without students in the room. When asked, they are not asking for less rigour. They are asking for permission to learn before being judged.

How to actually make the change

Pushing for wholesale grading reform is usually the wrong opening move. Instead, a small change that looks boring on paper and arrives on leaders’ desks with most of the paperwork already done is the way to get approval. Here is how that can happen in practice.

1. Start with one module you don’t have to fight for

Pick a single first-semester foundational course where the genuine learning goal is competency: an intro programming course, an academic writing module, a foundational maths sequence. Avoid, for a first pilot, anything that directly gates competitive progression later, since that invites a harder argument you don’t need to have yet. 

Approach the module leader before you approach the committee: a pilot proposed by the person who already teaches the course moves through governance far faster than one proposed to them. Run it for a single cohort before scaling, and agree in advance what “success” will look like: attendance, submission rates and extension requests, not only final grades. This way, you are not relitigating the definition of success after the data comes in.

2. Pair it with rich feedback, or it will backfire

Pass/fail without strong formative feedback does not reduce anxiety, it just removes information students were relying on. Replace the single summative grade with something more useful: rubric-referenced written comments, short one-to-one or small-group feedback conversations, exemplar scripts that show the difference between a pass and a borderline attempt, and, where possible, a resubmission opportunity before the pass/fail line is drawn. 

This is exactly the combination the STEM study above used, and it is why the anxiety reduction held up. The honest objection here is staff time, so build feedback into contact hours you already have – converting one seminar a fortnight into a feedback clinic, for instance – rather than asking colleagues to absorb it unpaid.

3. Use your own retention data, not the literature

Senior leadership will engage with your institution’s own numbers faster than with someone else’s study. Work with your institutional research or planning office to pull first-year withdrawal figures and the reasons codes behind them, then translate the case into terms leadership already tracks: cost per withdrawn student once recruitment and lost tuition are counted, stress indicators from your own student survey and the staff time going into appeals and mitigating circumstances cases. A one-page business case built on your own figures will do more work in a provost’s inbox than a literature review.

4. Bring student voice in before you write the proposal, not after

Run a short focus group or survey with current first-years and recent graduates of the target module while you are still drafting, not once the proposal is written and you need endorsement. Two questions do most of the work: what have grades stopped them doing, and what a fair pass/fail threshold would look like to them. 

Curriculum committees respond to specific, quoted student language that is anonymised, with permission far more than to aggregate statistics, and it pre-empts the accusation that this is being done to students rather than with them.

5. Address the ‘easy way out’ objection before someone else raises it

Name it yourself in the proposal rather than letting it surface unopposed in the meeting. The reframe that works is that pass/fail changes what is measured – a competency threshold instead of a ranking – not how rigorously it is assessed; the threshold itself can be held constant or raised. 

Precedent from a rigorous programme carries real weight here: Cornell’s College of Engineering, hardly a soft-touch institution, adopted pass/fail elements in 2022 as part of a mental health response and framed it explicitly as infrastructure for student well-being, not a concession on standards. That framing is what persuades sceptical colleagues, more than the policy detail itself. Where you can, pre-brief likely sceptics one-to-one before the meeting rather than debating the idea for the first time in the room.

6. Solve the transcript problem before anyone asks about it

This is the practical detail that kills proposals in committee if it is not answered upfront. Registrars and exam boards will want to know exactly how a pass/fail module interacts with GPA calculation, degree classification and any external transfer or accreditation requirements. 

Come with an answer already chosen: exclude the module from GPA entirely, record it as a pass/fail flag alongside the transcript or award credit at a threshold pass without a grade point. Check early whether professional accreditation bodies, partner-institution transfer agreements or national credit frameworks impose their own requirement for graded assessment – if one of them does, you need to know before you propose the change, not after it has been approved and someone flags it in an audit.

The bottom line

The first year is when we lose students to dropout, to disengagement, to mental ill-health. How we assess in that critical year shapes whether they stay, thrive and learn deeply, or whether they survive on adrenaline until something gives.

Pass/fail in year one has solid evidence behind it, student endorsement in front of it and almost no implementation cost. The question worth raising in your next curriculum committee meeting is not whether you can afford to try it but whether you can afford not to.

Lasha Markozashvili is associate provost for teaching and student success at Nazarbayev University.

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