During the pandemic, some high schools opted to switch from their traditional grading systems to pass/fail grading systems. Who needs grades, right? Everyone is a winner! You’re a winner. You’re a winner. You. And you. And you over there. You’re a winner, too. And, yes, even you in the hat in the corner. As for everyone! 

Yes, if you guessed we think such a pass / fail non-grading policy is absolutely ridiculous, you guessed right. To the high school administrators who decided to switch to pass / fail grading policies, you lacked faith in your students. That lack of faith is likely to hurt them when they apply to highly selective universities.

Why Pass / Fail Grades Are Detrimental to Elite College Admissions Odds

As we are quoted in a piece in The Chicago Tribune by Karen Ann Culotta entitled “COVID-19 Led Some Schools to Drop Letter Grades. One Suburban Student Is on a Quest to Get His Back,” “Brian Taylor, a managing partner at Ivy Coach, which provides college admissions counseling and ACT and SAT tutoring, applauded high schools that assessed students’ progress with traditional letter grades as much as possible throughout the pandemic. ‘Shame on the schools that are putting their students at a major disadvantage by not putting the letter grades earned during the pandemic on their transcripts,’ Taylor said, adding that while many colleges are now ’test optional,’ scores from ACT and SAT exams, and high school transcripts, still determine admission. ’One of the reasons applications were up at many colleges is because students thought they could get in without test scores,’ Taylor said. ’But if a student doesn’t have all of their letter grades on their transcript, and there’s no test, what data can the colleges rely on?’”

That’s right. During a year in which it was optional for applicants to submit an SAT or ACT score, some of these students weren’t going to be submitting grades? Grades, of course, have long been the most critical factor in elite college admissions. So, without test scores and grades for these students at schools that foolishly switched to pass / fail, what exactly were admissions officers to rely on when evaluating these applicants? What kind of laundry detergent do they use? To high school administrators who switched to pass / fail, it’s not too late to correct the error of your ways, as you’re doing your students a grave disservice.

The Schools That Are Gradeless Post-Pandemic

Now that the pandemic is in our rearview mirror, the vast majority of schools have transitioned back to grading their students. Bravo! Good riddance to a system that benefited no one and undermined America’s faith in its resilient students. However, some schools still use a gradeless system. Some have always been gradeless. Just as many American high schools refuse to calculate class rank for the sake of undercutting competitive pressure and helping students out once their applications reach the hands of elite admissions officers, a select set of schools continue to tabulate academic performance without the tried and true benchmark of grades. 

Gradeless Systems Hurt High-Achieving Students

But gradeless systems are not the same as unranked graduating classes. In the case of the latter, a poor class rank can sink an otherwise competitive applicant’s odds of admission. Going rankless helps such students out. However, going gradeless does the opposite: it sinks everyone’s ship for the sake of keeping a few academically underperforming students afloat. Grades are a genuine benchmark for achievement that colleges need to split hairs between highly qualified applicants. Without grades, they are left in the dark and would rather err on the side of rejecting the applicant from the gradeless school.

To schools that are still adhering to a faulty pass / fail system now that the pandemic is no longer, we suggest reevaluating your approach. Think of the children (A.K.A. the students who are put at a disadvantage when their academic strengths are obscured)!