ORIGINAL POST:

Here's the problem with not making it mandatory that I see.

If you make it optional, then it is effectively no longer an option for anyone that has to worry about competing for grad school or med school or whatever wrt their grades in particular classes. It may legitimately be the case that I think I cannot effectively learn organic chemistry without getting the benefit of learning from labs, for example. I might wish to pass fail because I don't think I'll be able to do well on the final without the things I would have learned from taking the class in person. But IF the pass fail is not universally applied, then it is no longer an option for me to pass fail that class, because any medical school will always just expect that I elect to not pass fail it. That's especially true if even ONE person elects to not pass fail it and gets an A. As soon as it is shown to be theoretically possible to take the class normally online, that will become necessary for everyone who wants to be competitive even if they have circumstances that would make it prohibitively difficult.

If it were universally applied, this wouldn't be an issue. Grad schools couldn't fault you for pass failing a class that you had no opinion but to pass fail.

Does that make sense?

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MY RESPONSE:

So I see your point and think this is a valid concern, but the problem is that even though this is better for equity between Swarthmore students, it puts Swat students at a universal disadvantage against students from other colleges (or students taking important classes for grad programs in different semesters), and thus has the potential to cause a great deal of harm.

First, I think it's worth distinguishing three types of classes (for grad school purposes, which is the example I focus on here): courses that are required for admission, courses that are recommended (which typically means essentially required to be a competitive applicant), and then electives that generally don't matter as much.

Required courses will be uncovered either way, since Swat reports pass-fail grades when required to do so, so this case doesn't really matter.

For courses not directly relevant to their specific programs, I don't think grad schools will have issues with students CR/NCing those even if they had the option not to--I would expect CR/NC will become sufficiently common (if it is the default, which I think it should be) that this will not appear out of the ordinary. Since adcoms don't especially care about grades in any particular one of these classes and there will still be plenty of classes with which to calculate GPA, grad schools don't have any particular incentive _not_ to be understanding in these cases.

However, the big problem comes up with courses that are functionally required, but not formal application requirements. To borrow the example I'm most familiar with: most economics graduate programs recommend that students take real analysis, an upper-level math course, to build the abstract thinking/proof-writing skills necessary to succeed in math-heavy graduate econ courses. In practice, this means that a strong grade in real analysis is functionally required to be a competitive applicant to top programs. One of the most common reasons students drop out of graduate econ programs is the math, and taking students who have demonstrated their ability to deal with the level of math required by grad-level econ courses is therefore a much safer bet for institutions.

The result is that grad programs have a direct incentive not to take students who CR/NC real analysis, even if the students were forced to do so, because it's simply safer to take the exact same applicant from some other school who took real analysis and got an A. Of course, this is a very specific example, but the same principle applies to grad programs in a wide range of disciplines. To use your example, I think that unfortunately, med schools will still prefer applicants with letter grades in organic chem because they have a strong demonstrated incentive to do so.

Realize that while these programs may have some incentive to be understanding, I highly doubt that they will do so when it comes into direct conflict with their goal of picking the students most likely to make it through the program.

The basic argument is: students without letter grades in courses that are required or functionally required are unfortunately in a really crappy situation either way. Students who CR/NC courses that aren't directly relevant to programs they're applying for are fine either way. So, better to enable the potential for students to get letter grades when they need grades to be competitive for grad programs/internships/whatever, even though this is obviously (and unfortunately) not a viable solution for every student.

To respond briefly to your example of one student requesting a grade and thus harming all others in the class: first, I think other students applying to med school are harmed just as much either way because even if they had no choice but to CR/NC, they are still at a disadvantage to students who took organic chem in another semester or to students at another college who got letter grades. Second, for the reasons I gave above, I don't think students who don't need this specific class for some sort of future application are harmed for CR/NCing, since there's no express incentive for grad schools not to be understanding.

There are also plenty of other cases where this harms students (e.g. freshmen applying for internships during the upcoming fall would have no letter grades whatsoever, making it pretty much impossible to get into any programs that don't permit self-reporting), but most of them result in basically the same issue as the above.

I also don't think self-reporting solves for this, but I don't want to write another essay right now, so if anyone does want to have that discussion, I'll write down my thoughts later.