My D’s school sent out additional guidance today that all A grades will be automatically uncovered. All grades of A- or less will require manual uncovering. That tosses any plans to take all or nothing with uncovering.
I think that, for non-professional grad school (PhDs and thesis masters), it would be best to take a Pass for anything below an A- or B+.
Because graduate committees don’t look too deeply into the GPA, they mostly only have their initial impression from the transcript. So the higher the GPA on the transcript, the better the impression. If they end up looking through the transcript, having three Ps from The Spring Of The Coronavirus will not really affect that initial impression (nor will finding that there were three Bs that spring which affected the GPA make much of a difference in the other direction).
“He got 4 A’s and 2 not A’s. He was given the advice by 2 different advisors to take the A’s and then P’s in the other classes. The rationale was he’d get a bump in GPA and no one was going to care about grades for this semester when this is all over since schools are all.”
If you reveal your grades, you pretty much have to go all-in, any p/f would be seen as a B- or lower, if the transcript is going to be studied down the road (med schools as was mentioned). Engineering is different in that once you meet the threshold, typically 3.0, then HR or recruiters are not going to look too closely at the grades, hiring mangers probably won’t either. But even a casual glance at a transcript that shows four grades and two P/Fs means the applicant is hiding something.
^I agree the optics of partial and selective masking of grades aren’t good unless the hiring or admitting institution only cares about GPA. More selective employers and schools will likely look at the whole transcript when making their final decisions.
Why would you assume that if the fall semester is online that courses would be assessed on a P/F basis? For most schools the option for this past semester was because there was a sudden switch and it was a chaotic time filled with all sorts of uncertainty and stress. I don’t expect that the same grading practices will continue in the fall just because classes are online rather than F2F.
@gwnorth - Some schools cited socio economic disadvantaged students’ home environments as a reasons for going to P/F options. Those wouldn’t suddenly improve if Fall semester stays on line.
@momofsenior1 I guess that makes sense.
I think the only schools who MIGHT have the same p/f policies as this semester are those where the students are given no choice to attend classes online in the fall. I think that schools who will hold classes, but allow students to attend online if they want, will not be so flexible. I think the assumption will be if you make the choice to attend online, you are prepared to deal with what being online entails.
Confirming that at least one school is noting transcripts about P/F. Saw the following message today when reviewing D’s transcript: *The University of Pennsylvania granted unlimited pass/fail options for the Spring 2020 term in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Dean’s List honors were suspended for 2019-2020. *
I wonder whether the determination of cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude honors will be affected by this ability to choose P/F rather than a letter grade.