“You know what my problem is? I’m an A student, not an A+ student.”

So lamented one of my best friends on a nighttime walk at the beginning of our sophomore year, concerned that he would be disadvantaged in law school admissions half a decade down the line. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. He is among the most naturally curious people I know, and yet, at a school which purports to champion academic exploration for its own sake, his primary takeaway from his freshman year was that he should have taken greater care to maximize his GPA. Though we are not all equally lunatic, every student at this college has at one time or another felt the same pressure to curate their academic experience in service of a hazy future. This is antithetical to what Amherst is all about.

When the next freshman class arrives at Amherst, they will have the opportunity to take a remarkable array of courses with world-class teaching faculty, but hardly any of them will take advantage of that opportunity quite to the extent they should. Instead, with little idea of what to expect in a new and unfamiliar place, they will take timid steps into their first year, burdened by the old high-school axiom that they will be granted no quarter for failure, however small. We will, of course, recite the age-old adage that it is wonderful to challenge oneself. But they’ll have heard that one before, regularly accompanied by reminders that it can be disastrous to do so less than gracefully. Exploration, they’ve been taught, should never come at the cost of a B. If we don’t impress upon our freshmen that Amherst really is different, they will eschew unfamiliar—and very possibly difficult—experiences in favor of the beaten path.

We are not, of course, any less intrinsically curious than previous generations of Amherst students. On the contrary, I have been continually impressed by the unbounded love for learning that distinguishes my friends and classmates, and I am tremendously grateful that Amherst has been the site of my undergraduate education. I can attest that academic exploration is not dead here—I could not have foreseen an interest in my own major mere months before I fell in love with it in my second semester, and mine is only one of many such stories here. It is precisely because that rare intellectual drive persists at Amherst that we must take extra care to ensure it is preserved and empowered.

Like all young people, we are impressionable, and that is by no means a flaw. Were we not so impressionable, we would not stand to gain as much as we do from a culture of intellectual exploration. But it does mean that we are more susceptible to peer pressure than we’d probably like to admit, and when everyone around us limits their academic exploration for fear of bad grades, we’re naturally inclined to follow suit. We have managed to inculcate in each other an attitude none of us would have adopted independently, and thereby corralled ourselves in a cage of collective grade-induced anxiety. But we should not despair that there is no way out.

Amherst cannot alone reverse the encroachment of pre-professional pressure into undergraduate education, but we may nevertheless take meaningful steps to shelter our freshmen from its influence so that they may freely explore their nascent intellectual interests. I think we ought to grade freshmen exclusively on a pass/fail basis. Now a junior, I wonder at what my freshman year might have been like if none of my friends ever talked—or even thought!—about grades. What an impression that would have made! Our freshman experience indelibly shapes our perception of Amherst far beyond that initial year, and the absence of letter grades would impress upon our freshmen that, unlike in high school, exploration and learning for their own sake are the primary yardsticks of success at Amherst.

I understand that some of us may be nervous that adopting such a policy would undermine the value of an Amherst degree. For what it’s worth, we would not be the first school to do so: Swarthmore mandates pass/fail for the first semester; MIT, for the entire first year; and in recent years they have, if anything, only grown in stature, numbering among a select few schools whose reputation for genuine academic rigor has remained relatively intact in our era of rampant grade inflation. We certainly need not worry that our own brand would be tarnished by joining them.

Amherst has spent two hundred years in the highest regard in no small part because we have never maintained an unreflective commitment to tradition. And conversely, our enviable position obliges us to lead by example, clearing the path for reform at schools that have not always been as forward-looking. Just two years ago, we proudly ended legacy admissions, spurring a spate of other schools to like action. We have always refused to let outdated practices ossify, and we must now reconsider a grading policy that fails to reflect our faith in learning and exploration as worthwhile ends in themselves. By making freshman year pass/fail, we can take a meaningful step toward establishing ourselves as a shining example of what a liberal arts education in our century can be. I am optimistic that we will rise to the occasion. ■

—Daniel Fleer