Is Dartmouth going the way of everyone gets a trophy?

Joseph Asch of Dartblog reports.

The SP: No Grades Freshman Year

Here’s one Strategic Planning idea that would be my personal candidate for the Law of Unintended Consequences award:

Consider your typical Dartmouth freshmen: not very outgoing, of an intellectual bent, happier studying alone than being with friends, and concerned about good grades. The kind of people who might become college professors. People who might not want to take courses outside the academic areas in which they have excelled in the past.

If that profile seems right to you — and we can be sure that it does to the professors on the Students of the Future committee — then proposing that all courses during freshman year are graded on a pass/fail basis makes sense.

But if you think that Dartmouth students are happiest with their peers, that they love a good party (the louder and the wilder the better), and they are concerned about good grades, then the above idea is just short of being nuts.