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COVID changed college grading in two connected ways: classes moved online with little preparation, and colleges temporarily loosened grading rules. Students received more chances to use pass/fail, credit/no-credit, withdrawals and incompletes. The academic results were not uniform: one randomized study found lower online grades, while a large Texas A&M analysis found higher average GPAs. Both can be true because teaching conditions, assessments and grading policies changed simultaneously.
What changed when campuses closed
In March 2020, colleges abruptly replaced in-person instruction with emergency remote teaching. This was not the same as a deliberately designed online course: instructors had to move lectures, laboratories, exams and office hours online while students dealt with illness, caregiving, job loss, unreliable internet and shared devices.
To limit the academic damage, many institutions adopted temporary flexibility. A common design let a student first see the earned letter grade and then decide whether to keep it or convert it to pass/fail or credit/no-credit. Policies also expanded late or retroactive withdrawals and allowed more incomplete grades when a student could not finish under normal conditions.
Lafayette College’s spring 2020 policy illustrates the rationale. Its academic committees said the goal was to make evaluation “more flexible this semester so that it equitably takes into account the diverse academic needs, interests, and concerns of our students and the very different pedagogies being employed for the balance of this academic year.”
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How emergency options worked
Pass/fail or credit/no-credit
Students could often replace a letter grade with a passing or non-passing mark. A passing mark usually earned credit but did not enter the GPA; a failing mark could carry different transcript and GPA consequences depending on the institution. Because rules differed by college and program, students had to check deadlines, major requirements, financial-aid rules, transfer policies and graduate-school interpretations before electing an option.
Withdrawals
Colleges extended withdrawal windows or permitted retroactive withdrawals. A withdrawal generally removed the course from GPA calculations but could affect satisfactory-progress calculations, enrollment status or graduation timing.
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Incompletes
An incomplete allowed additional time to finish specified work. It was most useful when a student had completed enough of the course to be evaluated later, rather than when the entire course design had become unworkable.
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The strongest evidence does not support a single national “COVID grade effect.” Delivery mode and grading policy produced different outcomes in different settings.
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| Study | Population and design | Finding | What it can and cannot show |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kofoed, Gebhart, Gilmore and Moschitto (2024) | 551 West Point students, randomly assigned to online or in-person sections of a required economics course in fall 2020 | Online students’ final grades fell 0.215 standard deviations; the largest decline was among academically at-risk students. | Provides unusually strong evidence of a delivery-mode effect, but covers one course at one institution. |
| Tillinghast, Mjelde and Yeritsyan (2023) | 7,852 undergraduate classes in Texas A&M’s College of Agriculture, fall 2010 through spring 2021 | Average class GPA rose 0.22 points in spring 2020 and about 0.18 points in each of the next two semesters. | Shows a substantial GPA shift in that college; the authors say the causal mechanisms require further study. |
| Rodríguez-Planas (longitudinal analysis) | More than 11,000 academic records from spring 2017 through spring 2020 | Lower-income students were 35% more likely than higher-income students to choose pass/fail. Flexible grading explains the income-group difference in observed spring 2020 performance. | Demonstrates why raw GPA comparisons can mislead when students have different grading choices. |
| Kelly and Swidler (Lafayette study) | Students using Lafayette’s spring 2020 election policy | Pass/fail election was more common among Black, Latino, international and lower-GPA students and among seniors. | Shows who used one institution’s policy; it is not a national participation rate. |
The West Point result points to learning and engagement costs associated with emergency online delivery. Survey responses cited concentration problems and weaker connections with instructors and peers. The Texas A&M result captures the transcript outcome after delivery, assessment and policy all changed. Easier or differently supervised exams, altered standards, emergency flexibility and changed student circumstances could all raise recorded grades without demonstrating greater mastery.
Why higher GPAs did not necessarily mean better learning
A GPA is an output of both student performance and the rules used to measure it. During the pandemic, instructors changed exam formats, deadlines, participation expectations and weighting. Open-book or take-home assessments replaced some proctored tests, and some institutions stopped counting a low letter grade in the usual way after a pass/fail election.
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These changes can protect a student from a one-time shock while also reducing comparability with earlier transcripts. A higher average class GPA may therefore reflect grading insurance, altered assessment difficulty or greater opportunity to revise work rather than improved understanding. Conversely, a lower online grade can reflect lost interaction and concentration even if the formal grading scale remains unchanged.
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Who benefited from flexible grading
Equity was a central justification for the temporary policies. Students did not enter remote learning with equal health risks, housing, income, technology, work obligations or caregiving demands. The longitudinal income analysis found that lower-income students used pass/fail 35% more often than higher-income peers, and that accounting for flexible grading removed the income-group difference in observed spring 2020 performance.
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Lafayette’s data similarly showed higher pass/fail take-up among Black, Latino and international students, students with lower prior GPAs and seniors. The senior pattern included a possible “check out” effect: students close to graduation may have viewed a non-GPA option as protection against a final-semester disruption. The findings show that an option can be formally open to everyone yet used more heavily by groups facing greater disruption.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What persisted after the emergency semester
Not every temporary rule became permanent. Colleges set their own deadlines and eligibility rules, and there is no single national 2026 count showing which institutions still retain COVID-era accommodations. The durable change is less a universal pass/fail policy than wider experimentation with what transcripts and assessments should measure.
Administrative data covering bachelor’s students from 2014/15 through 2022/23 found that lenient grading compensated for some pandemic effects for low-ability students by helping them pass compulsory exams and continue. That result concerns persistence in educational outcomes; it does not establish that one grading regime remained in force across colleges.
Assessment models that gained visibility
Faculty discussions during and after the pandemic broadened beyond the conventional percentage-to-letter-grade model. The following approaches answer different problems and should not be treated as interchangeable.
| Approach | How performance is represented | Potential strength | Key trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Letter grades | A–F marks contribute to a GPA | Familiar to employers, graduate programs and scholarship offices | Can make small point differences appear more precise than the evidence supports and can magnify unequal outside burdens. |
| Pass/fail or credit/no-credit | Completion or non-completion, usually outside the GPA | Protects a transcript from an extraordinary disruption | Can hide distinctions in mastery and may be interpreted differently for prerequisites, transfer credit or admissions. |
| Ungrading | Feedback and demonstrated learning replace or reduce conventional letter marks | Focuses attention on revision and learning goals | Requires clear standards and a transcript conversion process for institutions that still demand grades. |
| Contract grading | A pre-agreed set of tasks and conditions determines the mark | Makes expectations and workload explicit | Completion of tasks may not show the same level of mastery across students or courses. |
| Standards-based grading | Separate judgments report mastery of defined outcomes | Shows which skills a student has achieved | Demands well-defined standards, repeated evidence and consistent calibration. |
| Labor-based grading | Evaluation is tied primarily to documented effort and agreed labor | Can recognize substantial work under unequal conditions | Effort and learning are related but not identical, so feedback and outcome evidence remain important. |
How to interpret a pandemic-era transcript
- Check whether a mark is a letter grade, pass, credit, withdrawal or incomplete; the same label can have different rules at different colleges.
- Read the institution’s catalog for how pass/fail affects prerequisites, major requirements, honors, academic standing and financial aid.
- For graduate admission, scholarships or transfer, ask the receiving institution how it treats pandemic-era non-letter marks rather than assuming they are ignored or penalized.
- Compare GPAs cautiously across terms. A 2020 average may reflect different assessment formats and election rules than a pre-2020 average.
The lasting lesson
COVID exposed a tension that ordinary grading often hides. Letter grades provide a common shorthand for selection and progression, but they can also encode unequal learning conditions. Pass/fail and related accommodations offered protection when disruption was extreme, yet they reduced information about relative performance. The post-pandemic challenge is to design assessments that preserve credible evidence of mastery while allowing flexibility when health, technology or family circumstances make a single high-stakes measure unreliable.
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