In its mission statement, Milton claims to cultivate a passion for learning in its students and wishes to develop creative, critical thinkers unafraid to express their ideas. Our celebration of diversity, in both identity and talent, suggests that our academic policies should strive to reflect our aspirations. Generally, high-school electives seek to broaden our perspective on the world, but growing academic pressures in recent years seem to have put a strain on our exploration.
According to the World Health Organization, reports of fifteen-year-old students feeling extremely pressured by schoolwork rose to 63% in 2024 from the 54% reported in 2018. Higher pressure on grades, especially in college admissions, seems to discourage people from taking electives outside of their strengths. This pressure creates a strange environment for students: the safest classes for our grades usually fall under subjects in which we already have proficiency.
In a poll of 72 Milton student respondents, 76.3% said that they would be more likely to take an elective if it were pass/fail. 30.6% said that all electives should be pass/fail while 44.4% said that the grading practice should depend on the elective.
These results indicate that students are not necessarily asking Milton to eliminate grades from electives, especially since that would require drawing harsh borders around which classes are and are not considered “elective.” Rather, students seem to want Milton to create some way to allow students to explore new subjects without removing grades entirely.
One method that colleges have found is offering students 1–3 pass/fail allowances during their four-year education, so that students do not worry about ruining their GPA with a totally new field. For example, my sister, Maya Rabin, a 2026 graduate of Amherst College and a double major in Economics and Political Science, took a pass/fail Intro to Dance class during her senior year. Some colleges that have adopted a similar policy include Brown, Columbia, Yale, Williams, and more.
That highly selective, prestigious colleges offer versions of this policy suggests these schools are not trying to reduce academic rigor. Instead, pass/fail options recognize that academic challenge can mean more than simply taking the hardest class in a subject you already know well—a challenge which, of course, is difficult in itself, and it is important to push yourself even within your strengths.
If colleges trust their students with an allowance of pass/fail courses, high schools can give their students a similar choice.
After high school comes college, often accompanied by crippling student debt, and then a busy job, so I promise your schedule will not get lighter. Milton’s wide range of classes across the Arts, English, Social Sciences, and more offer the perfect laboratory to experiment with your interests. Having the option to defer two classes to pass/fail would allow an English-focused student to not worry about a C in computer science showing up on their transcript, and vice versa.
Milton cannot claim to value intellectual curiosity while the grading policy creates incentives for students to avoid the subjects outside of their specialization. Even so, taking academic risks should not mean escaping evaluation altogether. By allowing a select amount of pass/fail credits, a student might discover that they love computer science, journalism, economics, dance, creative writing, marine science, or another subject they never expected to enjoy. They might also discover they hate it, but both outcomes have value.
High school should allow us to discover what interests us—at least as much as it allows us to continue what we are already good at. If Milton wants its students to become curious, creative, and fearless learners, its academic policies should not only reward what we already do well; they should give us room to discover what else we can do.