UWM Grade Recovery Program: Minds Behind the Pilot

For a lot of students, the first semester of college doesn’t go the way they planned. New city, new environment, no familiar faces and suddenly the grades that came easily in high school aren’t coming so easily anymore. Students stumble in their first semester, falling into a GPA hole so deep that some never climb out. The UWM Grade Recovery Program was created to change that.

Launched in Fall 2025, the program gives first-year UWM students who receive at least one F in their first semester the option to convert that grade to a non-credit, removing it from their GPA calculation. They still don’t get credit for the course. They still have to retake it if it’s required. But the zero stops dragging down their grade point average before they’ve even had a real chance to find their footing.

“We were hopeful that if we took away that punitive piece of that failure, students could move on to their second semester and start fresh,” said Sara Benesh, a professor of political science and director of curriculum and governance for the College of Letters and Science, who helped develop the program. “That was kind of the idea.”

The program grew out of a working group assembled by Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Dave Clark. Benesh was part of that group, taking on the topic of grade assistance for first-year students. What she found while researching the issue was that UWM was behind the curve.

“It’s been happening at the Ivy League schools for a long time,” Benesh said. “A lot of schools have done things to make that first year a little bit less punitive for students.”

Clark pointed to institutions like the University of Oregon and MIT as models, schools that had already experimented with non-graded first semesters or similar interventions. The question for UWM wasn’t whether to act, but how to do it within the university’s existing structure.

“We wanted to do something within the structure that we already have at UWM that might be helpful to students,” Clark said.

The team consulted with financial aid, athletics, student housing, Maverick and anyone else on campus who might be affected, making sure the program wouldn’t create unintended consequences for the students it was trying to help.

Clark described two types of students the program had in mind.

The first is a student who comes in with a clear career goal, hits a difficult prerequisite course and struggles. One bad grade sends them into academic probation, the university starts sending warning notices and psychologically, the damage compounds.

“It gets really hard for them to come back and feel good about what the next semester is going to be,” Clark said.

The second is a student who realizes mid-semester that the path they chose isn’t right for them. They came in wanting to be a nurse, but after one semester of chemistry they know it’s not a fit. Without the program, those F’s would follow them into whatever major they chose next, weighing down a GPA for courses they no longer even need.

“That didn’t make a lot of sense to us,” Clark said.

Of the roughly 760 to 770 first-year students eligible for the program, approximately 400 had opted in as of the time of reporting. Students have until the end of the semester to opt in, and both Clark and Benesh said outreach efforts were continuing to reach those who hadn’t responded.

Benesh conducted a survey of eligible students to gauge the program’s early impact. She received around 70 to 80 responses, and what she read in the open-ended comments stood out to her.

“So many students said they had a really rough semester,” she said. “College is harder than I thought. My family had some issues. I had a hard time meeting friends. And then when they got the notification that they could do this with their grades, it was just a weight lifted off of them.”

More importantly, students didn’t just feel relieved. They reported making real changes heading into their second semester, seeking out tutoring, attending class more consistently and reaching out to faculty and advisors for help.

“That’s exactly what we hoped would happen,” Benesh said.

The most common concern raised about the program was whether it would make students less academically accountable, giving them a reason to coast through a difficult course knowing they could wipe the grade away. Clark and Benesh both acknowledged the worry but pushed back on it.

“It’s not a free anything,” Clark said. “We’re just lessening the burden on your GPA, but if you need chemistry to become a nurse, you still have to pass chemistry.”

Benesh added that even students who chose to disengage from a struggling course might benefit in a different way, freeing up energy to salvage their other classes rather than failing multiple courses at once.

Faculty pushback was almost nonexistent. Clark said the few people who raised concerns about grade inflation quickly came around once they understood that students still had to retake and pass the course.

“Once we got past that knee-jerk reaction, everybody was on board,” he said.

One group that does require extra attention is military students. Depending on the type of benefits a student receives, converting an F to a non-credit could affect what the military covers. The program team worked closely with the Maverick veterans center to identify those students and make sure they had the information they needed before making a decision.

For now the program remains a pilot. Clark said the transition to official policy hinges on two things: gathering enough data to know whether it’s actually working, and solving a technological challenge.

Currently students must actively opt in after receiving their grade report. The goal is to flip that to an opt-out system, where the conversion happens automatically unless a student chooses otherwise. That change requires a formal policy update and a new system from the registrar’s office

“We’d like to be an opt-out so that it just happens automatically,” Clark said. “We find that not all students respond, and so not everyone is getting the benefit of this.”

Benesh is clear about what success looks like.

“I’m hopeful that we’ll have retained more students than we used to,” she said. “Students who struggle in that first semester, rather than giving up on college altogether, are able to stay and learn what it takes to be successful and then graduate.”

For a university where over 40 percent of students are first generation college students, the stakes behind that goal are high. And for those students especially, the program may offer something that matters more than a GPA correction. It offers the message that one hard semester does not define the rest of your college career.