A First Look at Student Motivation Resulting from a Pass/Fail Program for First-Semester Engineering Students

In 2010, administrators at Colorado State University implemented an experimental program allowing first-semester engineering students to take their entire course load for pass/fail grades, instead of the traditional A-F grades. Engineering educators were interested in the impact that this program had, and initially looked to GPA and grades. Realizing that those were insufficient to understand impact of the program, this study expands on previous work by obtaining a preliminary measure of students' motivation and correlating it with GPA and other variables of interest. Results indicate that the pass/fail students and traditionally graded students were very similar in terms of motivational qualities on average, but that motivational qualities showed relationships with semester GPA uniquely for pass/fail versus traditionally graded students. Also, student comments suggested that at the least they felt no harm was done by the program being offered and their enrollment or non-enrollment.