Coronavirus, Grades, and Applications

[AkraticAgent]

Do you guys think using a universal pass/fail option on all of my courses this semester would negatively impact my grad school applications? To give you some context, I am a junior and an international student studying at an American liberal arts school and I came back to my home country after my university decided to shut down all in-person classes. Now, the internet where I live is really poor and this is causing me problems in attending online classes and maintaining the level of academic work I'd normally strive for. I figure that using a pass fail would be better for two reasons: 1) My current philosophy GPA is reasonably good and if I get even a single B or a B-, it will go down significantly. 2) I take it that it'll probably look worse if I did poorly on an upper level philosophy seminar than if I simply received a generic "pass" for it. Am I totally misguided here? What are your thoughts?

[vpaglioni3]

It's hard to say that it won't impact your applications at all, but I wouldn't be too worried about it. I asked this exact question when my school had a town hall meeting regarding coronavirus, and was told that we were getting special "Emergency pass/emergency fail" designations instead of normal 'pass/fail", to differentiate from students who were doing poorly and switched to pass/fail to save their grade. It sounds like you also have serious extenuating circumstances that mean you really would need pass/fail to avoid suffering undue consequences from this. I think you should take the pass/fail, and if need be you can explain this semester's circumstances when it comes to application season.