> This is reflected strongly in the free responses, where many students reported feeling an insurmountable sense of inadequacy

For those wondering how the heck an MIT student can feel academically inadequate, there are three things that can contribute to it and that are kind of built into the whole concept of a top-tier STEM school.

First, incoming students at a school like MIT [1] will have a wide range of abilities and prior knowledge because these schools are in the very top tier of schools. There is no tier above to draw away students who are above a certain ability level. The distribution of ability has a much longer tail to the high end than schools that aren't in the very top tier.

This means that the average MIT student is going to meet some fellow students that just totally outclass them academically.

Second, incoming students at such a school almost always were at or near the top of their high school class. Around 97% of MIT students were in the top 10% of their high school class.

Half of those students are going to be in the bottom of their class at MIT, and for most of them it will be the first time in their life they have ever been out of the top 10% in anything intellectual. This can be one hell of a shock to one's confidence in one's ability.

Third, MIT is a fairly specialized school, emphasizing STEM. They expect their students to want a deep and broad and rigorous STEM education, and they try to provide it. This means they have a lot of courses that are fast-paced yet go deeply and rigorously into the subject.

Such courses are a hell of a lot of work...much more than anything most incoming students will have dealt with before.

Result: for many students at MIT or similar schools they find themselves in an environment where they have many classmates who they see as much smarter than them, and they are having to work much harder than they have ever had to work before...and even with all that work they are somewhere down below the top of the class in territory they have always associated with failure.

It's not at all surprising that there are widespread feelings of inadequacy. (That in EECS these feelings are more widespread among women than men is a bit surprising at first glance, and so should be investigated, of course. I'm just commenting here on the general feeling of inadequacy that I'd expect to find at a school like MIT).

When I was at Caltech a big thing they did to help with this was grade all freshman classes pass/fail. That gave us an entire academic year to get used to our new environments. Since then, they've cut that to the first two terms (out of three) of freshman year are pass/fail. I don't know why they did that.

According to what Google finds for me, it looks like MIT only does first semester of freshman year as pass/no record. If you pass, the pass is recorded, but if you fail it is as if you never took the class. Second semester freshman year a lot of MIT students will get the first ever "B" or "C" they have ever received.

I think they should do the whole year without grades. That way students get more experience in their new environment without having to worry about grades and where they stand in their class, and they get a whole summer to recover and figure out how to make whatever adjustments they need to make to deal with the rest of their time at the school.

[1] by school like MIT I mean basically any school that is one of the top universities in the world.