<p>My son transferred out from a county vocational school after his Freshman year. When he came back to the township public school his transcript wasn't ready with his transferred credits until the end of the sophomore year. Not knowing how much credit will be transferred to this public school, he signed up for courses in order to comply with this public school's graduation requirements. Now that he got full credit transferred from his vocational school, looks like he has one extra course that he doesnt need for graduation. More importantly this extra non-honors course is bringing his W-GPA down.
Can he ask the school to calculate his GPA only based on his required courses and bascally drop one course (one non-honors course that he got credit from his voicational school) from his transcript?
Does any parent have any experiencxe in this area? Waht is the process for this? If the GC doesnt want to do it, what do I do? Any follow-up? Any alternative?
Please advise. Appreciate your help.</p>
<p>He can try. It’s an unfair situation, but some schools are more sticklers for the rules than others. My sister-in-law still grumbles (25 years later!) that she missed being valedictorian because orchestra wasn’t weighted. (Which she took on top of a full schedule.) Now there’s a stupid rule for you.</p>
<p>My expectation is that if I were a college admissions officer and saw someone trying to game the system this way, I would definitely count it as a strike against the applicant.</p>
<p>The colleges will see his move from the vocational track to the honors one. So unless this impacts admission at a school (like a second-tier state u) which only considers GPA as submitted by the GC and nothing else, I’d just drop it as an issue.</p>
<p>Mini, I dont think I made my situation very clear here.</p>
<p>My son didn’t transfer from a “vocational” school to a “honors” one. The Vocational school was a very good “State acredited high school” specilized only in Technolgy and science. Because the school didn’t have enough sports activiites, my son being athletic wasnt fully staisfied. sports was very important to my son. So he transferred out. As a matter of fact, the “Vocational” school had all honors courses unlike the public school. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I heard that top 5 students of our township middle school are going to join the same vocational school. May be their interest is different. Bottom line is the county vocational schools are equally competitive.</p>
<p>I am not sure if the vocational schools are same across the country or not. </p>
<p>My guess would be that this non-honors course is on the transcript to stay - and I would think that ALL high school transcripts will have to be submitted to colleges - the one where he is attending now for soph/jr/sen year - and the one from the Voc/Tech school for his freshman year as well. </p>
<p>You are basically asking that his GPA be figured on ONLY the transcript from the school he is at now?? Do I understand that correctly (so the other school grade will not be figured in)? If the policy is that ALL grades be included in GPA - they I think you are out of luck there - if it is that GPA is figured only from the present school grades - you may not have to worry about it.</p>
<p>When my guy changed schools - his GPA was only figured on the new schools grades - did not include the other schools grades as there was a very different grading system at that school. He did have to submit transcripts from both schools to colleges tho.</p>
<p>I still don’t know what the issue is. It sounds like you are trying to wangle to find a way not to include a course that he really took in his GPA because, later, after the fact, you discovered that he didn’t need it for graduation. But when he took the course, he (and you) didn’t know that, so it wasn’t even a consideration, and the assumption was that it would be part of his GPA.</p>
<p>Have I missed something? It does sound like gaming to me, but perhaps I really just don’t understand it.</p>
<p>I admit that I don’t understand it fully either- my sons took many courses in high school that weren’t required for graduation, and they took well beyond the required number of credits both for graduation and for the colleges they applied to. I can’t imagine anyone allowing them to select certain of those classes to keep off the books. </p>
<p>Is this something you want to do for college purposes? If so, what kind of difference does this class not being honors really make, in terms of GPA? If it were possible to pull certain classes off the transcript in order to bump up the GPA, everyone would want to do this, because most students take classes above and beyond that required for graduation. I guess I’m confused also. Maybe it would help to tell why you want the course removed… did he do poorly in it? Is it a class ranking issue? Will taking the class out of the GPA make or break his college application? Scholarships?</p>
<p>the college wants to see all the grades, and some they drop themselves- ie NYU drops religion class grades ( which most Catholic schools require) when calculating GPA</p>
<p>So each college is different, but once you take the class it is there to stay, “required” or not</p>
<p>Some schools colleges weight, others don’t it varies</p>
<p>I’m reading the question differently. I think the OP’s son is currently repeating a class that he previously took at the vocational school but didn’t realize that the credit would transfer, and now wants to drop the redundant class.</p>
<p>Colleges can recalculate GPAs, but they can’t recalculate ranks - which we all know they use. I don’t believe there is any truly fair ranking system (though I have my preferences based on what I think is important). My impression, and I might be wrong, is that the kid is being penalized for taking a non-honors course beyond the minimum required to graduate. This is a pretty common situtation. That said, if other kids took more courses, and more honors level courses, then they probably deserve to rank higher. Take these for a hypothetical schedule.</p>
<p>Kid A - 4 honors courses, all As
Kid B - 4 honors courses, 1 non-honors course, all As
Kid C - 4 honors courses, 1 non-honors course, with a B in honors course
Kid D - 5 honors courses, 4 As and 1 B</p>
<p>In most school systems kid B, C and D will have a lower rank than Kid A. But Kid D will more likely have “hardest curriculum” checked.</p>
<p>I think the student has a course that isn’t required for gradaution at his new school…he wants to drop the Grade he got at the vocational school, as it is not needed for the new schools gradaution requirement, and is obviouslly a lower grade</p>
<p>it is not dropping a class he is currently taking, but one he already has, in essence “dumping it” or “erasing” it from his transcript altogether</p>
<p>from the op</p>
<p>"drop one course (one non-honors course that he got credit from his voicational school) from his transcript?:</p>
<p>and yes, what happens is the new schoools transcript will have THEIR grades, and then the old schools transcrip with have THEIR grades</p>
<p>they don’t blend the grades for a number of reasons</p>
<p>the colleges will get TWO HS transcrips, one with say 9 and 10th grade, the other with 11 and 12</p>
<p>the new school would not want to be responsible for the courses and grades from the old school- it is not their teachers, curriculum, etc</p>
<p>at my Ds school we had people transfer out as sophmores, and when applying for college, needed to request OFFICIAL transcripts from both schools, our school would send an unofficial copy of old schools information, but would not verify it was official with the New schools stamp, etc</p>
<p>Thanks for all the input. I guess I havent described the problem very well. The processes vary from school to school. my son got all courses transferred from the voc school. However the public school gave him credits equal to what they had for thier Freshman year curriculam. The voc school had 6 credit for each course, but the public school gave him 5 credits for 3- honors courses and 4 credits for the remaining courses because the public school allows only 3 Honors courses per year. Subjects like Foreign language, social study are all non-honors courses (4 credits) in our public school. Now because we didnt understand this credit translation until the end of the soph year, we thought that he may not get the course credit for a “Technical Art course” that he took in the voc school. my son repeated one non-honors course (Technical arts).
This public school uses a formula to calculate your GPA as follows:
W-GPA= Hons (5 credit)x5(A grade) + N-Hons (4 credit)x 4 (A grade)…/Total number of credits</p>
<p>Honors course= 5 credit, non-hons =4 credits
honors course grade A = 5, non-hons course A grade=4 (assuming that one got A grade in both honors and non-hons courses)
so if you see the math here, with one extra course, the denominator will be heavier than your peers and the result will be lower. that’s how he is bringing down his w-GPA.</p>
<p>Overall he has all the honors courses for last 3 years (including the voc school transferred courses) and a total of 10 AP courses( incl his senior year course load). so he took the most rigorous course load that the school offers. he doesnt have to worry about the course load. but his peers with same load and more “B” grades have higher w-GPA than him. This root cause here is the formula that the school is using to calculate the GPA.</p>
<p>Armando, you got it. Exactly that’s what happening in this case.
The grade is not in question.
The “weight” of the the extra course is bringing down the w-GPA when averaging.</p>
<p>If that is the reason, every student in the world has the same problem (unless he’s never taken a non-honors class in his hs career), whether or not he transfers from another school. I can imagine the outcry from the rest of the students that are vying for the top spots when they find out they could have kept 9th grade non-honors classes off their transcripts (mandatory classes such as PE, Life Skills Management, fine arts, personal fitness, first two years of foreign language, etc.) if they had only attended another school.</p>
<p>Actually, our high school avoids this problem entirely, since we do have one year of mandatory fine arts and our first two years of foreign language are non-honors. They just don’t include the freshman year into the GPA <em>for ranking purposes</em>. Have you looked into this? Perhaps they don’t even look at freshman year for ranking.</p>
<p>When you say TRANSFER, that just means the school accepts the classes from the old school in place of the classes from the new school- the classes don’t magically appear on the new schools transcript- the new schools transcript is just for that school and classes don’t magically disappear either</p>
<p>you can’t have it both ways- taking bits and pieces of the old schools transcript to bolster the GPA- no matter what the reason- </p>
<p>if so, you could come up with all sorts of reasons to drop classes from transcripts</p>
<p>and I can bet you if some new kid came in and suddenly took over top ranking and it was learned they dropped grades from the transrcript, there would be a stink, and no school would want that</p>
<p>If you took Bio at school ABC but transfer to XYZ< that BIO class will not be on the ABC transcript, as it is not their class</p>
<p>So how ever the new school calculates their GPA, I can’t imagine they will jsut say, oh gee, a non honors class, must drop it</p>
<p>To the OP are you hoping that the class disappears entirely from all transcripts> because the only way that can happen is if the old school agrees to it</p>
<p>and if the new school drops it, that is unethical and unfair</p>
It’s an unfair situation, but some schools are more sticklers for the rules than others. My sister-in-law still grumbles (25 years later!) that she missed being valedictorian because orchestra wasn’t weighted. (Which she took on top of a full schedule.) Now there’s a stupid rule for you.</p>