GPA & rank punishment for taking HS classes early

Parents Forum
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<p>Long time reader, first time poster who needs your advice.</p>

<p>My child, "Z", has a high GPA at a huge high school. Getting one B or taking one non-AP/non-Honors class over entire high school career is a GPA/rank killer.</p>

<p>Z took some required classes before high school started. They were completed the summer before freshman year and during freshman year.</p>

<p>Three years later, Z tells me that everyone takes different classes now. (Many students postpone taking these classes until senior year/after college apps to keep their higher GPAs.) One less class is required now.</p>

<p>The problem: Z’s weighted GPA and class rank are lowered because other students will only have the new, lesser amount of credit applied to lower their GPA. (These classes are all required, low-level non-honors classes.)</p>

<p>This district and school have very specific graduation requirements for each separate class, based on year entering high school. Unfortunately, this group of classes falls into a situation where one of two options are required for the district, but the school then only allowed “Option #1.” Now everyone takes “Option #2” (with less credit).</p>

<p>The high school said they couldn't do anything and to contact the district. I am currently going through district hoops.</p>

<p>The latest response is that the GPA and rank difference would be “not significant” since it doesn't affect the valedictorian or salutatorian positions. I was pretty shocked at that response, especially since it included an example of Z’s rank rising by 20 spots, and that was also “negligible” since Z is already in the top 5% and top 10% and that wouldn't change. They stated that colleges rely on those numbers, not rank or GPA.</p>

<p>It seems a no-brainer to offer to change one class to “Pass/Fail” or something similar to make the class requirements equal, but so far, “not possible.”</p>

<p>Are we justified in being upset? What would you do?</p>

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<p>For most colleges he’ll be evaluated against the kids in his own school so I would get a copy of the school profile and make sure that it contains enough information to give admissions counselors a picture of how he fits into his own school. Lots of schools don’t rank, and a fair amount don’t weight the GPA (ours). Kids manage to end up where they should be. if he’s in the top 5% of 10% it’s not going to matter significantly it sounds like.</p>

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<p>This type of thing is really annoying! I understand your frustration.</p>

<p>You might possibly get somewhere with the district.</p>

<p>Is Z’s guidance counselor helpful to Z? If so, perhaps the guidance counselor could include in his/her letter a statement explaining this, and indicating that Z’s rank would rise by 20 spots (or so), if an A in a course that is no longer required, and that is not being taken by other students in Z’s cohort were dropped from the transcript. At universities where the difference between being in the top 5% vs. top 2 or 3 students matters, that ought to indicate that rank is not especially meaningful at that particular high school.</p>

<p>It seems to me that the fundamental source of this difficulty is grade inflation. When you say that getting one B or taking one non-AP/non-honors course over the entire high school career is a rank killer, it makes me long for the grading standards at my spouse’s old high school. I believe that an average somewhere in the range of 3.80-3.85 was enough to be in the top 5 students out of 300+.</p>

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<p>This is a frequent concern voiced on CC. Posters look at their schools’ policies on class rank and realize that their students’ ranks are affected adversely because someone else took fewer classes, or someone else had teachers who graded easier, or someone else took community college classes to receive higher weighted grades. The list goes on and on. I’m sure your student is not the only one with concerns. Your child’s school is relunctant to address your concerns because in doing so the need would arise to address everyone’s concerns. There is an established GPA calculation policy and that is how it should be.</p>

<p>My advice is to be happy that your child is in the top 5% with all A’s in a huge school. That is significant for college applications and after the application process is over, no one is going to notice or care if the student was ranked 19th of 1000 or 39th of 1000. As momofthreeboys noted, students end up ranked where they should be ranked.</p>

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<p>Being in the top 5% is great, but in a situation like this I would do what QuantMech says, ask if the GC can include the information that your kid’s rank was affected by taking an extra course. </p>

<p>This sort of stuff happens all the time. My sil is still miffed that she missed being valedictorian by taking orchestra in addition to the full schedule, while the actual valedictorian had the same courses and grades minus orchestra, but because orchestra wasn’t weighted her GPA went down. If they just hadn’t counted orchestra she’d have been better off. She got into Harvard anyway. :)</p>

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<p>You’d think by now that schools would have figured out that it doesn’t make sense to identify one student as the valedictorian if another has the same grades in the same courses + A’s in courses that the putative valedictorian didn’t take. It can’t be that hard to find a better ranking algorithm, or to name co-valedictorians. When the system is being gamed, everybody loses, in my opinion.</p>

<p>I hope your sister-in-law gets over this slight in time, mathmom–there’s nothing like a 95-year-old who is still disgruntled about high school class rank.</p>

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<p>@mathmom - My MIL is still upset about my BIL missing Val for the exact same reason. He is now 56 year old. Resentment dies hard for some people.</p>

<p>I agree with QuantMech that this is simply a case of grade inflation run rampant. More than twenty students have UW 4.0 and taken virtually nothing but weighted Honors and AP classes. This might be the better issue to address with school administration.</p>

<p>My advice is to think of the serenity prayer - this is something that you have tried to change, but apparently you cannot.</p>

<p>Take solace in the fact that your child has an UW 4.0 and will hopefully be recognized by GC as having taken the most rigorous curriculum. In a large district, the impact of being Val vs. being top 5% is minimal - adcoms realize that these things swing based on uncontrollable, even “unfair”, factors.</p>

<p>x-posted with QuantMech</p>

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<p>@QuantMech - naming multiple Valedictorians is not a good solution. In a disctrict near us, everyone who has a weighted GPA greater than 4.0 is named “Valedictorian”. A couple year ago, almost 20% of the class earned this “distinction”. Adcoms realize that, at least for that district, Val means nothing.</p>

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<p>I just had a fund-raising idea for cash-strapped school districts: Go back and add valedictorians to the original list, then ask for donations. Evidently the high school class of 1975 would not be too far back. :)</p>

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<p>Unless you are applying for a scholarship that requires being in the top 1 or 2 of your class in really won’t matter. However there are cases where people don’t agree with the way a school figures out rankings. For example in my sons high school they used the non-weighted GPA for ranking. And it’s not on the 4.0 scale they use the grade percent out of 100%(for example 98%…) So there have been times where the top kid didn’t take the harder AP classes and beat out other kids who had AP classes but a slightly lower non-weighted GPA. The rankings would have been different if they had used the weighted GPA.</p>

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<p>@QuantMech - You might be on to something - the scary thing is that my MIL would likely write a big check if the school district did so. In fact, she has probably tried doing something similar over the years, as if bribery would resolve perceived injustice.</p>

<p>Maybe I could just charge her a dollar every time she tells the story of his being “robbed” of Val - the school would have more money than they could spend.</p>

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<p>Waaaay back at the dawn of time, my high school ranked the top two and then the remaining eight of the top ten seniors each spring, and the local (and only) newspaper published their names and photos in a big, splashy front page article that every single person in town read and pondered and gossiped about. When I graduated, one of the top two was the clear “class genius” who had skipped two grades and was headed to Harvard. The other was a slacker who hadn’t taken a single honors class–but the school didn’t weight grades for honors (we didn’t even have AP’s at my school). I got over this immediately, but thirty years later my parents, who were convinced I deserved that top spot instead of languishing among the eight, would still mention the boy’s name with contempt. While the wonky ranking system at OP’s son’s school may or may not mean that he gets into his second choice school instead of his first, I can assure you that in the great scheme of life, this sort of thing matters only if you let it make you crazy. Let it go.</p>

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<p>

If it were me personally, I doubt that I’d care. HSs with this many 4.0 students usually do not submit detailed class rank info. So this type of slight difference is unlikely to have a significant impact on college admissions or any other noteworthy measure. Taking HS classes early offers other benefits outside of GPA and class rank that may have more noteworthy impact on college admissions, such as the opportunity to pursue classes at a higher level after completing the standard HS track early.</p>

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<p>I agree with a previous poster that the only reason to care is if a scholarship at a school where your child wants to go, is offered to the top 2 students in the class.</p>

<p>The guidance counselor can write a note explaining the situation and include it with the transcripts sent to colleges, or even you could write it and it could be included in the package. If you wanted to do that.</p>

<p>I never knew my kids’ GPA’s at all. Luckily, our local school, though not the best quality and quite small, is pretty low stress when it comes to these things. The school did have a lot of the problems described above, with band and orchestra kids losing out etc. Noone cared that much about it.</p>

<p>I think the best thing for a student to do is go through high school satsifying requirements, taking classes that he or she is interested in, and exploring interests in extracurriculars, or volunteer work. I don’t think small differences in grades or tests or other stats really make any difference.</p>

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<p>No.</p>

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<p>Let it die.</p>

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<p>It is what it is. </p>

<p>Frankly there is no ranking system that is totally fair to all. Example - DS had 2 B’s and was about #20 (just out of top 5%) due to his many unweighted music classes plus the business class he was forced into freshman year due to overbooked study halls. His buddy with 3 B’s was the salutatorian - he had an extra weighted science class (that part was fair)… but no music and more study halls. The trade-offs probably say that by logic they should be about equally ranked. But there really is no fair system that would get to that conclusion without giving them both benefit of weighting for their tough IB courses.</p>

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<p>It rankles my 50 yo sil when she thinks about it, but I don’t think she thinks about it much. The subject probably came up either in a discussion about my older son, who had some scheduling issues that kept him out of AP and honors classes he wanted to take and that might have cost him a place or two in line. He still had an excellent rank. Younger son actually ended up with a much better rank than I expected, helped by the fact that while only “academic” classes were counted, for some reason all his 99’s and 100’s in orchestra counted as academic classes. He took two orchestra classes every term so that helped quite a bit. Our school system ranks AP and honors the same, and neither are very heavily weighted.</p>

<p>I’ve been around CC long enough to know that there are many, many different ranking systems and none of them are perfect.</p>

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<p>This situation is so common that adcoms must be able to recognize and ignore it. I once read a transcript of a school board meeting where the grades of middle schoolers who were taking high school classes were discussed- one board member laughed about it and asked why he should really care if some parent was worried that her kid wouldn’t be Val in 5 years. I was astonished at the time, but now realize that class rank is not that big a deal if you are in the top 5 or 10%.</p>

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<p>To be honest, I think you’re getting really worked up over almost nothing.</p>

<p>Nobody is being “punished” for anything, and nothing has happened to Z that is of any consequence. The GPA and class rank he has will leave him no less qualified for college admissions than the GPA and class rank he would have had otherwise.</p>

<p>Want to borrow my College Confidential user name? I think you might need it more than I do.</p>

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<p>Don’t get too upset. Here’s what happened in my district a few years ago. A student transferred in as a Sophomore with a GPA from a school that was quite a bit higher than anyone in our district could ever get, even with the most weighted schedule, earning all As.</p>

<p>She promptly became #1 and wound up val. The stupid administration didn’t even recalculate her grades to fit where she should have been in the mix.</p>

<p>Where my son went to hs they had a policy that only someone who had been in the school for 4 years could be val/sal. Not perfect, but at least nothing like what I described can happen.</p>