<p>Our school lists cumulative GPA and class rank on each semester report card. It’s definitely very helpful, especially here in Texas where class rank correlates to guaranteed admission at state schools. I agree that it would be very frustrating not to have that information, and I can’t think of any reason why schools would want to keep that info a secret? They obviously have their reasons, but I’m really curious about what they are!</p>
<p>I agree with the idea that until a course is completed and a final grade has been submitted it should not be included in any GPA calculation - which is why many schools only recalculate GPA at the end of the school year once all the grades from that year are final.</p>
<p>In our school district, we use:
[TEAMS</a> for Student Management](<a href=“http://www.ptsteams.com/student_management.php]TEAMS”>http://www.ptsteams.com/student_management.php)</p>
<p>I have access to my D’s report card, absence and every grade/ score for every test she took at anytime I want.</p>
<p>Our school district gives out GPA and rank in senior year, with the first 6 weeks report card.</p>
<p>We know how to calculate the GPA. Rank on the other hand is unknown.</p>
<p>
Of course we all want the kids to step up to the responsibility themselves. The fact of life is many of them will and many of them won’t.</p>
<p>If they do, parents don’t have to do anything.
If they don’t, and parents do not have early access to their grade, it will be hard for them to provide guidance.</p>
<p>It looks to me like the school is not stepping up to their responsibility to provide parents with the tools to help the students.</p>
<p>Our school is on a semester system; everything reboots at the end of the semester. So we get updated GPAboth weighted and unweightedon the semester report cards since those are the grades that are used in calculating cumulative GPA. Our school just did away with class rank.</p>
<p>In my DD’s school the GPA was only included on the final report card of the year and that was in error. As I said, they fought me about including it at the end of sophomore year. Normally they don’t tell you your GPA until end of junior year. Makes it a little difficult to start looking for schools when you don’t have that information. </p>
<p>Also, they do have an online portal which is absolutely useless. The send home progress reports each marking period but the grades on the portal are never a good indicator of what comes home on the report card. Last marking period DD’s APUSI grade was a 74. When she brought home the report card it was an 86. No way she was doing that poorly and brought it up that far in 4 weeks.</p>
<p>My daughter’s HS had a parent portal where you could see the kid’s grades on every test and the class average at the current time. The problem with this was as the last poster stated - what looked like a particular grade two days before report cards might change significantly because the teacher had not yet entered a class participation grade or a grade for a marking period project which could weigh heavily in the report card grade calculation.</p>
<p>Of course the system can only be as good as the users.
If your child’s teacher does not enter a particular grade, you can’t see it.</p>
<p>My D can tell me exactly if the online system has all the grades that she has taken though. The few grades that may be missing are from recent tests. Over a grading period, she may have 20 different grades, 2 or 3 missing scores will not affect her final score of that grading period much.
Further more, you can not do anything about changing those grades that come at the end of the term anyhow. You use them for the next term.</p>
<p>What you can benefit is the knowledge of the grades that the student received early on. The student has to work on improving them over time, it’s not something you can change over night.</p>
<p>
Well that’s a bit of an exagerration. All you need to do is find out what the weighting system is, and whether there are any courses that are excluded from the calculations (at our school gym and health, but not art or music) and you can pretty easily calculate the GPA on your own. </p>
<p>The hardest thing for me was trying to figure out how our system (1-100, but 1-ca. 106 with weighting) would get translated by colleges into the 4.0 system. That’s why I mostly used Naviance. I actually didn’t bother to look at average GPAs for college acceptances except when I had to stick something in. (Like the college board thing that suggests colleges based on SAT scores and grades.)</p>
<p>OP:</p>
<p>your district policy is ridiculous, IMO. Our HS transcript covers the period (semesters), cumulative, and also has a GPA calc for UC/Cal State (weighted academic courses), so parents know exactly how their children are tracking against the minimum GPA required the instate public colleges.</p>
<p>We also have Zangle and the GPA (cum and term) is updated each term along with class rank. Each term is considered a separate grade so there is no “final grade” at the end of the year. If you got a 99 in English A and a 92 in English B, you get one A at .5 credits and one A- at .5 credits. It doesn’t get averaged to the 95.5- A like (99+92)/2. It would be a (3.7 + 4.0)/2. </p>
<p>Because of that, each term GPA is relevant.</p>
<p>Fire123, I completely disagree. It’s a college preparatory school, which means preparing the kids to succeed in college, not just get in. That means taking responsibility for their own grades and schedule.</p>
<p>We do have quarter grades, Fall Conferences and good communication with the teachers. Parents are notified if something is going wrong. The students receive printed progress reports from time to time at the teacher’s discretion. And yes, kids who have issues are able to work with a learning specialist. If necessary, that might mean checking in with parents more formally and more frequently.</p>
<p>My kids’ high school includes weighted GPA on the final report card each year. They do not calculate or show unweighted GPA. I didn’t think it was a big deal one way or the other. The school’s weighting methodology is clear and if the GPA wasn’t shown on the final report card, or if I wanted to know what it was after first semester, I could easily calculate it myself.</p>
<p>"Well that’s a bit of an exagerration. All you need to do is find out what the weighting system is, and whether there are any courses that are excluded from the calculations (at our school gym and health, but not art or music) and you can pretty easily calculate the GPA on your own. </p>
<p>The hardest thing for me was trying to figure out how our system (1-100, but 1-ca. 106 with weighting) would get translated by colleges into the 4.0 system. That’s why I mostly used Naviance. I actually didn’t bother to look at average GPAs for college acceptances except when I had to stick something in. (Like the college board thing that suggests colleges based on SAT scores and grades.)" </p>
<p>Mathmom, the reason I said that was because not only do you have to calculate each class (honors and AP’s multiplied by 1.1), but you then have to try to figure out what the grade is because they not only compute the class grade, but then there is some long formula for figuring out how much each quarterly exam is worth and figuring that into their grade. I’ve sat down and tried to calculate her GPA and it comes in the neighborhood of what the school gives me, but not exactly the same. We then have to translate that into a 4.0 scale since we do number grades, i.e. 92, 93. It’s almost like the school makes it so you couldn’t possibly figure it out on your own, yet they don’t want to share it with you either. And they don’t use Naviance. I believe DD’s GPA at the end of last year was something like 93.438 weighted (or something like that – lololol).</p>
<p>It is not always best to convert the 100 scale to 4.0 scale. Commonapp allows you to define a scale.</p>