<p>I was just told last night that my kids should have been taking Band pass/fail. arrgghh!
In fact, this person, a teacher at the HS, said any elective with a standard weighting should be pass/fail - this is so infuriating! Both of my kids will likely be music minors , have no problems getting the A in Band/Jazz, but it does hurt their overall
unweighted GPA. Seems like an audition group should be Honors to me~</p>
<p>I really despise this gaming of class rank, weighted GPA system. And I hope and pray
that colleges will look at my kids rigorous schedules and see they did not let this influence their decision in scheduling.</p>
<p>^ldavis: if a college redoes GPA, they often eliminate electives like art, music, etc anyway…it will affect rank but not necessarily the GPA calculation for admissions</p>
<p>that’s encouraging, I have never heard of them eliminating electives?! Seems odd tho for a possible Music minor. Hey - whatever works. </p>
<p>I would hope that any reasonable admissions person would look at a packed schedule ( both have waived lunch) 8 solid periods, and realize these kids are no slackers.</p>
<p>On the one hand, I want to agree with the advice most people have given here – a kid should do what he likes, take the courses that interest him, etc. I give that advice all the time. It’s the way I managed my own education (I took Music Theory instead of Physics my senior year in high school), and largely the way my kids managed theirs. I believe you shouldn’t make decisions based on college admissions. You should make decisions based on what will most engage, excite, and educate your child, and 9 times out of 10 that will be the best admissions strategy, too.</p>
<p>There’s another hand, though.</p>
<p>When my daughter switched schools in 11th grade, we advised/permitted her to take the equivalent of the OP’s second course option, and it hurt her in several ways. The lower-weighted classes were nowhere near the same level of rigor as the higher-weighted classes, and were really just a waste of her time. The next year, the GC refused to say that she had taken the most rigorous curriculum available, because she hadn’t taken AP Calculus (having taken honors Calculus instead), and I believe that hurt her. And her class rank at the new school was negatively affected by her less-weighted grades. (What did I know? Her previous school didn’t have ranks.) </p>
<p>Everything worked out fine in the end, but she was rejected by a couple of colleges that should have accepted her, and I have to believe that the less rigorous schedule and 10-15 class rank positions were a meaningful headwind.</p>
<p>The really important lesson, though, was that there was some substance in the school’s weighting scheme. At my kids’ school, there were a handful of un-weighted courses that were great, but all the kids knew what they were, and top students vied to take them as a badge of honor. Most of the unweighted courses were unweighted for a reason, and the quality of work that went on there was not good. So it’s nice that your school offers Arabic, but make certain it’s a real Arabic course, not a class where you memorize a few phrases and that’s it. (And, with Arabic, it’s absolutely NOT a real Arabic course unless the school is offering at least a 3-year progression, and better 4 years.)</p>
<p>D2 also transferred her junior year, and we had to work very hard with the administration to convert her old transcript to the new school’s grading scheme. D2 didn’t get all the honors credits she should have received, but the GC was still able to check off that D2 was top 1% and took most rigorous courses. D2 did take few art and English courses which were not honors, her art course were fun/interesting, but her non honors English were boring.</p>
<p>This is an interesting thread - my daughter’s school has a weighting scheme which goes up to 7.50. It’s insane. The only classes where an A is 4.0, B is 3.0, etc. are the lowest level classes (Level 3). All other levels 2 - regular college classes, 1 - Honors, and AP, are weighted. They say that it’s only used for class rank, but I was wondering how colleges would view our particular weird system.</p>
<p>Not sure what you mean here – the same GPA recalculation scheme is used at all of the California public universities from the most selective to the least selective. So this presumably includes the “average” college bound students in California.</p>
<p>Also, Penn State University Park and Indiana University Bloomington are selective enough that the “average” college bound students may not get in.</p>
<p>As a parent of an 11th grader who has “challenged” himself to the limit, I think my son ignoring “protect the GPA” is going to have negative repercussions for us financially.</p>
<p>His school does not rank.</p>
<p>His school does not have grade inflation.</p>
<p>He is finding Universities where his unweighted GPA will not make the cut for scholarships or honors colleges. </p>
<p>He also preferred small schools and our financial situation was different 2 years ago. He went into high school fully willing to take GPA hits in exchange for learning the classes that interested him.</p>
<p>Count me as another who never heard of Arabic in high school. That is so cool!</p>
<p>My daughter is a graduating senior and has taken 4 years of Arabic at our local public high school here in NH. Definitely not a course for the feint of heart as many students in Arabic 1 struggle due to the challenge of writing and reading a different alphabet, not to mention the very different sounds. It’s not unlike the challenges of Mandarin. I’m not sure that it was a hook for her, but it may have been a factor in enabling her to get a “global studies” scholarship at her college that will pay for a semester abroad (in addiion to a good merit package).</p>
<p>Arabic was definitely a hook in a friend’s case - she could speak it well enough (never figured out how, the only Arabic thing in our fly-over state is baklava at Costco, I looked for lessons for DD1 and nothing there) and also French, did Model UN and had no problem getting into a top 20 west coast school with awesome funding for international relations…</p>