<p>hudsonvalley the way our school weights the 92 in Regents Living Env vs 88 in AP Bio results in a 0.2 difference. Students in our school understand you won’t be accepted at top universities without taking 5-10 APs. I never got the sense that people were trying to game the system and most of the top students have taken arts and musics despite the fact that they are weighted less than honors or APs. On the rare occasion a kid makes it into the top 25 students without AP courses, they never end up at top ranked colleges.</p>
<p>I don’t think not weighting hurts the very top students.
Colleges seems to recalculate GPA anyway.</p>
<p>Students at my younger daughters top public school took APs & honors courses & every year & many if not most of the graduates go on to college, including the most competitive for admission.</p>
<p>While students who hadn’t taken any AP courses may be ranked in the top percentile right along with them, the transcripts, the counselor recommendations etc., will fill out the background, so it isn’t difficult to see that one student took a lighter academic load & one was most challenging.</p>
<p>IMO, the not weighting, does hurt * some* students-
namely those who were like my daughter. Not everyone has a very strong middle school background. Some like my daughter were coming from a block behind, she not only had significant learning differences, that were not adequately addressed in middle school, but her middle school classes wouldn’t have prepared her to the same level as the students in the magnet program even without the Ld’s.</p>
<p>She did work very hard & eventually took 4 AP courses ( & at least two equally strong honors courses) in which she did really well, IMO. But because the grades were not weighted- she didn’t qualify to apply for many scholarships- which I think hurt her self confidence.</p>
<p>Now, I think that students who work very hard in their classes, even if they are not college prep courses, deserve to be recognized- however, they should also admit that not ranking may discourage other students from taking the most challenging classes.</p>
<p>( she also did not take PE- our state only pays for students to take 5 courses ea semester & if she had had PE, she wouldn’t have been able to take the courses she needed for college- the school does however waive PE, for those who participate in a school sport with daily practice & she played sports all through high school, sometimes even being on a rec league team at the same time)</p>
<p>Our school includes every class in the GPA, including PE, health, practical arts, and the state-required personal finance. It weights Honors, TAG, AP and IB all the same–one point higher than regular grades (5.0 for A, etc.)</p>
<p>A group of TAG/AP/IB parents tried to get this changed since for three straight years the Valedictorian will be a student who has taken only Honors, no TAG, AP or IB. The school board would not consider it because the other two high schools in the district have limited AP selections and no IB.n (Stupid reason, I know, but it’s a political decsion.)</p>
<p>Freshmen can only take four honors classes; sophomores can take as many as they like, but only four count toward the weighted grade; juniors and seniors can take as many as they like, but only five count toward the weighted grade. Languages are considered honors at Levels III and IV (or IB). </p>
<p>So, for three years, our son has taken six IB/AP/TAG classes in addition to two non-weighted classes but only four were weighted his sophomore year and five last year and this year. (We are on a block schedule. Four class periods and one FLEX/seminar session per day.)</p>
<p>Because he got an A- in keyboarding his freshman year, he will be 3rd in a class of 438. Two girls with all A’s will share Valedictorian unless something bizarre happens in the next two months. One of them has taken no AP or IB classes.</p>
<p>OWM, Is TAG a gifted students program?</p>
<p>mathmom – I think there are cultural differences between schools. The kids at the rural Hudson Valley high schools I am familiar with all seem to be more focused on class rank than on rigor of courseload. At least the majority of them. This was not the case at the suburban New Jersey public I attended, or the big Upstate NY suburban high school I graduated from. GPA and class rank are also a big focus of many of the parents I meet. Our kids generally do not fare well on standardized tests in comparison to the children of friends who live in Westchester County and other NYC area schools. Not surprisingly, most students who go to college tend to go CC or SUNY schools; it’s not uncommon for the vals and sals to head off to Clarkson, Siena or RPI.</p>
<p>This was the year my daughter was a freshman.
[Among</a> Garfield’s freshman class, 129 currently have perfect 4.0s.](<a href=“http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002336475_garfield15m.html]Among”>http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002336475_garfield15m.html)</p>
<p>^hudsonvalley, I’m sure there are cultural differences. Within Westchester too. Just interested that a very similar weighting system doesn’t seem to have had the same effect in our school. It may also help that no one has any idea what their class rank is until they announce it early senior year. It was like pulling teeth to find out if my younger son might be in the top 10% of the class when we were trying to put together a college list. I really though he might be only in top 25%. What a surprise to find out he missed the top 5% by one kid.</p>
<p>At our school only APs are grade weighted and some dual enrollment. For ex. modern language is not grade weighted even at the college level and honors classes are not grade weighted either. All classes are included in GPA. We also have 8 classes a semester, 4 classes every other day. As a result to be Val or Sal you need to take tons of APs, like 7 or 8 your senior year, 5 junior and 2 or 3 sophmore year. Students have to double up on Sci early Chem and Bio to start the AP Sci track. They need to take Algebra and Geo in middle school so they can be ready for AP Calc and AP Stats by Junior year. Really it is the middle school prep. that will determine if you are a Val or Sal and a ton of work all four years. We use a weighted system so you would lose out with less classes. Eight AP classes is a tough load with EC’s.</p>
<p>OWM - You exactly describe the problem in my D’s high school. There’s no IB/TAG but Honors and AP are both given the same extra weight, and there is a world of difference between the Honors and AP classes. It is very irksome to the AP crowd when students who are enrolled in honors take top spots in class ranking. Rumor is that this is going to change in coming years (.5 bump for honors) but that doesn’t help D and her friends. In the end, though, I agree that admissions offices are really good at “reading” all of the systems and comparing them fairly (sometimes recalculating GPA through their own formula).</p>
<p>Palos Verdes Peninsula HS in California puts a comprehensive description of their last year’s Senior class online. The posted info includes each student’s weighted and unweighted GPA, SAT and SATII test scores, number of honors/AP/college classes taken, extracurriculars, a list of all the colleges where each kid applied, whether they were admitted/waitlisted/denied, and where they matriculated.</p>
<p>PVPHS’s grading policy is very interesting. Valedictorian status – which they define as having a perfect 4.0 UW-GPA – is shared by 21 kids. The top-ranked kids have a W-GPA of 4.98! Ten percent of their kids have W-GPAs above 4.73, and a full 50% have W-GPAs above 4.0.</p>
<p>My husband and I have been playing around with the PVPHS data, and put together a [FAQ[/url</a>] with pointers to the original data, some Google Docs spreadsheets we have built, and inferences from the data . We have also started a [url=<a href=“PVPHS Stories - Google Docs”>PVPHS Stories - Google Docs]Stories</a> Wiki](<a href=“PVPHS acceptance FAQ - Google Docs”>PVPHS acceptance FAQ - Google Docs) where we encourage visitors to share their thoughts about the PVPHS data.</p>
<p>Our school gives 4 points for regular classes, 5 points for honors classes, and 6 points for AP or college classes. All classes are counted, including art, music and gym which are only offered at regular level. The AP premium is certainly justified, because many of the teachers are overly picky, allowing only 1-3 As in classes of 28-30 students; I suspect that without the “risk premium” the AP classes might not get filled!</p>
<p>There are a couple of interesting regular-level classes available at the school, like sociology, which my son didn’t/wouldn’t consider because it would impact his GPA. Of course, the fact that it was regular level also means it would have been taught at a snail’s pace.</p>
<p>Our school also does the 4 points regular/5 points Honors/6 points AP system.
All grades (including gym/art/orchestra/theater) count toward gpa. Dual enrollment classes at the CC count as Honors for weighting purposes. Class rank is based on weighted gpa’s. Foreign Language gets Honors weight at level 3. My kids took some of all (Reg/Honors/AP).</p>
<p>kathiep: Yes, TAG is Talented and Gifted. At our high school, there are only two TAG classes: Science Exploration and Literature/Humanities. You can take them sophomore, junior and senior years and repeat them because the curriculum changes each year. They were added to the curriculum four years ago after a science teacher and lanuguage arts teacher received their Gifted certification.</p>
<p>Our science-math-geek son has taken the Literature/Humanities class three times, never taken the Science TAG class due to scheduling conflicts with AP/IB. He had the TAG Literature teacher for freshman Honors LA and loves him. Our older son took the class as a senior, so I am a four-year TAG Literature mom.</p>
<p>Each year is a different theme and combines movies, poetry, short stories and novels. Plus summer reading, movie watching and journaling.The themes the last four years have been poverty, humor, love and (this year) the importance of being smart. First quarter is a community project on the theme, second quarter is a comparative literature study, third is a novel and fourth is a 30-minute group movie project, including storyboards, scripts, trailers, posters, and the actual movie production. The movies are shown at the TAGademy awards dinner and premier.</p>
<p>It’s a great class. And the teacher wrote our son the most amazing letter of recommendation for his uber-reach school, relating the creative process to the scientific research that our son hopes to do. </p>
<p>Probably TMI, but I love this TAG class.</p>