<p>My town has 3 public HS (each with about 500/class) in an unpopulated (1 rep to the House) flyover state. They have no weighting of grades whatsoever. Valedictorians are 4.0 GPA, previously with no Honors/AP requirement, but now must have taken at least 1 Honors class, out of 3 available, each semester to qualify. All the bright kids never get 4.0 because the only teacher who taught Honors English in 9th grade did not give out A's (2 out of 90 students, I heard, got an A). Significant number of students opt out of Honors Classes as the State school, which everyone attends, gives merit awards based on GPA. My son carries a 3.8 having taken every Honors class/AP class he has been able to take. I have no idea what this translates to as far as Weighted GPA goes. He'll barely make top 10% in his class in terms GPA based rank, behind many kids who never touched an 'H'. </p>
<p>So, I want to visit with the Principal, then the School Board, about considering weighting of grades, and I need some data/research to back up my points.</p>
<p>If anyone has any links to reputable information on this subject, or have had experience with this sort of a process, I sure would appreciate any help. Thanks much for any info.</p>
<p>It sounds as if your primary concern is the merit aid awarded from the state school. Many colleges will calculate GPAs using their own methods rather than rely on the high school’s weighting scheme, in which case they start with the unweighted high school grades. Do you happen to know if this is the case with your state school?</p>
<p>I don’t have any answers, but am also interested in more information. I’m in the same situation as your son, and it is preventing some of our top students from going to the schools they deserve.</p>
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<li> My son, a rising senior, is interested in top private schools and should have the standardized scores to make him competitive. I have some concern that he could fall out of top 10% in rank. The HS has a phenomenal drop out rate, having shrunk from a class of 600 that started 9th grade and now down to 450 at the end of Jr. year. Obviously most of the dropouts are coming at the bottom end of the class. Therefore, his consistent place of 30-40th in class puts him barely in the top 10% now. Even if he got straight A’s in the fall, he can’t get ahead of all these other kids who already banked their A’s in non-honors classes. Another 50 or so students lost, and he may actually fall out to that magic top 10%. I realize this is probably not a deal breaker but it could be an issue.</li>
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<p>I think the Merit award at the state school is going to be a major obstacle to change as I think a lot of people bank on that. I would be <em>highly</em> surprised if our state school, which is not one of the better known ones, does anything like recalculating the GPA. </p>
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<li> Anything we can get done won’t help my son any. But hopefully my younger daughter could potentially benefit from any changes we can make. Yet another case of her benefiting from not being the first.</li>
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<p>The HS principal has already indicated that he is ‘disinclined to acquiesce’ so I need hard data and good supported points before I go visit.ad</p>
<p>Fairfax County in VA will be changing their grading scale due to the pressure (for a better word) from parents. They felt their students were being shortchanged for merit scholarships/college admissions because of the grading system. They will also be weighting all honors courses too. It tooks them years to accomplish this goal.
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The FCPS Report shows the actual high school grades (A,B, C, or D) are the MOST important factor in college admissions. This finding is repeatedly acknowledged in the report with citations from the National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC), the College Board, and FCPS’ own college survey conducted for the report. </p>
<p>The FCPS Report shows that 55% of colleges do NOT recalculate GPAs for college admissions. </p>
<p>The FCPS Report shows that 89% of colleges compare an individual applicant against the entire applicant pool. </p>
<p>The FCPS Report undeniably confirms that the current six-point scale used by FCPS results in FCPS students having notably lower GPAs than non-FCPS students with similar SAT scores but graded on a 10-point scale, thereby putting FCPS students at a competitive disadvantage for college admissions. </p>
<p>Survey other high schools in your state that are similar to yours and show how they weight–it is usually posted in an online profile or student handbook. Look at stats kids post on CC and see what UW vs W GPAs are for the target colleges for your grads. Find out if the target colleges recalculate GPAs. Your argument is stronger if they don’t. Good luck.</p>
<p>I would not worry about weighted grades. Keep in mind, the more competitive the school, the more likely they are not to use weighted grades. </p>
<p>The thing you should be concerned about is the school profile and how the school presents themselves to the college. It is important that the school state the 4 and 6 year graduation rate, the number of students that attend 2 and 4 year colleges, the percentage of students eligible for reduced free/lunch.</p>
<p>You state you son has taken every AP honors course given. make sure the profile list the honors/Ap courses given, the criteria for taking these courses and any limitations on Honors/ap courses. Talk with your GC to find out what is considered the most rigerous courseload.</p>
<p>For example, students are not permitted to take AP until junior year and are limited to taking X # of courses per year. This will help your son more than any weighting.</p>
<p>MTnest: Thank you. That’s just the kind of info I need to gather.</p>
<p>MomPhD: I do plan to do that, but I don’t think any of the info is on line. I’ll probably have to contact them individually but fortunately there aren’t very many.</p>
<p>Sybbie: I’m a bit confused. Are you saying that the competitive schools don’t use weighted grades? That would work against my son who would have a higher GPA/class rank if they weighted his Honors/AP classes? I’m going to try and get his school profile and look it over. I didn’t know such things existed until a couple of months ago.</p>
<p>ihs76, I’ll second what sybbie said about the school profile. There are examples here on CC that you can print out and use as examples for the GC. The uphill battle might be that the very things that would help your son–listing not only the AP and honors courses, but also the number enrolled in the courses–might be things that the school isn’t eager to make public. My D1’s school makes a point of saying that grading is rigorous, and that it is quite common for students to get C’s in a course yet get 5’s on AP tests. If your GC can put in something similar about how honors students are willing to take on a far more demanding curriculum, even though it affects their GPAs and class standing, that will help. If the GC isn’t willing to put it on the profile, see if she/he can use similar strong language in the counselor’s recommendation, especially for tippy-top schools. It makes the school look good if your son gets in to stellar places, so they should be rooting for him!</p>
<p>And do check with the state school about the merit aid business. Believe me, I feel your pain here–I lost out on a sweet scholarship back in the day to a student who stayed far away from honors, let alone AP, so that the student’s 4.0 would be preserved. </p>
<p>One other tack to take with the principal: bring in a printout of the latest Newsweek ranking of top high schools in the US. The ranking is entirely dependent on the number of AP tests taken at a school and the number of graduates. Drive up the former and drive down the latter and your school moves up in pecking order. See if there are any schools nearby or in the state that are on the list, and then see if there’s any way your school could advance…which would make your principal look like a genius. Of course, you can then point out that maybe it would be a good idea to encourage students to take more AP classes, perhaps by offering a carrot like weighting those classes. Hey, can’t hurt to try!</p>
<p>“Fairfax County in VA will be changing their grading scale due to the pressure (for a better word) from parents. They felt their students were being shortchanged for merit scholarships/college admissions because of the grading system. They will also be weighting all honors courses too. It tooks them years to accomplish this goal.”</p>
<p>I was so happy when they did this! I live in Loudoun County so the same is happening for us! Finally we get weights and a normal grading system! Last year I got ONE B+…but that would’ve been an A at most other places! So for that class I get a 3.3 instead of 4.0.</p>
<p>About half of the colleges recalculate GPA, half do not. Princeton does, Brown doesn’t; U Michigan does, UNC doesn’t. And recalculation methods vary–some exclude freshman year grades, some exclude elective grades, weighting amounts differ, etc. Maybe there is a more current version of this report somewhere, but see page 45. BTW, the percent of schools that don’t report rank has likely increased since this report was written, but if you can confirm this, let us all know.</p>
<p>Yes, the majority of counties near Fairfax also followed the change that Fairfax made as they didn’t want their students to be at a disadvantaged. </p>
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<p>TJHSST will be weighting all their science, math, english, history honor courses due to the change of grading scale. Since ALL their courses are considered to be honor courses, they are trying to get the fine arts and language courses weighted too! They already give weight to the AP classes.</p>
<p>TJHSST was ranked the #1 high school two years in a row by Newsweek.</p>
<p>Sybbie might mean that more competitive HSs don’t weight. I haven’t observed this among publics in my state, except for those charter or magnet schools where all kids are taking the same honors/AP curriculum. Some of the private HSs don’t weight for the same reason–uniformity in a rigorous curriculum.</p>
<p>I was on a committee that our high school formed to change the ranking system. We had a group of about three parents, four teachers, a guidance counselor or two and the assistant Principal and a school board member or two. We ended up changing the weight for AP classes to one whole grade bump for grades C and above, half a grade for honors grades C and above and no bump for anything else. I don’t think there is a bump for dual credit classes either, but I’m not sure. I think the committee was a good idea because it brought a bunch of stakeholders together and we did end up with a consensus and it was easily passed by the school board.</p>
<p>Since ranking is a joke at your school, why not try to convince the principal/school board to NOT RANK students and to give a more informative school profile to colleges? As long as they are not weighting grades, if they don’t rank either, then the colleges have to look more closely at actual courses taken vs what is available. Even top schools that don’t recalulate GPA’s are going to be looking for kids with the most rigorous coursework available. As for valedictorian, some schools have a commencement speaker determined by student vote rather than valedictorian determined by rank.</p>
<p>I have a suggestion that may help your son with merit aid. My son was able to qualify for a scholarship that was awarded based on SAT and GPA by having the high school submit what his gpa would be IF it were weighted. This particular university did not make adjustments for unweighted gpas but they accepted the high school’s adjustment which was clearly computed (plus 1 point for each AP class) and signed by the principal of the school.</p>
<p>Wow, your high school was very accommodating to recalculate the GPA for your son. I’m pretty sure our high school would have told us no as it would have opened them up to having to recalculate for anyone who asked (and most of them would ask!).</p>
<p>Thanks for all the advice/info. I think if I can get the principal on board, or at least have him not be obstructionist, then we could go the committee route for the school board as it would have to be done at the Board level. Hence, the request for info that I can present to him to start with, and bring him along. Maybe if I can find some way to couch it that it would end up being advantageous to the school/district? May this would increase the number of his students who are scholarship winners based on GPA? </p>
<p>Kathiep: Would love to hear about what kind of data or info your committee used to arrive at it’s decision.</p>
<p>One thing they might be receptive to is the opportunity for more kids to get merit scholarships, and not just at your state school. There are other schools (Indiana and Alabama come to mind) that give automatic scholarships to students with certain scores and GPAs, and they take the highest one shown on the transcript. So the kids from high schools that weight will generally have higher GPAs than those from schools that don’t. So in a way your school is disadvantaging its students. My D’s high school weights half a point for honors and AP. I’ve seen a lot of other schools that weight a full point for AP. Assuming that any changes won’t be implemented in time to benefit your son, he might want to ask his guidance counselor to include in the counselor recommendation that while he’s in the top __%, he took the most rigorous curriculum and if there was weighting his rank would be considerably higher. I’ve got to think guidance counselors want their students to do well and so would be willing to include that.</p>
<p>FWIW, our competitive public high school neither weights grades nor ranks students. There are no valedictorians, the class president speaks at graduation. Each year over 50% of each graduating class goes to Ivy or Ivy-like (think Stanford, Duke, Chicago, Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore) schools and is well represented at all the top OOS publics. I can definitely see and understand the concern about students not being competitive for GPA-based scholarships when reviewed against students with weighted grades, but even weighting systems aren’t all created equally, so some disparity may still exist. The one circumstance for which our HS will “adjust” and recalculate grades is when one of our alternative school students (more of a lab school, not “alternative” in the most commonly used sense of the term - attendance is by application and lottery, not mandated) wants to apply to the California state schools or becomes a National Merit Semi-finalist and needs a GPA. A-School students receive evaluative transcripts, no grades or formal GPA. The guidance office will “recalculate” those transcripts in concert with the teachers to provide a GPA in a necessary circumstance.
I agree that the high school’s profile (often found on the Guidance Department websites) will tell the colleges a more complete story about the rigor of the curriculum and the relative “value” of the GPA.</p>