After much complaining over the years from parents- Our high school is changing over to a 10 point scale. Currently a 90-92 would fall under a B and it’s changing to a 10 point scale of a 90-100 is now an A. Problem is they are not going to recalculate past grades so if your kid had a 92 in the past it’s still a B on their transcripts. Parents of 2023 kids are obviously upset as it’s a huge disadvantage.
My question- do all colleges recalculate or should the parents be pushing to a over all recalculation?
No. How a college recalculates, or if they do, varies by college. And few are transparent.
How? They are not anymore disadvantaged than if they were in C22. Any student ranking, if the school ranks, will still be apples to apples.
Probably won’t get anywhere. What should be done, and hopefully the school already plans this, is to include a blurb on the school profile about the grading change.
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Thank you. I think parents are concerned because their child’s GPA is lower then let’s say a nearby high school who has a 10 point grading scale. If a child has all 90% it’s a 3.0 at our school and a 4.0 at another school- hence disadvantaged and why I asked if colleges all recalculate so it wouldn’t matter.
Which was the case last year, the year before, ad infinitum. How a student compares to their peers from their HS is more meaningful than how they are compared to those in the next district. Presumably, students who have graduated from this HS got into some decent colleges. Admissions is able to figure out these nuances
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Thank you. And yes this is what I was wondering. Do colleges take into consideration that the reason they have a lower gpa is due to their schools grading scale. Yes obviously kids have gotten into colleges with it this way.
And another question. What would be good reasonings to not just recalculate the whole school. A teacher there said it’s because they would have to grade harder?! Which doesn’t make sense to me as if a kid earns a 92% they earned a 92%. You just gave them a B instead of an A but I don’t see how that changes your teaching.
Hopefully the school counselor letter includes an explanation about this change.
Evaluation integrity. If a student under the old scale earned a B with a 92, then changing that 92 to an A is unfair to those students who legitimately earned an A under the old rubric. Plus that would just scream grade inflation.
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That’s a excellent point to check on
Our high school is exploring a new grading system right now (grading for equity or something similar) and in these classes the grading scale is different than the rest of the school. I guess testing this out before whole school adoption is beneficial, but it creates all sorts of comparison problems. My son was in one of the experimental classes this past year. We just file it under the “it is what it is” category.
The 90% and above being an A, etc. system seems too broad to me. I wonder why schools don’t just leave the raw percentage as it is. It’s a lot more descriptive and I’ve seen kids on this site denote their GPA as such. I’m no expert in grading policies, however, and assume there must be a reason behind the broad stroke grading.
Some (perhaps many?) schools include raw percentages along with letter grades on students’ transcripts.
Is the intent to inflate grades, or to allow a greater range of percentage grades within each letter grade? The latter means that teachers could include a greater percentage of more difficult items on tests, so that an A grade can mean something other than “almost perfect on easy questions”?
However, even a 10 point scale for high school grading still means that an A grade is close to meaning “almost perfect on easy questions” with a limited amount of space for the teacher to use more difficult items.
When my DS’s school changed grading scales, they only did it to the incoming class. Everyone that started with the old, finished with the old. The school added weighted grades so it is a little different.
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The state of North Carolina used to be on a 7 point scale and we changed over to a 10 point scale in 2015 if I recall correctly. It was no problem.
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The teacher may have a point: teachers here often curve tests/quizzes, and overall grades are predominantly test/quiz averages. Especially in harder AP classes here, the raw score average will be a 70-75 but that will be curved to an average of a mid-to high B(ie the tests are made to be hard on purpose to really separate out the students, and the curve is there so half the class doesn’t receive a low C and below on the tests). We had a similar scale change before my kids got to HS and the teachers known to curve most tests to mid-high B (which used to be 89-90ish, the B/B+ border) just curved them to a 87-88 under the new scale, still the B/B+ border. If the English teachers used to have the midpoint of the class to be between A- and A , which used to be 93-94 vs above 95, then it shifted to be 90-92 vs above 93, to keep the “relative” to peers ratios similar. When the HS did the shift to the 10 point scale, there were no retroactive changes because, as has been pointed out, that wouldn’t be fair to those who earned the A in the old scale. The profile explained the scale change, Colleges figured it out, and it didn’t seem to matter.
Colleges will look at letter grades. Our main public universities recalculate grade point average by adding 0,5 grade to an honors class and 1.0 for AP class. My son’s school considered all their classes as Honors and didn’t specifically put that on the transcript thinking that the school profile would cover it.
After talkiing to the university it was found that with the huge number of applications that it recieves it was very possible (most likely) that an application would be kicked for the lower grade point because the computer wouldn’t recalculate the grades because the honors designation wasn’t specifically on the transcript. In that case the school profile is too late and useless.
So the high school went back and added the honor’s designation to all their academic classes.
They made it retroactive for everybody presently enrolled. Which is the only fair way to do it.
Of course, that could result in gaming by high schools by very generously designating courses as honors that would otherwise not be considered honors in the absence of that kind of incentive by the universities.
Perhaps that is why California public universities maintain a list of which courses at California high schools count as honors for admission recalculated HS GPA purposes. Not all high school designated honors courses count as honors for these purposes.
And no course labelled “honors” counts for OOS applicants
Our school did this about 5 years ago and did not recalculate. College counselors included information about the change in the school summary that goes to colleges. Our admit rates and schools were the same as before the change and the same as after the change. It will be okay!
Long time posters will remember my daughter’s GPA saga. Something was very wrong with the GPA calculation at the HS as my kid was taking honors and AP classes with A grades, and her weighted GPA was lower than her unweighted one. I should add, that this was the same with her older sibling but since that kid was a music major, GPA didn’t matter as much.
Anyway…I complained about this for a long while with the guidance department. I also sent my kid’s transcript to a handful of neighboring HSs where I knew faculty and ask that they simply tell me if the weighted GPA should be lower or higher. ALL said it should be higher.
Well…eventually the school looked carefully at their screwed up formula, and realized there was some error in it. No kidding. My kid was in the beginning of her junior year and they recalculated all GPAs for her class and grades 9 and 10. They didn’t touch the seniors.
And yes, this did affect some students. To this day, the student whose rank went from 2 to 3 has parents who blame me for this rank change. They haven’t spoken to me since.
I wouldn’t worry about any other grade but the one you are in. As noted above, the school profile sent to colleges will be comparing apples to apples. They won’t be comparing grade 10 GPA to grade 12 GPA…or even the GPAs at other schools. Your performance will be compared to those in your class.
Remember, there are tons of ways to compute GPAs. I’ll add that the handful of folks who I sent my kids transcript to…none calculated the same weighted and unweighted GPAs. BUT they all agreed that someone taking honors and AP classes with A grades should have a higher weighted than unweighted GPA. And really that’s what my hunt was.
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So many parents who have seniors have fought to get this changed so they recalculate the GPA for the seniors. The schools response is that lawsuits would ensue from former parents so thats why they won’t do it. Their transcripts will now show two different grading scales and this is what they will send to the colleges.