<p>My trascript describes gym is" *Not Averaged".
How about Health Education?</p>
<p>Ask your GC. In reality some colleges may just not consider those classes at all.</p>
<p>What, in high school, or college?</p>
<p>I think PE in college should be pass/fail, and not factored into the GPA. It’s not like anyone cares what you got in PE anyway.</p>
<p>In high school, I think health education should be graded and gym should be pass/fail.</p>
<p>In my state, which I believe to be one of the strictest, high schoolers are required to take PE all 8 semesters of high school, unless they are varsity athletes and then they are excused during the semester of their sport. It is graded ABCDF. In our school at least, it is counted in GPA. </p>
<p>And frankly I don’t believe for a minute that universities with 15,000 - 20,000 applications coming in the door bother with the minutia of figuring out that this school’s GPA includes gym and that one doesn’t and backing it all out. Ditto with other courses that a state may require for graduation (for example, consumer education or something on the state’s constitution).</p>
<p>For me, it depends on how it’s graded. If PE is graded based on effort, then it should be included. So much of High School is just EFFORT, why shouldn’t P.E. be the same? </p>
<p>If it’s graded on how many push-ups one can do, then no. Some people are just more athletic than others.</p>
<p>The UCs don’t include PE when they calculate the ‘UC GPA’ for the HS classes.</p>
<p>We’re in NY (not Pizzagirl’s state) and our students also have to take PE every semester. In our school, at least, it’s graded pass, or pass with honors, or fail, but isn’t part of the GPA. Health has a letter grade and I think it may count, but since many students put it off until their senior year, it probably never has much effect on the GPA.</p>
<p>I’ve taken PE graded every which way, and I can tell you it made me mad as %&* when my friends who did exactly the same thing in class got better effort grades than I did. (This was a calisthenics class, not something more subjective like tennis.) I did the same number of jumping jacks, squat thrusts and all that other nonsense. It was the final straw for me, I just took modern dance for my exercise after that.</p>
<p>In our HS, you have to take PE every year. No exception for athletes, even if they miss a PE class for a game, they have to make up the PE. It is graded and counted in the GPA, but if you show up dressed and participate, you get an A. I have known kids in danger of not graduating because they didn’t bother going to gym.</p>
<p>A couple of years ago they started a summer gym class which would excuse kids from gym during the school year. Seems to defeat the stated purpose of teaching lifelong fitness and regular exercise.</p>
<p>In N.Y high school,not college.</p>
<p>I don’t have an opinion regarding GPA, but what would have taken an “A” effort for my D’s physical education, would require my son’s “A” academic effort. The reverse is also true. An “A” in measurable physical education outcomes would be almost no effort for him, and near, if not impossible for her.</p>
<p>We’re in Illlinois, and at D’s high school, unless you have an athletic waiver, gym is required every semester except for the semesters you take health (required) or drivers’ ed. Neither gym nor drivers’ ed counts in the GPA. Health does count. I’m sure there are plenty of colleges that recalculate GPA to exclude health and other non-core subjects, but there are also plenty of schools that take the school-calculated GPA at face value.</p>
<p>The two classes should be different:
Health is an academic class… do you know the subject matter? Can you tell me what path a red blood cell takes through your body? Can you explain a nutrition label?<br>
PE is an “effort and participation” class… do you show up in the right gear and do your darndest to get better at whatever the subject is. If you are already really gifted in the PE front, I would like to see some kind of metric that measures if you tried to improve. In real life I know that’s probably not going to happen…</p>
<p>In NYS you must pass gym every term. The only exception is if you have completed all of your courses in less than 8 semesters, they will not make you return to high school just to take gym. </p>
<p>Otherwise the the state regs say that the course cannot be waived. Unless you are on home insturuction, if you are in school, even if medically excused you must show up to and get dressed for gym. The teacher may assign an alternative assessment (yes, you can be medically excused and fail gym and it will show up on your transcript). </p>
<p>Health is an academic class and averaged in to the overall gpa. It is usually a one credit course. </p>
<p>Gym, it depends on how the course is coded on the transcript. Normally gym is not calculated in to the gpa. </p>
<p>If you attend a NYC Public HS if there is an *next to the grade then it would not be calculated into your overall gpa. If there is no * next to the grade then it is calculated. I have seen this on the transcript and had to remind our programmer that the couse should not be calculated in to the overall gpa.</p>
<p>um~~~~~~.~~~~~~</p>
<p>To sybbie719:I live in NYC.I didn’t take the Health Education,does it affect my average?</p>
<p>I kind of wish Florida had better PE requirements. You only have to take 2 semesters of PE for all four years. My high school was a magnet arts school and due to required art classes taking up so much of our time, most of us took PE online…yes it was possible…no, it did not require any kind of physical exertion whatsoever. While I’m not a big PE buff, I think it shouldn’t be that easy to get around it. In middle school there was no PE requirement whatsoever, I’m not even sure if it was offered.</p>
<p>BTW. NY does not excuse varsity athletes from gym. That’s probably a district policy based on some loophole. But otherwise, graded gym is horrible… And if the teacher hates you? Good luck.</p>
<p>Edit: And yeah, the medical exemption thing in NY is rather annoying. I got to write a report on my injury (yay) with illustrations. It took me a day. I spent the rest of the semester reading. But I had to go to the gym everyday before class for attendance. Why she couldn’t check the library logs, I don’t know but never the less, I showed up to that gym every day and then walked accross the school to the library. Inefficiency at its best.</p>
<p>I’m in another state where PE is required every semester. Health is a separate requirement, and one must still be in PE when one takes health. Health is graded just like any other class and the grade is calculated into the GPA. PE is graded, but the grade is not included in GPA calculation. Personally, I think it ought to be.</p>
<p>If the state considers the course is so important that it’s required every semester, it’s grade ought to matter. PE is not just playing games. It’s learning about health and fitness, lessons that are as valuable as the one’s kids learn in other classes. So, some kids aren’t as athletically inclined as others? Big deal. Everybody takes English all four years. Nobody argues that it shouldn’t be required or calculated into the GPA because not everybody is good at it. </p>
<p>Off my soapbox here long enough to point out an irony - my kids don’t take PE. Athletes in school sanctioned sports can get an exemption. Mine take the exemption so they can take their fine arts classes. We have just 7 periods in the day. Five go to core classes, leaving just 2 for electives. Ordinaryd1 wants to be in band and choir. Ordinaryd2 wants band and visual arts (sculpting). The only way to get them in is to take a PE exemption.</p>
<p>You need health in order to graduate. You will probably take it next year and then it would most likely be averaged in</p>
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<p>IMO, the goal of PE is / should be developing skills that enable one to get physical activity for the rest of one’s life. Much of PE has been predicated too long on teaching kids how to play volleyball, basketball, soccer, etc. despite the fact that studies have shown that only 3% of adults get cardiovascular exercise through team sports. It’s far, far more common for adults to get exercise either through solo activities (jogging / running, walking, working out on exercise machines, bicycling, swimming) or through group classes such as aerobics – yet only recently has PE begun to evolve to recognize the fact that it’s more valuable to get someone to like brisk walking or jogging that they can use into the future to get their heart rates up, than it is to teach them how to play volleyball when few / no working adults are actually going to be able to commit to volleyball leagues as a means of getting exercise.</p>
<p>Personally, I think it would be just fine if schools offered a period where students jogged / ran / walked briskly or took some kind of aerobics class and as long as they participated fully, they got an A. The goal is to get the heart rate up for health purposes … not to “be competitive” or better skills, the way that the goal is to better skills in English or math class. As long as that goal of getting the heart rate up is met, it really doesn’t matter that Suzie takes 15 minutes to run a mile whereas Johnny does so in 8 minutes, or that Suzie will never be a good volleyball player.</p>