<p>Deirdre:</p>
<p>Does the school use + and -? It makes a real difference if a student is a B- as opposed to a B+ student. I am not in love with numeric grading. It gives a false impression of total objectivity when so much grading is subjective; it can also turn minor differences into huge ones, as, for instance, the difference between a B (86) and a B+ (87). But letter grades err in the opposite direction, lumping together students of quite different levels of achievement.</p>
<p>My DS took a HS course (Geometry) in summer school before ninth grade. When they calculated the GPA, the course wasn’t included. (And he got an A+, so I definitely wanted it included!) Turns out their computer program only included from ninth grade forward. Kudos to me for keeping track of this and calculating his GPA by hand. As a result of my bringing it to their attention, they fixed the computer program.</p>
<p>You’d think by this point, schools would have this down pat. Apparently not.</p>
<p>marite-- Nope, no plusses or minuses, just A,B,C,D, F, with no weighting. For years this has meant the kids with highest gpa are typically not in the most challenging classes. In an interesting response to this, the school does not have vals or sals, although students with 4.0’s (typically 1 or 2 per year) are recognized at graduation. The class speaker is selected by faculty from speeches submitted by any interested senior.</p>
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I was thinking that too, khsstitches.</p>
<p>Here’s hoping that DeirdreTours’s S has a fantastic experience at AU (if he has inherited the good graces and circumspection of his mom, he is sure to be open to opportunities in the Capital and that wonderful school), BUT if he feels he wants to transfer, it may be incumbent on you to make sure the record is set straight.</p>
<p>Really, I commend you on your equanimity. Most of us would be screaming and calling lawyers, if only to prevent this ever happening to any other student.</p>
<p>Deirdre:</p>
<p>That system seems so wrong to me! Is there a way of getting it revisited by the school/school board?
I am personally not much interested in weighting vs. not weighting (our high school did not weight, and it did not hurt the students who took harder courses) or in who is or is not val or sal. But the combination of no + or- and not weighting is not helping students who like a challenge perform at a much higher level than others. And to add errors to this is just unconscionable.</p>
<p>It is a poor grading system, when combined with the very strange rules on what can constitute the grade (final exam cannot be more than 3.5% or total, but homework is 40%), it didn’t serve my son terribly well. OTOH, he/we knew how the school operated (except for the grading issue that started this thread) and we chose it as the best overall choice for him.
Had he chosen to, he could have easily achieved a 4.0 under the system he was graded on; I would feel far more angry if he had worked his tail off for, say a 92%, rather than mostly coasted to one while concetrating on other projects. </p>
<p>I don’t have the energy to push the school to change its overall grading system, just getting the to conform to the actual policy without alienating anyone will be all I can manage!</p>
<p>“so I can’t see how a college can recalculate an A in IB Biology to a B in IB Biology”</p>
<p>If the HS profile sent with the transcript says that grades in IB courses are increased (or weighted or whatever terminology they use) by 1…the colleges that recalcuate GPA’s could take the A=4 and change it to a B=3. They would only do this if the profile mentions anything about weighting or grade increase.</p>
<p>This example assumes that the admissions committee calculates on a 4 point scale. Some do, some don’t. Some do their own “weighting” for AP/IB and Honors courses.</p>
<p>If the profile says nothing…the A stays an 4 for college admissions committee GPA calculation purposes.</p>
<p>But…in the situation of your school…would a student in an IB course who has 100% on all of their assignments and tests, get the same letter grade on their transcripts the student who gets the numeric equivalent to a B? </p>
<p>(In our school district, which weights for AP/IB and Honors, a student taking all advanced and honors courses could, theoretically, get a 5.0 GPA on their transcript with perfect grades in every course. A student with perfect grades, but no advanced and honors courses, could only get a 4.0 GPA on their transcript.)</p>
<p>I’m not sure I understand your question. At other schools in our district, a student with an accumulated course grade of 90% would receive an “A” on the transcript as would the student with an accumulated course total of 100% (in IB or AP), at son’s school they have been using a steeper grading scale (in violation of district policy). The highest GPA any student in the district can get is 4.0.</p>
<p>But your son was not competing against others in your district for college admissions – he was competing against kids nationwide, and the college ad com looked only at the profile for your son’s school, not for the district. College ad coms don’t look at all schools in a district as being equal in any case – I mean, here on the west coast the kids who graduate from Lowell in San Francisco aren’t looked at through the same lens as the kids coming from Mission High. </p>
<p>The only time the policies of other schools in the district would have made a difference would be if your son had been competing for some local academic award or scholarship, open only to students from your district. </p>
<p>Do you have any reason to believe that the school profile sent with your son’s college apps reflected the district policy rather than the school policy? Have you even seen the profile?</p>
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Actually, I think that students who truly like a challenge will look for that on their own, and not really care about their GPA. It is the students who are opting for the tougher courses merely to enhance their GPA who are hurt by this system – if anything, the lack of weighting helps insure that the IB and AP classes are filled with kids who really want to be there and belong in that environment.</p>
<p>Deidre, I know your son is in college now and what is done is done. But yes, if I were you I’d be pretty darned ticked. If your son earned A’s, and it was reported on his transcript as B’s, then that’s wrong. And it needs to be fixed for future students. I don’t know if he’ll need his h.s. transcripts again, but I think you have a right to be angry.</p>
<p>“But your son was not competing against others in your district for college admissions – he was competing against kids nationwide, and the college ad com looked only at the profile for your son’s school, not for the district.”
Whoa! I have to disagree with that statement! Regional admissions reps - who do cover large areas, like all of SF, often are the one’s who have to make a decision about who to support in the admissions process, when it reaches the "well, we can’t take ALL these students from these schools- who would you choose? "decision time.</p>
<p>But the regional rep would be familiar with the reputation of each individual school in terms of overall rigor. We don’t know from Deirdre where her son’s school is seen in that respect, but if had a demanding curriculum and the grading policy meant that the GPA’s of kids coming from that school were slightly lower – that would tend to contribute to a overall assumption that it was a tougher school. </p>
<p>As Deirdre herself admits, her son “coasted” and focused more on his own interests than on putting 100% of his effort into his homework. So I don’t really see the unfairness, given that he was graded consistently under the same set of standards as others in his classes. He apparently could have gotten A’s in those classes if he had wanted. </p>
<p>I mean --Dierdre isn’t claiming that she or her son believed that a 92 would be an A and found out only later that a different standard applied. Its the opposite, they believed that 92 was a B, and found out only later that it would have been an A if only the school had been applying a less rigorous standard. </p>
<p>What if the situation were reversed? What if district policy were 93=A, but your kid’s school had been doing it wrong and your kid had straight A’s, based on 90=A? Do you think that “fairness” would mean that the district should force the school to recalculate all its grades to take away the A’s of the kids who earned them thinking 90 was good enough?</p>
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<p>You think? We found out that the regional rep for Yale the year S was considering college was a recent Yale graduate who left after a couple of years. There’s no way he would be familiar with even the names of the schools in his region, let alone with their reputation for rigor.</p>
<p>I have to believe that adcoms ordinarily view a B- applicant very differently from a B+ one. But if a school gives only As, Bs, and Cs, it will hurt the students at the top of the range; when in doubt, be cautious and assume that the student is a B or even a B- rather than a B+ student. It does help a bit if the school has APs or IB and does not have too restrictive a policy regarding who can sign up for APs.</p>
<p>Marite–My understanding is that the Yale admissions office keeps very long term files for each region. A new admissions officer covering Area X would read the detailed notes of previous admissions officers covering that region.</p>
<p>calmom: Your arguments are good, but the fact remains that if OP had only found out this bit of information about 9 months ago her son could well have had better options 5 months ago. A transcript filled with B’s looks very different from a transcript filled with A’s, especially when it isn’t from some famously rigorous school. It really doesn’t matter what the school profile says. </p>
<p>I am quite surprised that her son was even waitlisted at Harvard with all those B’s and a C. The other parts of his transcript must have been phenomenal. I would be hopping mad if this were my child.</p>
<p>^^ I mean the other parts of his application (not transcript).</p>
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<p>There are many applicants who have NO weak points in their applications to HYPSM who are rejected from these schools. Although it may be a “possibility” that your S may have been admitted to Harvard if his grades had been calculated correctly, I would certainly not count it in the realm of “probability.”</p>
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<p>This is something that I can see as a real probability–and it’s a shame that your S did not have the full panoply of options available to him for examination last spring that he should have had. </p>
<p>I hope he has a great experience at American! You can’t reverse the clock–so feel free to get hopping mad and vent here before moving on.</p>
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<p>A lot of students come from schools where the teachers are free to set their own grading standards, and many where the teachers grade on curves. Is a curve fair? Lets say that the high school teacher gives the same algebra test to each of his separate classes – if he sets a separate curve for each class, then a student in who has 80% one class might have an A (low curve) – and a student who has 80% in another class might have a C (high curve). </p>
<p>I still really can’t get past Dierdre’s statement that her son let the homework slide and “coasted”. I’m not trying to attack her – my son was a coaster too, one who let the homework slide – and those habits did not serve him well when he got to college. </p>
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<p>One really important part of applications is the recommendation letters from teachers. Its hard for a kid who puts in minimal effort in class to get those kind of letters. Maybe Deirdre’s son had LOR’s that said he was “brilliant” and had a lot of “potential”… and then there were other applicants who had LOR’s that listed accomplishments that clearly reflected a good deal of time and effort, or that pointed out the extra effort they had put in to overcome some special challenge or hardship. So maybe if something could have been different and gotten the son into Harvard, a better LOR would have helped. </p>
<p>If Dierdre wants to go to the school and insist on a corrected transcript for her son, just in case he might need it in the future – that’s fine. She has every right to do that. But I don’t think she would be doing her son any favors. I do think she was right to tell her son what she had learned… but if it was me, that’s where I would stop.</p>
<p>Admissions Addict:</p>
<p>There is no question that regional reps keep detailed files. But the Harvard push to publicize its new financial aid package strongly suggest that there exist many many many schools that are/were totally unknown to its regional reps. Why should we be surprised?</p>