Virginia Parents Fight for Easier Grading Standards

Parents Forum
1

<p>I recall we had a discussion of grading standards on this forum a few days ago, but I couldn't remember if this article had been posted. Please ignore if it has been.</p>

<p>Virginia</a> Parents Fight for Easier Grading Standards - Yahoo! News</p>

<p>
[quote]
To the grade-grubbers go the spoils. And the grade-grubbers in this case are rabble-rousing parents in Virginia's Fairfax County. Residents of the high-powered Washington suburb have been battling the district's tough grading practices; chief among their complaints is that scoring a 93 gets recorded as a lowly B+. After forming an official protest group last year called Fairgrade and goading the school board into voting on whether to ease the standards, parents marshaled 10,000 signatures online and nearly 500 in-person supporters to help plead their case on Jan. 22. After two hours of debate, the resolution passed, a move critics consider a defeat in the war on grade inflation.</p>

<p>At most schools in the U.S., a 90 earns you an A, but in Fairfax County, getting the goods demands a full 94. Merely passing is tougher, too, requiring a 64 rather than a 60. Nor do students get much help clearing those high bars if they take tougher courses. Compared to the kind of GPA "weighting" many districts give for Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses, Fairfax County's half-point boost is peanuts. The upshot, protestors say, is that Fairfax kids are at a disadvantage on multiple fronts: snagging good-driver insurance discounts (which often factor in GPA), earning NCAA eligibility, winning merit scholarships, and - oh, yeah - getting into college.</p>

<p>...

[/quote]
</p>

<p>The grading system at the school described in the article is very similar to the one at my Ds' schools with one difference: our schools did not give an extra 1/2 point for IB or AP classes. So far, I have not heard any complaints.</p>

2

<p>I think there are two issues here. One was that the Fairfax kids may have missed out on scholarships (esp. at VA public institutions) where grades played a large part. So they wanted the grading systems to be similar across the state. I understand this perfectly.</p>

<p>But I also have also read (can't point to the article because it was when I was visiting sil in DC at least a year ago) that studies have shown that no matter what numbers teachers hand out, there is in fact very little difference in the actual distribution of A's, B's and C's in similar schools. If it takes a 93 to make an A, the math teacher will make the tests a little easier, so enough students get A's, or the English teacher will make sure that the A student's rubric score comes out right. </p>

<p>Our school doesn't weight AP any more than an honors course. I don't like it, but I don't think it's worth making a stink about though I suspect my older son might have moved up a few notches (maybe a lot of notches) if they had been.</p>

3

<p>
[quote]
If it takes a 93 to make an A, the math teacher will make the tests a little easier, so enough students get A's, or the English teacher will make sure that the A student's rubric score comes out right.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I'd probably want to have a slightly harder test with 90 as an A if I am able to solve harder problems but not necessarily the most careful one. The reason is that students make careless mistakes easily. In the case of 93, you have very little margin of error and one or two stupid mistakes would bring you to a B even if you know the materials very well. I think an easier test with a narrower margin tends to reward the most meticulous students rather than the brightest. Maybe the proportion of A, B, and C would remain same, but who'd get the As change. That may explain why only 16 students got straight As in TJHS. It's very hard to not make any careless mistake consistently in all classes.</p>

<p>Speaking of grade-deflation, Hong Kong Advanced Level Examination has the worse one:
1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
A % 1.8 0.2 0.5 0.4 1.8 0.1 0.5 0.8 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.3 0.9
Hong</a> Kong Advanced Level Examination - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</p>

4

<p>64 is passing and they are mad? Anything below 70 is an F in our system (even in AP classes). A 92 here still gets you a B (no plus or minus here). An 84 gets you a C and a 76 gets you a D.</p>

5

<p>I can somewhat sympathize with these parents. I personally think that this country should go to a standardized grading system as well as a standardized weighting system for honors and AP classes. </p>

<p>When S was in high school, his school did not weight honors or AP classes at all. Other schools in the area, would add a full grade point (or more) for honors and AP classes. At graduation, no one in S's class had a 4.00. When applying to schools that only look at weighted GPA and test scores (large publics), the students were at a disadvantage. Since they did not have weighted GPAs, their unweighted GPAs were entered and used on applications. The school had a policy of not converting any grades into a weighted system. This also resulted in a reduced likelihood to receive institutional merit scholarships from many colleges that use GPA and test scores for awards. So a student at S's high school with a 3.85 (unweighted) GPA looked academically inferior to other students in the area who had 4.3 weighted GPAs (and only 3.3 unweighted GPAs) taking less honors and AP classes.</p>

6

<p>I do have some sympathy when it comes to things like scholarships and insurance that have automatic GPA cutoffs. But I'm not sure there is ever going to be a way to fix the problem. With respect to admissions, I think most adcoms -- particularly those at more selective schools -- have a pretty good idea of various school districts and the relative difficulty among and within them.</p>

7

<p>We live in Chesapeake Virginia and our grading scale is also tough. It takes a 94 and above to get an A and it takes a 70 to pass. Our school system does not give out + or -. A B is B, whether it a 93 or an 86. And I know of other school systems that have the same scale, I am fairly certain that Virginia Beach has the same scale as well. So I doubt that the Fairfax kids were at a big disadvantage for scholarships in Virginia. They are not the only ones to have a tough scale. My kids would love to have the 10 point scale. My daughters only B was a 92 in AP US. Our school system adds .05 for AP and
.025 for honors.</p>

8

<p>Interesting article. I wonder where they will move to. Most parents work on the 95 o 66 corridor. PW straddles those roads, so if they want move out of the county it won't be to PW. Our A- is 93, B+ is 92. 60 is failing, not 64.</p>

<p>We also lived in AK, NJ, KS, and NC. All of the counties we lived in had the 7 point scale. At UMD most classes are also on the 7 pt, and my daughters friend who goes to VCU is also on a 7 pt scale.</p>

<p>I just don't get the real biggie about it, since it is not the letter grade that matters, but the percentile. Students who take honors, APs and IBS are given a higher gpa even if they get a lower grade than the person who takes std.</p>

<p>All of our schools multiplied the % by the weight and that was/is your gpa.
93 on a 4.0 (std) will give a student a 3.72
87 on a 4.5 (honors) will give a student a 3.95
80 on a 5.0 (AP/IB) gives a student a 4.0</p>

<p>Colleges don't see A or B's as much as they look at the gpa which is a straight mathematical formula. They also look at your class rank, why do you think they announce things like X% were in the top 10% of their class They also do not say our avg student has 5 As and 2 Bs, they announce the avg gpa. Finally if the letter matter and not the % than why would they ever assign a percentile, just say A, remove the second column where it says %. It seems a little strange that they care more about the letter than the percentile. </p>

<p>My friend who lives in Fairfax, and is a teacher said her daughters transcript showed the gpa in numerical weight like I just stated. Her daughter goes to VCU.</p>

<p>Most colleges will also re-weight the gpa to their stds, some remove electives like gym and chorus, some schools have a higher weighting system, some don't even give a gpa, but a %. So it is not really an issue when you apply to college.</p>

<p>Finally 10K is nothing for Fairfax. Fairfax county school budget is 2.2 BILLION. The avg SR class is definetely over 800, I believe there are 20 hs, which means if I did my math right, 64K high school students. 15% is not a majority of parents fighting it. 500 means the support isn't strong enough to change.</p>

<p>As a realtor, I can tell you, people buy in Fairfax because it is always on the top 100 hs in the nation. The board knows that, they really don't have fear that somebody is going to put up their home for sale and move to PW.</p>

<p>BTW I bet Pack is from NC, because that was our scoring system</p>

9

<p>
[quote]
I do have some sympathy when it comes to things like scholarships and insurance that have automatic GPA cutoffs

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Yes, but for insurance that is a very low cut off for all intentional purposes. I live in VA, the insurance cut off is 3.0, so if you take an honors course and pull a C, you will just need an A in PE to give you that 3.0. In NC there is no good student reduction rate. I pay less for my daughter in No VA than I did in rural NC</p>

10

<p>Today's Post has an interesting article on parents and web campaigns-and how they impact the decision making process. Article references Fairgrade and the fact that the School Board decided to reverse the Superintendent's recommendation to keep an "A" at 94. </p>

<p>Well-Connected</a> Parents Take On School Boards - washingtonpost.com</p>

11

<p>These parents are insane, they believe that changing it to a 10 point scale will make a difference, but like I said before in reality it makes absolutely no difference at all to any university. It might give the parent all warm and fuzzies to say my Johnnie is a straight A student, but it won't get Johnny into UVA any easier (UVA is ranked no.2 in the nation for state Universities, only behind Berkeley). If anything they are doing is hurting the Fairfax system...people here move to the area because of the school system, we are all accustomed to the traffic, thus a better school system than PW would be why you pay the extra big bucks. If PW is now seen as more challenging or even equivalent, parents will say hey for 100K less I get a brand new 4000sqft home on an acre, instead of a 1940 1500sqft bungalow on .10 acre. So what I have drive 15 minutes more, but my taxes are lower and the schools are the same. </p>

<p>Colleges are still going to look at the gpa in a numerical weight by how I explained it before.</p>

<p>To me these parents are just wasting time that could be spent in more valuable ways, like how to reduce classroom size...now a smaller class will definetely correlate into a child who can obtain and achieve success in the material being taught. </p>

<p>If I lived in Fairfax I would tell these parents to shut up and color. I am disappointed in the board, for a school district that has 139K students to listen to such a small element and give them so much credibility makes me stand in astounishment. 500 parents showing up is a very small amt.</p>

12

<p>I actually like the parents proposal as long as the teachers recalibrate their tests resulting in a grade distribution is the same or more stringent. The problem with grade inflation is not that so many A's are given but that it is more difficult to distinguish those students with mastery of the subject matter vs those who have amped up for the test and will forget it a few days later.</p>

<p>As a college prof my tests I always tried to include a very difficult question which was either a derivation or required the application of basic principals in an unusual way. Few students were able to solve it but those that did were my A+ students and those that were able to get substantial partial credit were the A's. And usually there was no single correct answer to the applied application because it required multiple assumptions for a solution. </p>

<p>If a test is unable to distinguish between deep understanding and rote memorization it isnt much of a test. This is not to say that it should be so hard that the majority of students get C- or less, just that B+ and A grades should be earned and F's for those who do not care.</p>

13

<p>I am not talking about UVA bc I am sure that admissions knows the VA school districts. There are other schools, however, that make merit aid decisions based on ACT/SAT scores and/or gpa. They do not care which hs you graduated from. There is chart that some schools stick with and that is it. All gpas from different high schools are equal on that chart. It does mean that some kids will be squeezed out of merit aid based on this type of system even if their standardized test scores are high. This happened to my own child at 2 colleges (one public and one private college).</p>

14

<p>I agree with you originaloog, however, I don't think that is the basis of the reason these parents are doing it. I think it comes down to pride in being able to say my student is an A student. In PW we are on a 7 pt scale, when my kids come home with a 92 and it is a B, I don't blame the school for their point scale or say you know if it was a 10 pt scale you would have all A's, I look at my kid and say doesn't it stink for you that you didn't study 15 minutes longer or checked your hw for a second time, it could have been an A!</p>

<p>This is PC at its finest. Parents need to get a grip...when their kid that they fought to have that 10 pt scale for doesn't make it into an ivy because the gpa is a 3.6 uw will they start crying foul to the universities? An 90 B grade is weighted the exact same as a 90 A grade. You can wrap garbage up in a nice pretty box, but in the end it smells as bad as the garbage you put into no name trash bag.</p>

15

<p>Northeast, my point is merit looks at a gpa, it is calculated the same for a kid in NJ as for the kid in VA. (Using just a std 4.0 scale) A 90 will be 3.6, whether it is an A or a B. It's just math. Universities do look at SAT and gpas, but every county and every state has different weighting. Some APs are weighted on a 6 and some on a 5. In your childs official transcript the school typically adds in an explanation of the weighting scale. If the university concurs as that is their weight scale, no need for re-adjustment, but if not they re-weight the gpa. However, nothing changes in the mathematical equation, only you as a parent can say my child is a straight A student. I have a friend who did that, loved to brag he was...little did she inform people, that the child took no AP or honors, and instead of taking physics he took earth science. It was about the A, not about his curriculumn, IMHO that is what these parents are fighting for. on a 7 pt scale, a C is an 83, kiss goodby saying they are on honor roll. However, when it comes to NHS, that 83 still translates into a 3.32, which for some schools they allow them to be a member.</p>

16

<p>bullet, I understand that math is math. I don't think that comparisons of looking at gpas between high schools can be fair. I do see the point of these parents trying to give their kids a shot at merit aid. As far as admissions to VA state schools, the admissions offices will quickly figure out the new grading systems and they will know the caliber of the students who are applying to their schools. </p>

<p>As far as the student who never took an AP or honors class, that student will have the upper hand in admisions at some schools. Taxguy had a thread about this subject. It was his opinion that many schools do not look at the course difficuly and just look at the gpa. I do agree with that at some schools, but not at others. I also think that the student who did not take an honors or AP class might have a harder time adjusting to college level work, but I don't have statistics to back that up. It's just my opinion.</p>

17

<p>We went through this in our district a few years ago. We changed from a 7 point scale toa 10 point scale because of parental complaints with college admissions. It was hard for my daughter's class because their transcript ( and GPA) was mixed with 2 years of 7 point and 2 years of 10 point. They did not change the grades from first 2 years to the current scale.The school had notations on the transcript, but I wonder how many ad-coms/scholarship committees actually read the notes and took the scale into consideration?
I do have to agree with mathmom though - it seemed that the kids that had 92's or 93's consistently on the 7 point scale started getting 89's on the 10 point scale. It appeared that some teachers did adjust to keep a similar grade distribution.</p>

18

<p>I think there is always going to be something to be unhappy or complain about in a school system. I live in Virginia (not the NoVa area). The bulk of our school funding and resources go to pay for ESL education so we can meet the standards and remain accredited. Our grading scale is rigorous (93 and below is a B), less than 40% of our students go on to higher education (2 or 4 year) and there always seem to be some sort of grade scale "adjustment" going on that never seems to benefit my D. Do I feel that she got a good education? Yes. Is she well prepared for college? Yes. Have colleges recognized that? Not all, but can I blame that on a grading scale? For the most part, no. Just my two cents.</p>

19

<p>One was that the Fairfax kids may have missed out on scholarships (esp. at VA public institutions) where grades played a large part. So they wanted the grading systems to be similar across the state. I understand this perfectly.>>></p>

<p>Actually the issue was more that of scholarships at out of state schools that are not familiar with Fairfax County. Also with things such as good driver discounts that go purely by GPA.</p>

20

<p>I live in VA in an area that's scale that's a little more lenient - 93 A, etc. (Years ago, according to an "old timer" the scale was 95 A.) I haven't seen anything to back this up statistically, but teachers have said that the grade distribution is similar regardless of the scale.</p>