Well, I think your kids are right - if 40% of the students are awarded "high" honors, then the honor can't be particularly high. There is always that push-pull regarding taking the most difficult courses versus protecting their GPA.
Interestingly, at the high school level where GPA may have important impact, the administration tries to play it both ways. On the one hand, Honors classes are assigned a 5.0 max while GT classes are assigned a 6.0 max as compared to a 4.0 max for Regular classes. This way class rank and GPA will reward those students who aim high since a GT C equals an Honors B and a Regular A as far as GPA is concerned. At the same time, quarterly Honor Roll awards are based strictly on a student earning all A's and B's.
On the other hand, at the middle school level, GPA is not weighed by course difficulty. Furthermore, students run the gamut from 0 to the max 5 GT courses. Social Studies and Science tend to have fewer GT students than Reading, Language Arts and Math partly due to reasons of higher difficulty and lower grades. As a result, the quarterly Principal's Honor Roll (straight A's) tend to include very few kids who take the max 5 GT load. I think there were only a few out of the two to three dozen qualifying 6th graders each quarter.
Last edited by Quantum2003; 05/13/15 07:17 PM.
