Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Weighted GPAs

My daughters in 7th grade and takes band for a grade. My point was not to minimize the difficulty of the course but the fact in the original posters complaint it lowered her daughters GPA. My comparison with a sport was a bad one.

We saw this bus coming from a long way off, so we made sure to let DD14 know that while we expect her GPA to be good, we would rather she challenge herself than play it safe for a higher class rank. This is one of those times where you have to encourage your kid to miss out on the honor of appearing to be the best student by having her gain real knowledge and experience instead. In my opinion, it is better to have a real education and no award, than an award and a half-arsed education to go with it.

A couple of DD14s friends have the highest GPAs in her class and, thank goodness, DD does think it silly how they maneuver around to keep it as high as possible.

In my graduating class, I felt bad for our salutatorian. Our school had unweighted GPAs, and the salutatorian had one B and everything else As - while taking a fairly rigorous schedule. The valedictorian of my class took almost no rigor, and skated to all As.

Best of luck,
--S.F.

Agreed! There is a Latin phrase which applies here: "Esse quam videri" meaning "To be, rather than to seem (to be)". It has been used as a motto by a number of different groups including the State of North Carolina.

Fortunately, more college admissions seem to be taking many factors into account rather than relying primarily on GPA.

Succinct, and since it's in Latin it sounds cool too. I had not encountered that phrase before, but am jotting it down now. Thank you Indigo.

Have a good day,
--S.F.

ITA with you Frog. The thing we wrestle with here is that ds' school program mantra is all about "getting into the *best* college", and GPA is stressed by his counselor, as well as by a lot of parents so there are a lot of students hyper-focused on it. DS' counselor has gone so far as to point out that if you opt to add high school courses taken in middle school to your transcript you might "accidentally" lower your cumulative GPA by adding in additional classes with non-weighted As and the same can happen by taking additional classes during high school which aren't weighted.

The only classes which are weighted here are AP courses - honors courses, gifted courses, accelerated courses, dual credit college courses etc are not weighted.

I find the emphasis on class standing and GPA very frustrating - and I'm not a student!

polarbear

Polarbear - Very frustrating, I agree and can empathize with you. DD14s situation sounds very similar to your DSs. Only AP courses carry weight, so As in non-AP classes can lower your overall GPA. Same situation on HS classes taken in MS, too.

Luckily our DD has bought into our mantra of bettering herself rather than her GPA. Taking two foreign languages and band, even while getting A+s in all three, causes her GPA to trail behind others in her class who max out mainly on APs and avoid filling their schedule with other classes. But she LOVES taking two languages and thoroughly enjoys band.

Oh well. I keep hoping that, at the end of the day, she won't be worse off by bettering herself.

Best of luck,
--S.F.

PB, this is what we are running into. Much as I am trying to encourage DD to explore areas that interest her (math, music and visual arts), she constantly has the school culture whispering in her ear, "How will that affect your ability to get into college?" This whole discussion was prompted by the school giving out class rankings which I think is somewhat ludicrous after one semester of classes. Some of DDs friends are talking about dropping band/orchestra because of the GPA effect.

DD has no desire to drop music. She's just irritated by an imperfect system. As a parent, I'm trying to help her keep things in perspective. I keep reminding her that I have no worries that she will get into college - that's pretty much a given unless something truly catastrophic happens. I told her that I want her to focus on figuring out what she wants to do in life and how college fits in with those goals.

I was curious whether anyone had seen a better weighting system. I'm not hearing that there is one out there.

There isn't. People figure out how to "game" them all, making the attempt rather pointless within a very short time.

Some of DD's top-10 "competitors" in school used a lot of trickery to goose their GPA's; avoiding classes which were unweighted by taking them over the summer at other institutions, so that they wouldn't be part of the calculated GPA, figuring out ways to have ONLY their AP/Honors weighted courses included in their GPA, etc. Some of those tactics were pretty extreme.

I was pretty happy to see that the kid when went au naturale there was the one who wound up number 1 in the end. I think that in her case (and I'd feel this way if she'd wound up number 2 or even 3) the weighting system really worked, because her transcripts are not pristine-- she has grades other than A+ on them. She was able to take risks and learn from mistakes.

I also kind of had to laugh, because for all of that jockeying around, the two radically accelerated PG kiddos were the ones who wound up 1,2-- and WAY out in front of the rest of the class. The reason was that they were the two who were able to truly ace the AP coursework and take on a wider variety of it-- not just mathy or lit-based stuff, but pretty much every offering.

Yes, my DD did do some playing of the game (she added AP USH late when she realized that her gpa was dropping because of an unweighted advanced math course that she was getting straight A's in)-- but only when it served her interests as a whole as well as her desire to be number 1.

For a perfectionist PG kid in a system that was insufficiently challenging, that top spot wasn't that unreasonable a goal, so we didn't feel that we could really say much about it when she decided she wanted it. It wasn't unhealthy in any way, that competition. DD knew everyone in the top 5, and was good friends with 3 of those people, and cordial with the other one.

I guess I look at this sort of thing this way-- secondary ed isn't really much more than a game at this point in many schools. DD was marking time until she had that bit of paper and could move along to the next stage in her life. She needed certain soft skills and better executive function for that next stage, so that is what her high school career was mostly about. It wasn't for learning the curriculum, which she mostly found trivially easy. Learning to play the game and play well-- I rationalize that this, too, has a place in the world. I further posit that kids at high LOG and who have strong justice orientations may need, more than others, to learn those things, because a lot of it is about how unethical a contestant is willing to be in order to "win" at any point in time. My DD had to decide on an existential level whether she was willing to play-- and to what degree. What did her own ethics dictate about what constituted reasonable personal conduct there?

SHE decided, for example, that she refused to superscore on standardized exams. She finds the practice abhorrent and dishonest, and couldn't do it in spite of the fact that she KNOWS that she is in a very small minority among high-achieving peers. She can't do anything about them-- only herself. So she lived with a disappointing set of SAT scores, and vowed to do better with the ACT (which she did).

That kind of decision-making and growth was a really important step prior to college, which asks kids to live in an ambiguous environment where THEY must adapt to the system as it is. That's a really tough thing for young matriculants, in my experience. The rules in the game of life aren't really the same for everyone. That's just the way it is.

I feel your pain. Luckily, our school did away with class rank, but they still confer Latin honors, and it's difficult to get highest honors if a student takes too many unweighted courses. My son knows that taking orchestra all four years will lower his GPA, which does annoy me, given that it's a very rigorous music curriculum. I have no idea how this could be fixed - even if one limits the number of weighted grades a student could receive in a given year, there are other ways to "game" the system (students figuring out which no-cut varsity sport they can join to try and get an exemption from the required, but non-weighted PE... or back when it was offered, student would take the Consumer Education proficiency test to get out of taking the non-weighted, but required in our state, course). I want my kids to be well rounded and be able to take art or music or business classes, all of which are unweighted. I tell my son that all of the kids who are at the top, trying to inch their GPA a little higher, will likely be accepted to many colleges based on GPA and ACT/SAT scores. The real fight will be for scholarships or elite acceptances, and for those, it will be much more beneficial to look well-rounded than to have a tenth of a point higher GPA. At least I hope that is true!

"secondary ed isn't really much more than a game at this point in many schools"

I agree. But it's a dangerous game being played by people and entities who are showing a frightening lack of concern for the game pieces (i.e., our children). I don't mean to be melodramatic, but this: http://www.timesheraldonline.com/ge...for-answers-in-wake-of-student-suicides. Reading the quotes from the good kids trying to find their way in this good school with good teachers and administrators who are trying so hard and still this happens over and over and over - it's heart breaking and very frightening.

Even though DS7 is young enough that he's not yet in the game, I know it's coming faster than I can imagine. We are telling him all the right things and modeling the behavior he'll need. I hope it's enough. Even more - I hope the people playing - and using - this game will finally cut it out. As a kindergarten teacher's poster says "The child is not going to be somebody. The child IS somebody."

I'm sorry to be emotional here. But the problem is so much on my mind these days.

Sue