DD has straight As this year and was invited to the academic awards night. The invitation indicated that kids with a GPA over 3.75 would receive high honors, 3.5 to 3.74 would get honors. So far, so good.

When we got to the ceremony, it became apparent that any one with a WEIGHTED 3.75 GPA received high honors. This meant that over 200 kids out of a class of about 500 received high honors, less than 50 kids got honors. I'm guessing that they didn't want to penalize kids who got As but didn't take honors and didn't want to penalize the kids who took harder classes??

My DD and her friends found the award ceremony insulting. To quote one of DD's friends, "They managed to make high honors feel like a participation award in little kids' sports. Everyone gets it."

How do other people's schools handle academic awards with weighted GPAs?

QPA (quality point average) was the term my high school gave weighted GPA, perhaps to avoid confusion. I never understood what its purpose really was, as most colleges don't care about it (at least at the time I graduated they didn't).

I never really understood why so much stock goes into class ranking, either. It seems to promote generalizing about students rather than forcing schools to actually individually examine them.

At our school the weighted academic GPA is what is counted. Any anyone with over a 4.0 GPA gets some sort of award. There are teacher awards that can & do get given to students who are excellent but don't take honors classes. But in general the awards are given to the honors kids.

At our local high school, high honor roll is reserved for kids who get A- or above in all their classes, for all 16 quarters.

The level of the class is irrelevant, so a kid taking all college-prep classes (A+ = 4.0) who gets a 3.5 could end up on high-honor roll, whereas a kid taking all honors classes (A+ = 5.0) could end up with a 4.5 GPA and not end up on high honor roll.

It's rare for the kids with the highest GPAs to end up on high honor roll, so it is considered a bit of a joke.

Holy cow MITHawk! That's basically the same thing I experienced in high school, and I actually hoped for the same for DS. I was irked by it at the time. But, in hindsight I realize it freed those of us taking the hardest classes from all the drama around valedictorian and honors. Wow - I hope it's like that at out [super-stressed out] high school!

Thanks,
Sue

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.

What?! On a 6.0 scale? That sounds extraordinarily confusing. And odd, for that matter. Does that mean they get grades reported on a 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0 scale? How does that work for college, etc?
Furthermore (and this might be a bit off topic) but what are the GT classes compared to honors/regular? How many kids even take them? It seems like too many would mess up the grade scale.
The whole question of weighted GPA versus class rank always strikes me as ironic: schools realize grade inflation is causing too many high GPAs, so they admit grade inflation is an issue...by eliminating class rank and making scales with higher limits (just wash, rinse, and repeat) but not by actually solving the problem and giving out less of the high grades. Why, education? Why?

WHAT? AP classes get a 7.0 if you get an A? We only have TWO level of classes College Prep, and Honors/AP Classes. It's frustrating, there is a HUGE gap in difficulty between the CP classes and the honors and nothing in between. Junior year you either do AP Literature or CP English for example. Freshman classes don't get the +1.. even if they are honors. (There are classes for English Learners.. ) Music, art, drama, PE classes, or sports do not get extra points unless it's AP Art, or AP Music Theory.

Most classes are on a 4.0 scale. And select honors and ALl AP classes are +1. If you get a C in an honors/AP class you don't get the extra point. I figured it out the other day the highest GPA you can possibly get at the school is a 4.6 and that would means A's on an almost impossible schedule and only possible since this years schedule change. Top GPA's range from 4.35-4.45.

But these GPA ranges with 7.0's don't really affect GPA for getting into university. The local state university's system for creating GPA had a very clearly defined set of classes that get +1 points. Our state college system takes the classes you take and calculate it's OWN GPA. School look at your GPA system and compare it to other schools GPA system.

That's not how it works now for med school. They look at what classes were taken and the science and math GPA is calculated separately. Ideally, they also want to see that students can take multiple difficult classes at once. I advise college premeds.

Here admission to first year med is open to anyone qualified to attend university. Entry to second year is based on performance in first year.

This means everyone is qualified on the same tests etc.

I found their skills quite unnerving.

I have a great story told to me by my thesis advisor regarding a (high-powered, Ivy med school) Md-PhD student who called him RANTING in the middle of the night about the lab's screwed up balances, and treatment group rodents who were apparently defective since they couldn't manage to survive even modest dosing on a per kg basis. Yes, "five kilogram rats" and "20 mgs per kg" was apparently lethal. My thesis advisor (then the lab's head post-doc) apparently hung up on him at that point. Which was probably kinder than laughing.

Ahem.

Man, I love that story. Math. It matters. More to the point, I've told that story to a LOT of future health professionals that thought that my grading re: unit conversions in freshman chem was "harsh."


As for grading scales, just so you know, MOST colleges now want them "unweighted." So you'll only have to calculate them on that basis anyway. Yeah, for the purposes of class rank and all that, there are a variety of schemes. Deliberate choice of words, really. LOL.

I was assuming as much. Even if your HS has a 7.0 scale, most colleges calculate an unweighted and a 5.0, and maybe one unweighted that takes out classes like PE. The problem arises when kids don't understand that and try to torture themselves into a crazy schedule and drop classes like art or music or whatever for that elusive 6.2 GPA....and then realize that 6.2 isn't worth the paper it's printed on -- or worse, it's worth a meager *3.75*.