stupid high school policies

[jwgh]

I went to a public high school that had a somewhat unusual (and, in my opinion, stupid) way of calculating grade point averages.

I think the standard way that GPAs are supposed to work in the US is that for each course a student takes he or she is given four points for each A, three points for each B, two points for each C, and one point for each D. Then the total is divided by the number of courses taken, yielding a score somewhere between 0 and 4.

Not so at my high school. There there were three categories of classes: 'Honors' level (which were supposed to be the hardest), 'College' level (which were supposed to be of 'normal' difficulty), and 'Standard' level (which were supposed to be particularly easy). When calculating GPAs, honors courses were worth an extra point and standard courses were worth one point less.

I checked my high school's website and they have the student handbook online, which allowed me to verify that this stupid policy is still in place. It contains the following table. (Note also that unlike the classic GPA-calculating method given above extra points were given for a + and points were subtracted for - grades.)

CALCULATING YOUR GPA (GRADE POINT AVERAGE)
GRADE  COLLEGE  HONORS  STANDARD
A+     4.3      5.3     3.3
A      4.0      5.0     3.0
A-     3.7      4.7     2.7
B+     3.3      4.3     2.3
B      3.0      4.0     2.0
B-     2.7      3.7     1.7
C+     2.3      3.3     1.3
C      2.0      3.0     1.0
C-     1.7      2.7     0.7
D+     1.3      2.3     0.3
D      1.0      2.0     0.0
D-     0.7      1.7     0.0
F      0.0      0.0     0.0

The result of this was that if you wanted to be valedictorian you would avoid college-level courses like the plague, and the thought of taking a standard-level course would never cross your mind, even if the courses in question were about things you were interested in. (I think psychology was only available as a college-level course, for instance. I actually took psych my senior year and I think I got some sort of C, but I still managed to graduate with a 5.05 GPA. I was valedictorian that year, but only because my class was full of slackers, relatively speaking -- in the years before and after me the valedictorian would typically have a GPA in the 5.2+ range, and usually there would be one or two other students hot on his or her heels.)

Anyway, even though I benefitted from these stupid policies, they still annoy me.

I believe that some years after I graduated my calculus teacher succeeded in convincing the administration that if the top two students' GPAs different by .01 points or less that there was no meaningful distinction to be made between them and they should both be given the honor of valedictorian, a feat which I think is pretty impressive.

Comments

We had "factors"

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

that amounted to pretty much the same thing, "factor 4" for normal courses and "factor 5" for honors courses, where the grade was multiplied by the factor divided by 4. Only a few remedial courses were factor 3, and there was an extra boost of factor 6 for AP courses. I think there were also a couple factor-7 200-level AP courses.

Our grades were all given in percentages, not letter grades. Finishing a year early, I didn't take any AP courses and dropped out of honors English to handle the extra classes, so I wound up with "only" a 97.something% average, just below the 99th percentile in the class I joined. Having some AP courses to boost me up over 100% still wouldn't have put me anywhere near the top two people in my original class.

We argued sometimes about the exact weighting, but I don't think it's so stupid to make some kind of adjustment for the difficulty of the courses. If you care more about being recognized for your grades than about getting an education, regardless of the system, you're going to be recognized for your grades more than you get educated. Imagine if there were no grade-point incentive for the grade-grubbers to take the honors courses. They'd slide along in the normal classes getting straight 100's, learning next to nothing, waiting for each other to slip up by one point, and annoying the hell out of the kids that actually needed some classroom attention to learn the material (not to mention the teachers). I think that would be a LOT stupider than locking them up in the schmart kids' ghetto of honors classes.

Re: We had "factors"

[jwgh]

Imagine if there were no grade-point incentive for the grade-grubbers to take the honors courses. They'd slide along in the normal classes getting straight 100's, learning next to nothing, waiting for each other to slip up by one point, and annoying the hell out of the kids that actually needed some classroom attention to learn the material (not to mention the teachers).

You think that anything would pry these kids away from taking Calculus or whatever? They probably all want to go to Harvard or something, so I think it would be pretty hard to pry them away from the APs.

The system might have worked OK if there was any uniformity in the difficulty of the 'honors' courses, but there wasn't as far as I could tell -- some were difficult, some were pretty easy, etc. And a full point difference is pretty extreme -- it's saying that even if you get perfect scores in all your tests in a 'standard' level class it's still only worth as much as a C+ in an honors class. That's pretty extreme.

"standard" level

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

Yeah, as I say, we didn't have anything like "standard" level; factor 3 courses were purely remedial reading and such. Even typing was factor 4 right along with all the Regents-level classes (in New York, we have standardized final exams for many high-school classes, drawn up by the Board of Regents). And, actually, the difficulty of the honors classes was pretty uniform for us, particularly in math and science, where the honors classes up through 11th grade were basically just the Regents classes taken a year early, and the senior honors classes were the AP classes. HEYWAITASECOND. Doesn't that mean my senior English and social studies classes should have been counted as factor 5, especially since I was doubled up on them? I WUZ ROBBED!

I still doubt I would have been Valedictorian, but I could have gotten the BIG Honor Key instead of the dinky one.

Hmmm, it looks like they finally did change the factoring at some point, and added a standard-ish level:And the Honor Keys now are based on an absolute standard rather than percentile--in a system that really works against early graduates, because it uses an index that's a sum rather than an average. I can't quite work out from the Student Handbook (http://arlingtonschools.org/ArlingtonHigh/ArlingtonHSStudentHandbook200405.pdf) exactly how the index is computed, though, to make a cumulative index of 680 for somewhere from 22 to 26 credits the cutoff. Maybe the administration can't, either, and that's why they have to start computing them in January rather than April (or March, now that they go by quarters) after the penultimate marking period.

Re: We had "factors"

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

In high school I had the attitude that "anyone who takes honors English or Social Studies deserves what he gets" and refused to do so. AFAIK there was no weighting in the GPA. Not that I'm sure we even had GPAs, at least ones that were routinely given out -- I certainly don't ever recall knowing what mine was. I think we had numerical grades and they just averaged those. So of course my average got a boost from my non-honors English and Social Studies classes... making me Salutatorian.

my calculus teacher succeeded in convincing the administration that if the top two students' GPAs different by .01 points or less that there was no meaningful distinction to be made between them

I can think of a certain temporary resident of a certain city between Maryland and Virginia who could stand to learn that principle.

I deserved what I got, all right.

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

My honors World History teacher got fed up with my expecting actually to learn stuff in class instead of reading ahead, and made me show her daily notes to demonstrate I'd done the homework. I wouldn't have gotten through college English and history classes without somebody to pound it through my head that the in-class learning BUILDS on the reading and so depends on its being done in advance.

I'm not sure I deserved the digs I got from her boyfriend who taught algebra and trig, making noises as though I must like him a lot to do his homework, but he actually only did that a couple times, and not in a way to give anything away to the non-honors history students.

[manfire.livejournal.com]

Something like that was how it worked in my high school, which had the "gifted and talented" classes that were higher-up than the "honors" classes which were higher-up than the normal classes. But the stupidest grade-related thing was in one of my elementary school classes, where the teacher gave out little gifts as incentives for kids to get good grades. For some incomprehensible reason, this included little gifts for getting a + on the end of the grade, and a penalty for getting a - on the grade, even though this meant that someone who got an A- was penalized while somebody who got a B+ was rewarded. (At least, that was the impression I got; possibly the teacher found some way around this outcome.)



JM

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

At my high school I think there were 4 levels for most academic courses -- honors, smart kids, average kids, and retardos. The base GPA scale was 0.0-4.0, but the honors courses scaled from 1.0-5.0. There was no penalty for being a retardo.

I ended up ranked #3 in my class with a cumulative GPA of 4.16 or something like that, trailing #2 by only a few hundredths of a point. If I had taken AP Chem instead of Band my senior year, as the valedictorian and salutatorian had, I surely would have garnered one of the speechgiving slots at graduation. But that wouldn't have been any fun!