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SPA should maintain its current unweighted grading system
March 7, 2017
Although the GPA boost might appeal to students who are already enrolled in honors classes, SPA’s academic structure does not support a weighted grading system, and its policy should stay that way.
Weighted grades are most applicable in large public high schools that have a more diverse range of academic abilities and offer a larger selection of classes: honors, AP, IB or regular. In these schools, a weighted GPA system works to distinguish the stronger and more motivated students out of a much larger sample pool, specifically for class rank and college admissions. Given the limited class offerings and inherent level of competition in the college-preparatory environment, weighted grades would not be beneficial at a small school like SPA. However, students should not fear that they are at a disadvantage compared to their public school counterparts for not having weighted GPAs to report on their college applications.
“College admission officers make it their business to carefully and closely read a student’s transcript and achievement, as measured by grades, in the context of the type of school they attend,” Director of College Counseling and Academic Planning Mary Hill said.
On top of the holistic approach that admission officers take, many colleges recalculate weighted GPAs to their own scale, or only consider the percent grade rather than a weighted one. SPA is known as an academically challenging school, and colleges take that into consideration when reviewing a student’s unweighted grades.
“When in the college search process, you hear admission officers saying ‘take the most challenging courses at your high school.’ Choosing to come to SPA is taking the most challenging courses,” Hill said.
The intensity of honors classes versus non-honors classes is relative. All SPA courses are designed to push the students in them, just varying the depth of content and the pace it is covered. Weighted grades would not recognize comparable academic efforts and achievements between levels, but would instead benefit students who are naturally adept at certain subjects.
Adopting the weighted grading system with the current honors courses available would give an unfair advantage to students who excel in science and math, but would not include students with fine arts or social studies talent. No honors level is offered for English or History–except for one senior elective–because these discussion-based classes are intended to include every voice in order to diversify the students’ understanding of, and appreciation for, history and literature.
A weighted grading system is not applicable to the scope and intensity of SPA’s curriculum. While weighted GPAs might benefit students at larger high schools where challenging courses have to be sought out, SPA students are pushed to reach their potential regardless of what level class they are in, and their effort should not be quantified or compared to students in honors classes. SPA’s current grading system, which works on a 4.0 scale, should be maintained into the foreseeable future.
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Richard Lahti • Apr 9, 2021 at 2:41 pm
There is a factual flaw in the argument presented by the “against” editor, I work at a state university in Minnesota. It is now 2021, and with the pandemic many universities have gone test-optional or test-blind, and many automatic academic scholarship criteria have shifted to pure GPA (as opposed to GPA + ACT) – for example, the scholarships at Winona. In conversation with reps in the admissions and scholarship office of multiple state universities, it sounds like whatever GPA is submitted by the high school is the GPA used, without any further delving. So if you go to Albert Lea, where AP/PSEO/Concurrent enrollment classes get a bonus point (5.0 for an A on a 4.0 scale) and because of those bonus points, your 3.8 (unweighted GPA) gets bumped to a 4.0, schools will use that (weighted) 4.0 to hand you a scholarship, even though you had some A minuses or B’s. Conversely, if you are at one of the schools, like SPA, that does not weight, and you took the exact same AP/PSEO/Concurrent schedule as the kid from Albert Lea, and did better (3.9 unweighted) your 3.9 (unweighted) will be compared to his 4.0 (weighted) and you will be found lacking if the required minimum is 4.0 EVEN THOUGH YOUR ACTUAL GRADES WERE BETTER. Maybe no student from SPA would stoop to attend a Winona State, but for the 40% of schools (mostly in the outstate I suspect) that don’t weight grades, Winona would be a perfectly decent school and qualifying for $3500/year to help would be nice… and it would stink to get beat out by someone with lower grades in the exact same classes.