posted by Joe Polk at 11:18 AM /
At high schools across the country, more and more students are graduating with grade-point averages of A, including some whose averages are well above the traditional 4.0 for an A.
Grades -- some weighted with extra points or fractions of points for taking harder courses -- are getting so high that a solid B is becoming the new C, which years ago was considered average.
Consider these examples:
At Mt. Lebanon High School, roughly 20 percent of the senior class of about 470 students have weighted grade point averages of 4.6 or higher, and averages occasionally reach as high as 5.2.
Link: www.post-gazette.com/pg/07154/791202-298.stm
Grades -- some weighted with extra points or fractions of points for taking harder courses -- are getting so high that a solid B is becoming the new C, which years ago was considered average.
Consider these examples:
At Mt. Lebanon High School, roughly 20 percent of the senior class of about 470 students have weighted grade point averages of 4.6 or higher, and averages occasionally reach as high as 5.2.
Link: www.post-gazette.com/pg/07154/791202-298.stm
Labels: high school, school district
15 Comments:
These articles often slide around the true issue. The true issue isn't that students receive extra weight for honors/AP classes, hence enhancing their QPA (not GPA). The true issue is that teachers/schools have lowered their standards and distribute B grades for average work. That's what grade inflation is - started at colleges 2+ decades ago and has filtered down to high school. I imagine it's as much a symptom of our self-esteem culture as it is a practice designed to aid college admissions.
**Anonymous Mom of 3**
No Child Left Behind is forcing 100% of children to be proficient by 2014.
Proficient is defined as a C grade by Standard & Poor’s School Matters website.
The High School bulletin board on the left of the front drive thru entrance had a list of honor students posted there last year. The honor roll was a C grade and a 3.0 average.
We have made a joke of letter grades and we need a system of percentage grades to show the community the schools are performing. Any less of a system proves a C is an unearned B
The lowering of grades started before no child left behind.
Remember the Bell Curve we learned about in high school? Grades should be distributed along a similar curve. That can never happen, though, because then you would have to admit that a certain percentage should fail, and failure is not an option (for either the kids, parents, teacher or school district) anymore. Where I grew up we had vocational programs (body shop, wood shop, etc.) for kids that we knew were never going to cut it academically....
Using a bell curve -- even if it makes sense, which it may not -- doesn't assure that anyone will fail, or even that the "average" grade will move from a B, in any given school or class, to a C or to anything else.
The problem here is that society has come to expect that schools, like other institutions, will rank people. (Grading isn't an essential part of education; grades were invented long after schools were invented.) All rankings have elements of arbitrariness, that is, they bear a highly imperfect relationship to "the truth" (if that exists) and/or to the goals of the institution.
What do you mean when you say "the honor roll was a C grade and a 3.0 average"? I believe it is a 3.0 average with no grade below a "c" on a report card. And as the previous post noted, grade inflation preceded NCLB.
**Anonymous Mom of 3**
I guess one of the problems is that if 1 school district does it, every other school district needs to.
Harvard doesn't come look at every school. If they get 2 applications (a 4.8 from St Clair and a 4.0 from Lebo), they will choose the 4.8 from St. Clair (all else being equal)
As AMo3 noted in her first comment on this post, grade inflation may reflect what kids and their parents want and expect as much as it reflects a strategy for maximizing college or grad school admissions. (Grade inflation is, in other words, a cousin of the Lake Woebegon effect; the point of the grade is to make the student and the family feel special, not to measure achievement.) Lebo shouldn't worry that it has to raise grades in order to ensure that its graduates have abundant college opportunities. Colleges and grad schools will find ways to select the students they want to select, grade inflation or no grade inflation.
Given a 4.8 from St. Clair and a 4.0 from Lebo, all other things aren't equal -- which slights neither school -- simply because Harvard will know whether or not the school's overall program is demanding. If the high schools are equally demanding but use different grading scales, Harvard won't care whether it takes the 4.8 over the 4.0. GPA isn't the point. For the elite Ivy colleges, the question is never "should I get straight A's or take all AP courses and get A's and B's?" or "what GPA/QPA do I need to get in?" The answer is "take all AP courses and get straight A's" and let the GPA/QPA take care of itself.
In a nutshell, that's a reason *not* to get too obsessed over Lebo's access to the elite Ivy colleges.
Of course, Harvard itself is the capital of grade inflation.
Harvard sits beside a body of water known formally as the Charles River and informally as Lake Woebegon.
I used Harvard as an example but go ahead and pick any college not here in Pittsburgh. They get 20,000 applications for 2000 spots.....Who will they choose? The Best gpa or will they go to Mt Lebanon and find out that they don't curve.
Anon,
I've been involved with Ivy admissions for almost 25 years. The elite colleges look hard at grades, but especially at the upper levels, they look even harder at other things. When you have 20,000 kids applying for 2,000 admission tickets, at least half of those 20,000 will have fabulous academic records. More than 2,000 of them will be class valedictorians; many more than 2,000 will have straight-A averages. Lots of valedictorians and straight-A students don't get accepted to top colleges. Colleges can see through inflated grades (yes, in fact, at many colleges they do learn enough about the high schools to figure out what the real standards are) -- even while other departments, as JP points out, are engaged in grade inflation of their own.
To follow up on Mike's comment, selective colleges/universities will come to Mt. Lebanon (until we really screw things up) because admissions folks recognize that Lebo's curriculum is appropriately rigorous, students perform well once they reach college, and by golly they get high SAT scores to boot.
I have volunteered as a college greeter at the high school and have had the opportunity to speak with admissions reps - the selective schools will tell you they have a short list of schools in Pgh that they visit and Mt. Lebanon is always one of them.
**Anonymous Mom of 3**
Harvard???? According to JP’s link Harvard rates ½ of its students as A- or better.
Why would you aspire to send your kid to a college that lies about student achievement?
Boston must be funny like that? Because I'd rank 1/2 of the Red Sox baseball team as A- baseball players or better.
Please retort.
In that light, we can say whatever we want to say as far as GPW of courses and such. So can everyone else. Harvard (et al.) would be foolish to evaluate based solely on the GPA's reported by the schools, because of such. They need to look at independent, universal factors, and things like:
* SAT score
* # AP tests taken & scores
* # hours community service
can be measured easily across all the applicants. In order to crack the GPA nut, they'd have to have some measure of "comparative curriculum difficulty", which (by Mike's comments) it sounds like they do, and MtLHS ranks up high.
Good, so the collegiate evaluation
"problem" is solved, and the article's full of crap, because AMom3's first comment is correct - the article is looking at QPA's and going "OMG these r t2oo close 2 4.0!!!11! NEWS!!!1"
Now, back to my point. Clearly, 1/2 of the Red Sox are better than the average Red Sock. 1/2 aren't. But you can say 1/2 of them are better than average baseball players because players ain't all Sox.
So - should 1/2 of students at MtLHS be considered below the MtLHS average? YES. Should 1/2 of them be branded C or worse students? If the article wants to say "A C's a C's a C", then probably: no.
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