Tuesday, January 09, 2007

School Beat: Guidance Staff Reviews, Rejects "Weighted" Grades

On Monday night, Ms. Morestad, Mrs. Verkuilen and Mrs. Ellison reviewed the results of a task force that examined "weighted grades" and whether this would be a good idea to be implemented in the Evansville School District.

The reason for the examination was that in the current situation, there is a disinsentive for students to take hard courses----i.e. why take a difficult math or science course when one could get an A easily in another course. That is the theory anyway.

In their contact with college admission personnel, the guidance staff found that colleges mostly recalculate the GPA to the 4.0 scale, and said that in general they use high school grades only as a measure of how a student did among the local peers and found objective data from standard tests more useful for admission purposes. In short, colleges want students to take courses with solid content, and will look to the transcript to see what the student took.

In summary, the task force found that many schools that used weighted grades were unhappy with the result, and there was confusion. In the end, the staff recommended not to implement a system of weighted grading at EHS.

Click on the audio to listen in to the presentation.






Guidance Staff reviewed the "weighted grades" concept, pros and cons, and rejected it for Evansville School District


MP3 File

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