Monday, February 4, 2008

What Should a B Be?

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This front page Washington Post story about the different grading systems is more than a month old now, but I held onto it until this week because on Wednesday LCPS parents will see first semester report cards come home. The story has to do with grading disparities between localities, and compares Fairfax to Montgomery.

Simply put, Fairfax high schools set a higher bar for grades than those in Montgomery. To earn an A in Fairfax, it takes a score of 94 to 100. In Montgomery, it takes a score of 90 or higher. Standards for grading in the two counties, including bonus point calculations, are so out of sync that it appears possible for a Fairfax student to earn a 3.5 grade-point average for the same work that gets a Montgomery student a 4.6 GPA.

The article discusses the various impacts this can have on a student's college admission prospects and scholarship opportunities, and reviews the very few studies done on the issue.
I hadn't been aware of or given any thought to this issue until a parent brought it to my attention, so I'm not taking any position, I'm just bringing up the issue for your consideration. Michelle Zuckerman writes the following, printed here with her permission. She makes a number of statements that I have not attempted to verify and a number of others which are her opinion. LCPS would surely dispute much of what she says. I'm sure many parents would agree with her and many will disagree. I leave it for you to judge. I welcome your thoughts in the comments.

I put the Loudoun grading scale up against the Fairfax and Montgomery County scales and found the results interesting.

I have long maintained that our grading scale is too harsh, particularly at the lower end of the scale. The adjustments made several years ago really didn't fix all the problems. It seems to me that earning a grade of 80-81 should not earn you a "C" and that an 82-84 should get you more than "C+". In addition, I don't understand why a "+" added to a grade is only worth .3, rather than .5 points (as it is in Fairfax and Montgomery).

The comparison laid out in the paper highlighting the differences between two students taking the same courses in Fairfax and Montgomery resulting in drastically different GPAs is made even more interesting when you figure out the GPA a Loudoun student would earn for the same courses. We're right there with Fairfax's 3.5, far away from the 4.6 a Montgomery County student would earn.

As the woman interviewed in the article points out, our students are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to college admissions and scholarships. Now the standard line the guidance counselors offer is that "All the colleges know that Loudoun has the toughest grading system." While that may be true for VA schools, it is certainly not the case everywhere else. GPA is the first thing that admissions counselors look at. The same is true when applying for scholarships, particularly for merit scholarships. Loudoun students are at a definite disadvantage because the difficulty of our grading system makes earning a good GPA harder, not so much for the brightest students, but for the average to above average student.

It also fuels the competitiveness of grades at the high school level. The pressure on our kids to succeed is out of control. The push to get as many kids into AP courses and for students to take as many AP courses as they can before they get out of high school is beyond reason (and caused, I believe, in great part, by LCPS' desire to score high on the Post's Challenge Index). We congratulate ourselves on the record number of kids taking AP exams, but conveniently forget that we eliminated the honors courses in all of our history and government courses, forcing many kids into AP classes before they're ready or because their parents don't want them in the academic courses because that's where the behavior problems are. And the pressure and competition lead to all kinds of undesirable behaviors, among all students.

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5 comments:

  1. As an experienced teacher I do disagree with a number of the statements that Ms Zuckerman made.

    In terms of college admissions, most schools are aware of the issues surrrounding grading. And from the recent college tours I have been on many throw out the provided GPA calculations and create their own (UMD- College Park as one example). They also take into account the level of the course.

    The .3 is standard on all grading systems (even in college). I have not seen any system use a .5 differential as she suggests. (Fairfax does weight honors courses, unlike Loudoun)

    I don't know Ms Zuckerman, but if she doesn't teach AP and Academic classes then she shouldn't make such broad generalizations. The face of AP is greatly changing, especially in this county.

    I also feel very strongly about how people mischaracterize applying to college. Ultimately for most schools, applicants are not just numbers. They formulate an entire application process because they care about the whole student.
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  2. Another Loudoun parentFeb 5, 2008 11:52 AM
    I certainly don't understand the grading scale in Loudoun schools. Having completed my college degree a couple years ago, I can't see where an 82-84 score is a C. The standard grading criteria in my college classes was simple... 90-100 was an A, 80-89 was a B, 70-79 was a C, anything below a 60 was an F. In a Loudoun school, the same score of 70 is given a failing grade.

    I love these teachers who try to tell us that colleges "look at the whole student". If this is the case, why can't a HS graduate get into a 4-year school without an SAT/ACT test score?

    As was mentioned in the blog, there's also the competition for scholarship dollars. Who's going to get those regional/national awards, the student showing a 3.5 GPA or one with a 4.6 GPA?

    It's time to face reality and standardize the grading curves.
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  3. This is the age of computers and we have so many numbers that can be crunched to weigh a prospective students that we shouldn't fret over differences in scale. It is relative not absolute numbers that provide meaning. Out of context a GPA of 3.78 means very little.

    An admission officer might use GPA to rank students within a school system but SATs are normalized and are used to compare different school systems.

    I like it that we have more AP exams because now we have an addition metric that is standard across the country. An AP teacher can't hand out A's like candy and then have students gets 1's on the AP exam. Likewise a student who receives a C but gets a 4 on the AP exam can clearly claimed to have been cheated.

    My experience is that grades are too highly inflated in Loudoun. A grading scale with more than 40% of the students clustered in the A-B range (i.e. the number of Honor Roll students) means that parents can't differentiate how their child stacks up against their peers academically because everyone is getting A's. (Peer comparison is important in deciding if a child will do better in an AP course or an honors course.)
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  4. I am a former college admissions officer and currently a co-founder of the Fairfax County Fairgrade coalition that has gathered months of research data on college admissions and merit-scholarship. From both my professional experience and my current research efforts, I will state that both the Loudoun and the Fairfax grading scales are atypical and do have a negative impact on their students. The US Dept of Education study concluded that the traditional 100-90=A grading scale is the most commonly used among US high schools. In addition, many university admissions offices have confirmed that they DON'T recalculate GPAs but take it directly off the transcript. In addition, when a public school system has 68% or more of its students going on to 4 year colleges, then at least 68% should have a 3.0 UNWEIGHTED gpa...College bound students working hard should be able to earn at least a B. We have found this is not necessarily the case in Fairfax. Furthermore, Fairgrade has identified 15 school districts in the US that have converted their tougher grading scales to the 100-90 grading scale in the last 3 years alone, because of concerns that students were being adversely affected with respect to admission and scholarship money. The issue isn't grade inflation, it's grade DEFLATION in comparison to other nationally ranked high schools.

    Feel free to contact our Fairgrade group at Fairgrade.fcps@gmail.com
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  5. I agree with the former college admissions officer in regard to grading. As adults we take courses and expect to earn the same certifications whether we take the courses in CA or VA. Our students should be treated the same. SAT scores are not lowered or raised depending on where the child takes the SAT...are they? No location adjustment is fair or warranted in grading students. Think about colleges that receive applications from all over the country. Are they really all creating their own as the experienced teacher suggests? And if they are...the grade change to a 10 point scale will not hurt anyone or change anything except the childrens scholarship chances. Please...make the grading equitable and fair in relation to other jurisdictions.
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