Is changing GPA system best step for local students?
With similar debate taking place in the General Assembly, the school board discussed Tuesday night the possibility of moving to an unweighted GPA system at Warren County High School.
The impetus for considering the change, said board Curriculum Committee member Mike Holland, is to make the school’s grading system more compatible with the requirements of the Tennessee Educational Lottery Scholarship Program, which uses the unweighted system.
For the past decade or so, the high school has used a weighted GPA system which rewards students for taking more challenging classes, including honors courses and advanced placement courses. Instead of the traditional system in which an A is worth 4 points in all classes, here an A is worth 5 points in honor courses and 6 points in AP courses.
In addition to becoming more compatible with the lottery scholarship guidelines, proponents of the unweighted GPA also contend it equalizes students across disciplines, putting students taking usually low-point vocational classes, for example, on a level playing field with their academic track counterparts.
AP coordinator Carol Chambers worries, however, that an unweighted system would discourage students from taking the rigorous courses. There needs to be some sort of short-term incentive for students, she said.
To that end, Chambers, along with high school assistant principal for curriculum Dr. Haskell Greer, presented the board with a number of suggested incentives. These included proposals to add between 5 to 10 points to an AP student’s six-week grades and for the system to pay for a student’s AP test fee if he or she passes the college-credit-providing test.
While she would prefer the weighted GPA system to still be kept if only for in-school purposes, Chambers urged the board to delay any action until the General Assembly makes its decision on the matter.
On Wednesday, the state Senate approved a bill requiring the state Board of Education to establish a task force of education professionals to make recommendations by the end of the year concerning a statewide grading system.
In addition to how courses should be weighted, the task force would define what constitutes an honors course and set uniform grades across the state.
This latter consideration was undertaken because of the discrepancy of grading systems throughout Tennessee. This puts some students at a disadvantage for lottery scholarships.
“I don’t want our students in Warren County denied the chance to compete for lottery scholarships because the grading systems aren’t the same,” said state Sen. Jerry Cooper.
For example, the HOPE scholarship requires a student to have either a 19 ACT score or a B average. At Warren County High School, a B is equivalent to numerical grades between 84 and 92. Other schools, though, may have a more lenient grading scale, such as making a B between 80 and 89, thus making their students’ scholarship eligibility lower than that of local students.
The Curriculum Committee is set to resume discussion of the unweighted GPA debate later this month.