Need to implement 10-point scale
Tom and Mary Spitz
2008-07-01 12:08:59
Thank you very much for the supportive article in the “Our View” section of last week’s paper.Our daughter is an alpine ski racer and a member of the Whitetail Ski Team. She races in Pennsylvania and hopes to ski in college. So, as you might imagine, we are looking at schools up north. I have spent hours on the phone with admissions counselors, assistant directors, etc. With so many different grading scales each college has a different formula for their initial screening. However, every school says the same thing. If your county has a 90-92 as a B+, then it is a B+ and will not be considered as anything but a B+. The GPA is what it is. How this affects admissions, I am not certain because of the many different ways colleges work. Logic tells us, with all things being equal, except that her competition is from a 10-point school district, she may be at a disadvantage. This may affect students at all levels, not just the ones with the higher GPA.
At this point, the school she is favoring does award merit scholarships. The amount of this scholarship varies and can be thousands of dollars. The students usually awarded this scholarship are the students with a 4.0 GPA and strong SAT scores. We have just received our daughter’s report card. At this point, her cumulative GPA is 3.99. Her final grades for this year (with the exception of AP world history at 91) are a 94 or higher. People must understand that there are colleges that recalculate the GPA by unweighting it (remove the .7 for the AP class) and removing the +/- from the grade. This would bring her GPA down and therefore possibly make her not eligible for the merit scholarship pool. Many schools have a “NO EXCEPTIONS” rule to the scholarship GPA requirement. That rule may also pertain to scholar programs and honor programs. With the hardest year of school ahead of her, our concerns that she is not on a level playing field are becoming very worrisome.
According to my research, this grading scale also affects NCAA qualifications, but that is another story. It does hurt the “gifted athlete” who may not be the “gifted student.”
It’s obvious that the teachers and administration that support the current grading scale have the best interest of the students in mind. I would simply ask them to consider the possibility that in the current environment this scale is working against the students instead of for them.
Tom and Mary Spitz
Sterling