Make PWCS's New Grading Scale Retroactive

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Author: antonio.meadows

Started: April 25, 2009, 6:08:26 pm

Target: PWC School Board

Category: Education

Supporters:

Goal:

100,000

Goal Progress:

Status

Active

On April 1, 2009 the Prince William County School Board passed a revised 10-Point Grading Scale to replace the current grading scale. Although this is a step in the right direction, we have not achieved equality just yet. The new grading scale to be implemented next year will not be made retroactive; meaning that your past letter grades will not change, therefore your GPA will remain the same, and the transcripts you send out to colleges will not be an accurate representation of your academic achievements. For instance, if a student earned a 92 percentile grade in a class a student took this year, a college will see a B+ on that student's transcript. Next year if a student earned a 92 percentile grade in a class, the college will see an A for that class on that student's transcript. The colleges do not see percentile grades on student's transcripts, and thus may be led to believe that a student performed worse in the class the student took this year than a class a student would take next year. Although the student and his or her parent(s) would know that this is not true as you earned the same percentile grade. But the colleges will not know this, only the students, their parents, and their teaches will, which does the student no good when competing for admission into the colleges of the student's choice.

One of the main reasons why the new grading scale was passed was to ensure that the GPAs of students in PWC were fair when compared to those of other counties in Northern Virginia. If students' grades from the past are not to be changed, it defeats the purpose of having the new grading scale implemented in the first place. Arlington County, a county whose school system is often ranked significantly higher than Prince William County's school system, has had a 10-point scale for over a decade now, with an "A" granting a student a 4.0, a "B" granting a student a 3.0, and so on and so forth (Arlington County does not use "+s" in their grading scale). When compared to those students, PWC students are still at a disadvantage. We are copying Fairfax County, but their County is composed of students who achieve much more than the average student in Prince William County, with the average SAT scores of their minorities being greater than the average SAT score of the White population in PWC (the White population generally has the highest composite SAT score in a county). Although PWC likes to believe that their school system is equal to Fairfax's it simply is not in terms of student achievement based on standardized test scores, one of the most important factors considered by colleges for admission.

Another reason the grading scale was implemented was because 55% of all colleges examined by Fairgrade (the organization which led to the implementation of the new grading scale in Farifax) do not recalucalte GPA to put students on an even playing field. So if PWC schools does not recalculate its students' GPAs, no one will, meaning PWC students' GPAs will still look as unimpressive as compared to other high achieving districts which currently use 10-point scales when the PWC students apply to colleges, (this applies to the Class of 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and possibly 2014, if the members of the class of 2014 took foreign languages and advanced math classes in middle school).

In order to combat this inequality we must make our voices heard, otherwise, otherwise our students will still be at a significant disadvantage.