District GPA Plan Didn’t Make the Grade

The original idea sounded great to the San Diego city school board when it came before members last year: Award an extra grade point in a tough course to high school students who otherwise might stay in an easier class to maintain a higher grade average.

An “A” worth four points in a regular chemistry course would be valued at five points in an advanced chemistry class. A “B” grade in the advanced course would be rated at four, and so on.

But as soon as the weighted grade point program took effect last September, complaints began rolling in from high school students, their parents and some principals. The charges ranged from unfairness to students who took advanced courses in previous years without getting extra points to concerns that too many courses were being weighted.

So in mid-January--two weeks before the end of the first semester--the board reversed itself, deciding to cancel the program and opting to reinstitute it on a gradual basis beginning next fall.

Report Card Surprise

And now the complaints are coming from the other side, from students who took harder courses in anticipation of the weighted grade and didn’t find out until they got their report cards at the end of the semester that the program had been done away with.

District Supt. Tom Payzant said that in retrospect, the situation is a classic case of how not to go about putting a program into place.

“Every time I thought a (final) decision had been made, there would be another motivation (and point) to consider,” he said last week. “I kind of went through the stage of being idealistic and optimistic about the program to then becoming angry and philosophical, that no matter what was decided, there would still be another round.”

But for the time being, Payzant and the five-member board insist they will consider the item no further, despite continuing disagreement in the community over whether more students were hurt by the original decision or by the reversal.

“The cause is noble--to encourage kids to take advanced classes--but the means of carrying it out was not done as well as it should have been,” said Barbara Brooks, principal at Point Loma High School.

UC Has Similar System

The district’s weighted grade program grew out of a system used by the University of California and several well-respected private colleges. Those institutions weight grades in certain advanced high school courses in their admissions process. The practice is used to reward the applications of students who take more challenging courses.

In putting its program together, the San Diego Unified School District decided to award extra points for advanced courses in grades 9 through 12, whereas most universities add points on transcripts only for those courses in the junior and senior years. The district also acknowledged that the program could result in some students with grade point averages above four, possibly affecting class rank, the designation of valedictorians and eligibility for graduation with academic distinction.

“In hindsight, I guess we should have tried to anticipate better the problem of immediate implementation and phased it in,” Payzant said. “The reason I didn’t do that was that there were a number of parents in the community who wanted it right away so kids could start immediately.”

But opponents popped up immediately once the implications of weighted grades began to sink in. Some parents complained that their children with high grade point averages who had taken advanced courses in previous years would be penalized in the valedictorian competition because their grades had not been weighted.

Valedictorian Issue

Payzant and high school principals tried to solve that problem by allowing individual schools to consider for valedictorian status any student with all A’s, whether earned on the traditional system or the weighted system.

“I felt that any student who goes through this school with all A’s, no matter the course, deserves to be a valedictorian,” said J.M. Tarvin, principal at La Jolla High School.

School board member Susan Davis, who represents the multiethnic Mid-City area, said other principals believed that any student working at his or her best, in an advanced class or not, should be rewarded.

“And kids working hard for an A in a regular class (make up) a lot of our students,” Davis said, “especially our Asian kids. They may be getting one of their A’s in an ESL (English as a second language) class, but principals feel that those kids, under the language disadvantages they are working, should get credit the same as a native English speaker taking an advanced course.”

Felt Penalized

Point Loma High’s Brooks said students taking journalism, yearbook or other specialty courses believed they were being penalized.

But concerns ranged beyond simply the valedictorian issue. At some high school campuses, counselors gave little information to students about the weighted grade program and few students took advantage of it. Also, many principals believed that the district included too many courses on the weighted list, especially in the area of humanities.

“There was a problem with the initial dissemination of information,” said Principal Shirley Peterson of Patrick Henry High School. “Here the information varied from counselor to counselor.”

La Jolla’s Tarvin said his college counselors feared spending an inordinate amount of time explaining the new weighted system to colleges and universities, which use variations of the district’s system. More than 80% of his graduates go on to college.

“And I had problems about deciding which college courses some of my students are already taking (at UC San Diego and elsewhere) should be weighted and (how to) explain that on transcripts,” Tarvin said.

Asked for Halt

As a result, Payzant--using as a basis recommendations from a committee of principals--asked the board to stop the program and reinstitute it on a more limited basis beginning in September, 1988, with grades 9 and 10. The board agreed in mid-January.

But now there has been reaction from students who signed up for tough courses in September with the expectation of a weighted grade.

“I worked real hard in advanced biology to get a B, and, if weighted, it would have been an A,” said Curt Myron, a 10th-grader at Mission Bay High. “I think it’s unfair to change things at the last minute. . . . A lot of students decided not to take the class this (second) semester as a result. . . . They want to take an average course to keep their GPA (grade point average) higher.”

Maryann Powell said her daughter, a senior at Mission Bay, may now miss the 3.6 cutoff for graduation with distinction as a result of receiving an unweighted B in her advanced-placement English class.

‘Seems So Discouraging’

“They change things in the middle of the stream, and it seems so discouraging that they are moving everything down to the level of mediocrity--that’s how I see it,” Powell said.

Both Tarvin and Brooks said the action probably was not fair to such students--almost all of them college-bound--but added that universities will still weight the grades for admission.

“We include an explanation of course (difficulty) with every transcript we send out,” Tarvin said.

“It’s too bad the (reversal) happened the way it did, but the students still have earned credit for upper-division-type courses that all colleges will understand,” Brooks said.

“But I understand students who feel it’s always nice to have a grade point average higher than it would normally be.”