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Gaining weight, losing curves

By: Michelle Hu <[email protected]>

Sophomore Daniel B. Lange is currently taking two courses this semester that are weighted: honors chemistry and honors pre-calculus. Both of these classes have gone through changes in difficulty due to weighted grades, because the teachers are now making the classes harder by reducing or doing away with curves and extra credit altogether.

Tim Mylin, Lange’s honors chemistry teacher, used to give curves to his honors chemistry students. Now that the class is weighted, he no longer grades on a curve. “The only reason I curved before in honors chemistry was because it balanced the degree of difficulty in the honors course versus a regular chemistry course,” Mylin said. “I tried to teach the courses so that it didn’t matter which class you took, you’d get the same grade and the curve helped make that possible.”

Janice Mitchener, Lange’s honors pre-calculus teacher, said that she gave extra credit to her students during second semester but will not be offering it anymore. “When I taught honors classes, I always felt that (since) we did not have weighted grades, I wanted to make sure the grades were not lower than what I thought maybe an honors class should be,” she said. “Since there was not (a weighted system), what I would do was I would make sure the class average or the test average for the entire class was around, I would pick a percent, low 80s, somewhere… And then I would make sure all the test averages were there; if not, I would curve the tests, as well as offer extra credit.”

Carmel decided to institute weighted grades because, according to history teacher Will Ellery, who was on the weighted grades committee, its administrators and staff said the higher GPAs would help students show colleges that they were taking a difficult course load in high school.

“There are probably a variety of factors,” Ellery said, “but the primary factor is that many, many other schools, not just locally, but nationally, have gone to weighted grades for a couple of reasons: to increase the rigor, to try and encourage kids to take (a) little bit more rigorous academic load. But I think, also, we have a responsibility to our kids especially here to prepare them to have the opportunities to go to any universities they want to. And with so many other schools maintaining weighted grades, our kids are applying to colleges, and we’re not necessarily on a level playing field.”

Now, due to weighted grades, students can have lower grades in some classes but still have a higher GPA overall. This was incentive for Mylin to change the way he gives students curves.

He said, “Now, the curve is pretty much going to be nonexistent because the weighted grade more than compensates for the honors course.” He said that when a student receives a grade in a honors chemistry class, the GPA is 12.5 percent higher than the GPA in a regular class. “The way I see it, it’s better than me having a 5 percent curve,” Mylin said.

The curve Mylin gave last year was helpful to his students then, according to junior Navya Kumar, who was in Mylin’s honors chemistry class sophomore year. “There’d be an 89, and it’d become a 94. It was like half a letter grade,” she said. “He’d throw out the top five scores, and he’d choose the next highest score, and it’d only be around a 96, or a 95, so then, that’s how much of a curve we’d get.”

This year, Mylin’s students will no longer be able to receive that extra 5 percent, which means that those whose grades are borderline won’t have them bumped up about half a grade. This causes somewhat of a problem, because even though weighted grades show how difficult a student’s course load is, some colleges still “unweight” grades from applications.

Ellery said, “It depends on which college you ask. Some of the colleges say they ‘unweight.’ And so, they will turn all of them into a four-point scale. Some other colleges have told us in frank consideration that they simply don’t have time to unweight, considering the multitude of applications they get. We need to be on the side of caution and present the best image we can with a weighted scale.”

Lange said that the weighted grades and getting rid of extra points is doubly detrimental to students. “Now that we have the weighted grades, the teachers think it’s okay to not give you extra credit and to only care about you getting a higher GPA,” he said. “(They think) you only have to care about getting a higher GPA, even though the colleges won’t necessarily care about the GPA after they unweight the grades and they see your letter grade, which probably won’t be as high because the teachers didn’t give you as much extra credit, so the letter grades aren’t as high even though it’s compensated for in your GPA. But, a lot of the colleges look at your letter grades, so that might affect when you apply to a college (and) whether you get in.”

For now, Lange said he is doing well in both classes, but worries that the new system will affect him negatively later on. He said his reason for disapproving of teachers trying to compensate for the extra GPA is the obvious differences in course difficulty.

“I think that they should just stop trying to pretend that a class that’s a much higher academic level can be compared to one that’s not, because I don’t really think there’s any comparison between the two,” Lange said. “They’re completely different and I really think that each (system of grading) isn’t very good, and especially if they try to use both, it doesn’t work.”

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