By Jackson Whiteker
<[email protected]> 

Starting next school year, there will be a few changes made to the grading scale and grading periods, including the implementation of a nine-week grading period and a change in the software teachers use to record grades.

Sophomore Ryan Wilmes said the change would benefit students. “I think that most people will realize that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages,” Wilmes said.

According to Assistant Principal Ronda Eshleman, next year the Power School system, a percent-based semester grade structure, will take the place of the current 12-point scale.

“We used to take six-week grades and base them on a 12-point scale that involved some calculation. Next year, we’ll just take the percent grades from each grading period and make each nine weeks’ grade worth 40 percent of the semester grade and have the final exam grade weigh 20 percent of the total semester grade,” Eshleman said.

Wilmes said, overall, the new way of calculating semester grades will help students. 

“I believe it will help students recover if they have a bad grade in the first grading period,” Wilmes said.

Sophomore Evan Davis said the student body might not take the changes very well. “Most people fear change, so it’s just something new that people will have to get used to,” Davis said.

Davis said the effects of the change to the way of calculating semester grades might vary from certain groups of students to others. 

“I think the smarter students will like it, but the more average students, the bad test takers, will not like it,” Davis said.

As for the change from a six-week grading period to the nine-week grading period, Eshleman said there will probably be more consistently positive outcomes and reactions from both students and teachers.

“I think the nine-week grading periods will be a good thing,” Eshleman said. “With nine weeks, it will give teachers some time to get more and bigger grades in to make the grading periods more even. Sometimes in the first grading period with six-week grading periods, teachers don’t have time to put those big projects in.”

Wilmes said the reaction from students will probably be a good one. “It’ll help to have more grades to offset any bad ones,” he said. “All of these changes will most likely have a good effect on students.”