GPA Stress - Merit Educational Consultants

GPA Stress

High school students, and their parents, stress out about their grade point averages (GPAs). Fact.  But, why? Because colleges consider GPAs to be the single most important factor in making admission decisions. Makes sense, right? But the criteria by which these high school teachers use to determine these grades vastly differs from school to school. That’s unfair.

As a college advisor, I meet with students across the United States, so I see a wide variety of grading rubrics and final grades.  Even the schools that seem to be transparent about how grades are determined because they publish a detailed rubric at the start of the school year still have variances that may seem sketchy. 

Some teachers dock points for each day an assignment is turned in late, while others will allow a pile of late work to be turned in the day before the grading period ends.  Hmm.  Others allow students to retake exams that they fail or let them drop the lowest test scores to improve their grades.  Many give extra credit points for ridiculous things like bringing treats to class or going on field trips.

Over the years I’ve seen some doozies. One student took a 3-week summer history class where the teacher told him he didn’t need to attend the actual classes.  Really! He just needed to show up on the last day of the summer program with all of his completed assignments.  This student gathered up notes from a previous history class that he had failed and turned them into his summer teacher for credit.  The shocker was that the teacher gave this student an A in the history class – he obviously didn’t look at the pile of papers.  But the ridiculous part of this story is that the teacher actually replaced this student’s previous F’s in the fall and spring semesters with A’s! How is this fair to the other thousands of students who suffer from reduced GPAs when they fail a class?

To get students to actually take state mandated standardized tests each year, teachers and administrators have bribed students to do well on the tests by offering a full-letter bump in their final grade if they score at a specific percentage on the standardized tests.  In other words, if the student gets an 80% in the chemistry section of a standardized test, this chemistry teacher would bump the student’s final grade by one letter grade.  Say what? 

On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve seen a teacher not budge when a student received an 89.99% and gave him a B+.  This actually happened to one of my clients, who was a straight-A student until he got this single B+ in Chemistry.  The student asked the teacher if he could do extra credit, write an essay or do anything to bump his grade to an A so he could become the class valedictorian during his senior year.  Sadly, the teacher wouldn’t budge, and even though the student reached out to the principal and superintendent of schools, the teacher refused to change his grade.

When teachers use unethical grading practices to help their students improve their GPAs or to gain high scores on standardized tests (which reflect well on the teacher), that ruins the value of GPAs for everyone. College admissions officers are savvy to schools with substandard curriculum but they aren’t always aware of grading practices of particular teachers.  Seems to me that there should be more transparency about actual grading rubrics and policies on Rate My Teacher so colleges get a realistic view of student achievement in classes.