Posted on 12/16/2006 8:55:51 PM PST by Ronald ReaganROCKS
Everything you said makes sense except for one thing.
IT ISN'T FAIR!
You can't just up and change the system like that. Not all schools follow that system. How do you adjust for applicants from a school using the old system against applicants from a school using the new system? And how do you compare GPA of an 18 year old applicant to a 30 year old applicant from the same highschool? Not to mention different highschools.
But even if there is an equalizing method for comparing the two different systems, I would still be against it. The reason....its just silly. Once you get to grad school, they get way more realistic. It's A, B, or incomplete. No half grades, no extra credit, and no one gives a * what your GPA is. And you beter not get incompletes because they will pile the work on 3 fold. In grad school you either get ignored or you graduate. Then after that you either get a job, or you get a phD. Real life doesn't have 9 gradations. Real life is thus: good, OK, or fired. And OK is only acceptable if it doesn't happen every day.
One of the local papers has a session with all the area valedictorians each year. Jacobs has about 1/2 the total from 12 schools, because all the others have one each. It must be emberassing for these kids, once they get over the initial rush of being one of many.
The system you described makes me want to spit.
It does so because it describes 5 levels of acheivment. Similar to the old abcdf system...BUT...
The difference is that in the old days, a C was considered average, acceptable, meeting minimum requirements. But by your system, average is the second place grade. That tells me that they have reduced the upper acheiving gradations by one and increased the FAILING gradations by 1. Apparently, many people are failing nowdays and they needed to expand that part of the scale to better differentiate one failure from the next.
What a joke.
I was ranked 500 in my class and we only had 209. It must have been because of the negative 80 percent that I was awarded as my final average. sarc.
This has to do with GPA. My son's college uses the plus/minus system of GPA. So just getting an A, doesn't automatically get you a 4.0 for the class. An A- will only rate you a 3.6.
And in college GPA does matter. You keep your scholarship by keeping up your GPA, you get accepted into a master's program only if you have a certain GPA, etc.
With honors classes in high school your GPA is often above a 4.0, but that was happening when I went to HS many moons ago (35 years ago the first 10 ranked in my class had above a 4.0, so this is nothing new.
Sooner or later the kids will have to face the reality that school is competition, so why not in HS before they run into total shock during college.
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