With the 2017-18 school year underway, PISD appears poised to discuss and possibly approve a series of changes to class rank and weighted GPA that administrators hope will allow the district’s students to get a leg up in the highly competitive world of college admissions.
The district commissioned a task force in 2015 to study the issue, and in April, it recommended trustees ditch the general policy of ranking students against their district peers. Trustees stopped short of approving the policy earlier this year, calling for the district to study its weighted GPA policies.
The expectation, board of trustees President Missy Bender said, is the district will consider a more fleshed-out policy recommendation in the spring.
“The school district will expand its evaluation of the class rank process to include an analysis of grade point assignment and calculations,” Bender said in a written statement to Community Impact Newspaper. “At the conclusion of this additional study, the administration will present the results of its findings to the school board in spring 2018. Any policy change adopted by the school board would result in at least a year spent communicating the impact of such change before actual implementation.”
The proposed system would work like this: The district would still use GPA to determine and report which students are in the top 10 percent of each graduating class, as state law requires. Each senior high school in PISD would still recognize a valedictorian and salutatorian, and bestow the Latin honors summa cum laude, magna cum laude and cum laude on students with the requisite GPAs.
But gone would be any list detailing where each PISD student falls in relation to his or her classmates. These direct comparisons of high-performing peers may hamper the college resumes of otherwise qualified PISD students, the district task force concluded.
Learning by example
If PISD does away with the policy of ranking students in each graduating class, it will not be the first district with high-performing schools to abandon the practice. The district studied a number of Texas public school districts that have done away with or altered the practice, including Highland Park ISD, which stopped ranking students by GPA in 2009; and Carroll ISD in Southlake, which adopted a similar policy in 2010.
Since implementing the new policy, more CISD graduates outside the top 10 percent have been accepted to state schools, said Carroll Senior High School lead counselor Tracey Flores, who has a 28-year career working in public and private schools and in the Texas Tech University admissions department.
“When the decision was made that we weren’t going to rank anymore, I was so excited because I knew what the effects were on our kids because of that ranking,” Flores said. “I witnessed it firsthand, being at Texas Tech.”
To determine how heavily universities weight class rank, PISD reached out last year to the admissions departments of 100 colleges and universities that tend to attract Plano graduates. Of the 61 institutions that responded, class rank was listed 15 times as a top consideration in admissions. Only GPA and SAT and ACT scores were listed more frequently than class rank as factors when assessing applicants.
PISD has seen some pushback in recent months from some parents, who attended trustee meetings to voice concerns about how higher-performing students would be able to distinguish themselves from their peers, if the policy is enacted.
In CISD, Flores said, skeptical parents came on board as they became more familiar with that district’s policy.
“It was, initially, the knee-jerk reaction of parents and students: ‘What do you mean you don’t rank? How are we supposed to know?’ That was a very natural reaction,” Flores said. “Then it was just a matter of explaining what I explained to you, and then it was like, ‘Oh, I see. Well, that makes sense.’”
Addressing incentives
Riding the momentum of a strong task force recommendation, the PISD board of trustees was expected to approve the new class rank policy last May. Trustees, however, were not quite ready to sign on. More study was required, several trustees said, particularly on the related subject of weighted GPA.
In PISD’s system, GPA is calculated on a 5-point scale with higher scores for students who take on more challenging coursework, such as Advanced Placement and honors classes.
District officials see the ongoing class-ranking discussion as an opportunity to address some issues with the weighted GPA system, such as whether it discourages participation in extracurricular activities or classes.
“I want [students] to take a course because they’re interested in the subject matter, not because they just want an extra bump in their GPA,” PISD trustee Nancy Humphrey said at a public board meeting in May. “I want them to have the chance to explore, because this is a time when they’re not paying tuition, and this is a time when they’re formulating their desires of what to do. So if we could look again at the course weights and the GPA.”
The next step for the district will be to establish another task force to study the district’s weighted GPA policies.
Superintendent Brian Binggeli told trustees in May the district would likely bring a proposal before the board in spring 2018 to ditch the class rank practice and adopt related policies consistent with the new practice.
Since then, the district has not announced any updates on the process, citing a “lack of new information to share” through a district spokesperson.
“The task force is yet to be determined, and so is the scope of their work,” PISD spokesperson Lesley Range-Stanton wrote in an email.
