A committee comprised of current Westlake High School students and staff presented proposed changes to Eanes ISD’s grade point average, or GPA, system at an Oct. 24 community forum.

The GPA proposal will only be used to determine which students are in the top 10 percent of the class and to identify the valedictorian each year, Westlake High School teacher Melissa Dupree said.

Instead of using a multiplier that awards students differently depending on their grade in a course, the proposal grants a 0.25 point bonus to a student’s GPA for taking pre-Advanced Placement courses and a 0.5 point bonus for AP courses, said Matthew Kearney, a Westlake High school junior and a member of the GPA committee.

Although there is not a cap on how many AP courses a student can take, there is a limit to the number of AP courses that can receive a bonus. Ninth-grade students would receive a bonus in one course, and 10th-grade students would be able to apply a bonus to two courses. Those in 11th grade would be able to apply a bonus to three courses, and students in 12th grade would be able to apply the bonus to four courses, he said. All pre-AP courses would still receive a bonus, he said.

The proposal also creates a grade-banded GPA scale that groups similar grades together—such as giving the same weight to grades 98-100—instead of putting an emphasis on every single point, Kearney said.

“The reason we prefer grade-banding is that with a 100-point scale, every single point is a pressure point,” he said. “We have students staying up all hours of the night for a test. We have students arguing with teachers, taking up lesson time, just because they want one point higher on a test, because they know it will help in the long run. Grade-banding would alleviate a lot of that stress.”

A revised proposal was presented to the EISD board of trustees Nov. 1, and it will be considered for a vote at the Nov. 15 meeting.

If the board approves changes, they will not affect any current high school students but would apply to incoming ninth-graders in fall 2017, Dupree said.

Need for change

To determine a weighted grade point average, Westlake High School students currently earn 1.1 times the standard grade earned for pre-Advance Placement courses and 1.2 times the standard grade earned in AP classes.

“This multiplier system was implemented about 12 years ago, and we discovered some unintended consequences that really started to surface five years in,” Dupree said. “We don’t think there’s a perfect system, but we think we can do better. We want students to be able to pursue their interest at a high level, whether that is in a core class or an elective. We also decided we wanted to be specific in the number of weighted courses that would factor into the GPA, but not the number of advanced courses a student could take.”

Because of the system that is currently in place, she said:

• students sometimes take more classes than they can handle academically;
• the school has fostered a culture in which students care about grades and their GPA but not about learning;
• some students feel pushed to take courses with a multiplier instead of a course they are actually interested in;
• many students and parents incorrectly feel courses without multipliers lack vigor or value; and
• students who fall outside of the top 10 percentile feel inferior or like they do not fit in. 

Source: Westlake High School/Community Impact Newspaper