The Weight of an Unweighted System
Photo by Pixabay from Pexels.
Tyler Canham
With the announcement of an overhaul of the Hamilton High School grading system going to vote at the school board, it is hard not to be skeptical of what these changes could entail for the students. While the current 5.0 system isn’t perfect, it is still a system that has, for the most part, been widely accepted by students. The 5.0 system is based on taking Advanced Placement (AP) classes that are meant to be college-level courses. This system follows a 5.0 weight for an A, 4.0 weight for a B, and so on. The new proposed system aims to completely upend this system that has been the standard and replace it with a new Laude system.
The Laude system will result in the removal of the 5.0 weighted AP grading system and function off of an unweighted GPA. This, combined with the addition of the recognition levels (Cum Laude, Magna Cum Laude, and Summa Cum Laude), will result in a more exploitative system that devalues the highest academic achievers at Hamilton High School while also reducing the incentives for students to take rigorous courses.
What are the current benefits of the current 5.0 grading system?
Before looking at the new system that Hamilton High School looks to implement for the incoming Class of 2028, it is important to understand the current 5.0 grading system. The 5.0 system works by weighting AP classes (college-level courses through the College Board) on a higher scale than other regular-level classes. Therefore, AP Biology will be weighted as a 5.0 for an A while this same grade in Spanish IV will result in a 4.0. This system largely has served as a way to encourage students to take these higher-level classes and use the grade boost as a precaution in case they don’t end up doing well. The current grading system has allowed many students to push themselves in trying classes they wouldn’t have taken if not for the cushion the 5.0 system allows for.
Another advantage of taking an AP class in general is taking a test at the end of the year that allows students to get college credit, potentially saving them thousands of dollars if they pass. The scores range from 1 to 5, with scores of 3, 4, and 5 being passing scores. Hamilton High School has prided itself on the amount of students that have both taken and passed exams. An article released by the district titled “Hamilton Recognized for Culture of Excellence in Advanced Placement Coursework” recognizes that Hamilton is one of only 16 schools within the state that was an Advanced Placement (AP) Pacesetter Level 1 Award winner. In order to receive this award, “at least 30 percent of the school’s student body took an AP exam with a 70 percent or higher pass rate.” This means that a large portion of the student body not only took an AP exam, but most of those students received a passing score on these exams, resulting in college credit being awarded to applicable schools. The current system that Hamilton has to offer provides a safe space for students to get out of their comfort zones and try a college-level class. The results and award that Hamilton received show that the current system is working, and the staff is in a large part responsible for making sure to support every student who takes these classes.
What does the new system entail?
The new system that is being proposed removes the 5.0 system and goes to a purely unweighted GPA (grade point average). The intended goal of this system is to recognize students for difficult classes that aren’t labeled as AP such as high levels of languages, band, and dual enrollment classes. These classes then go towards a Laude recognition system that will range from Cum Laude (3.0-3.49 cumulative GPA and at least 4 advanced course credits taken), Magna Cum Laude (3.5-3.749 and 6 advanced course credits taken), to then Summa Cum Laude (3.75-4.0 and 8 advanced course credits taken). An earlier article, The 5.0 Grading Scale Change, lists each of these classes that classify as “advanced credits” and also restates the requirements for each Laude recognition.
How will this system affect class rank?
Hamilton has traditionally done their class rankings based on the weighted GPA that is created by the 5.0 grading scale, which recognizes both a valedictorian and a salutatorian of each graduating class. However, with the Laude system, this would change in multiple ways. While the addition and recognition of students who have GPAs ranging from 3.0-4.0 is important, it also will result in an increase in stress for students who no longer have the weighted grades but still want to place high in their class rank.
For example, in one future graduating class there are two seniors. One of these students is your typical high-achieving student who has taken a dozen AP classes and received A’s in all dual enrollment classes he or she took. The other student also had straight A’s but never took any AP level courses meeting the requirements through honors and other elective courses. If the first student received an A- in any of those advanced courses, he or she would automatically rank underneath the other student due to the unweighted system, regardless of the rigor of classes taken. This effect of the Laude system will cause students in higher-level classes to take on more stress than they already have with the current system. Students who base their success on school achievements will end up taking fewer AP classes or end up burning out due to the removal of the safety net that the 5.0 system provides.
Not only does the class rank result in students having more stress and not receiving adequate recognition, but it also poses a potential risk for students applying to colleges. When colleges are looking for students to accept, they often look at class rank to determine which students to choose first from a given high school or to see where you rank among your peers. Universities such as Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, and Princeton all rate class rank as “Very Important” when it comes to their admission profile of a given student (Common Data Set). Also, this impacts college recruiting for sports, especially for highly academic schools, when the admissions board chooses whom to admit to the school. When I have talked to the college coaches, one of the questions they ask is if there are any students above you in rank applying to this school. This is because admissions are more likely to take a higher-ranked student.
How will this system impact the rigor of Hamilton High School?
With the main change of the Laude system being the change in the way AP classes are “weighted,” it is important to highlight the potential effects of what seems like a small change. With surveys gathered from several entry-level AP classes, it is very apparent that without the cushion of the AP scale, many students would not take the classes provided.
Out of 24 students in AP Physics 1, 50% of them said they would not take the class if it wasn’t weighted on a 5.0 scale. Similar to this, out of 23 students in AP Environmental Science, 52% said that they would not take the class without the AP-weighted scale. Even in higher-level classes that largely attract students who would take the class regardless of weight, such as AP Physics C, 13% of them said they wouldn’t have taken the class. Though this survey set is small, its results cannot be ignored. These survey results don’t even reflect other APs that tend to be the first that students take, such as AP Human Geography, which is available to freshmen, or AP Psychology, which is available to sophomores. These entry-level APs allow students to challenge themselves in topics they may be interested in without the risk of having their GPAs being dramatically affected if they don’t do as well in the class.
Out of the 91 total students that were surveyed, 69% of the students (63 out of 91) said that they would take fewer overall AP classes if it was on an unweighted system.
This change will impact Hamilton staff as well. As a result of the lessening likelihood of students taking these AP classes, there will be potential unprecedented shifts in classes taken by students, requiring teachers to learn entirely new curriculums and adapt to teaching classes they never have before. A teacher who traditionally has taught only AP Human Geography may have to switch to also teach other social studies classes, only having the time over the summer to make this change.
How will this affect future students?
By Hamilton choosing to switch to a system that unweights AP classes, they are disincentivizing students from taking rigorous courses and having the chance of receiving thousands of dollars in college credits. Hamilton’s prestige such as the “Advanced Placement (AP) Pacesetter Level 1 Award” will be much harder to achieve when half of the students that once took APs aren’t participating anymore in these classes.
Although one of the flaws of the 5.0 grading system is the ability to game the system and take unnecessary AP classes, at least the students are choosing to challenge themselves with rigorous courses that will ultimately benefit them regardless. The Laude system itself isn’t even safe from being played as the required classes act in a similar fashion, such as allowing students to take only honors courses instead of APs to receive the same levels of recognition.
Hamilton, by introducing the Laude system to replace the current 5.0 grading system, is setting up students for failure by preventing, rather than encouraging, them to get a college-level education in a place with the most supportive teacher and student body–a place where a mistake or failure doesn’t have the same impact as having to pay thousands of dollars for having to retake a class in college.
In the end, by taking away weighted grades, Hamilton isn’t hurting the highest achieving students who would take their classes regardless of the system or the lowest achieving students who are less likely to take an AP class in general, but instead, they are hurting the majority by targeting average students. These students, instead of taking AP classes, will now take regular classes because the weight of an unweighted system is too high of a risk to take.
