School Board Adopts New Grading Scale For NHS

By Susan Coney

The Board of Education voted to adopt a new high school grading scale on Tuesday this week. The new grading scale will become effective this coming fall.

In an effort to reflect Newtown students’ academic standing more accurately, Interim Principal Pat Llodra has made it her mission to help Newtown change to a new grading scale. With this most recent change in the grading scale along with the board’s previous decision to eliminate class rank, the goal is to more accurately depict academic achievement of students by using a series of graphs, weighted and unweighted. With these two major changes the high school administrators and the school board hope to better reflect the academic progress of Newtown’s students.

The new system will maintain the five levels of weight: AP (advanced placement), honors, college prep A, college prep B, and unweighted.

On the new scale, for instance, an A+ (97–100) would receive 5.33 in an AP course, a 5.0 in an honors course, a 4.67 in college prep A course, a 4.45 in college prep B course and a 4.33 in an unweighted course. The difference between the unweighted level and the advanced level is 1.0 across the scale, with points distributed accordingly to the honors, college prep A and college prep B levels. Many schools in surrounding towns use 1.0 as a grade point average (GPA) unit.

Pat Llodra and Head of Guidance Neil Culhane offered extensive background information on revamping the grading scale. They included in their presentation to the board the comments of a parent who has spent some time reviewing the scale. The parent, who was not identified, shared her thoughts about the transition to the new grading scale with the board. She stressed, “There are solid mathematical principles used in deriving these tables. It is a well-known scale that is used at Stanford and Columbia. We are not reinventing the wheel.”

Board Chairman Elaine McClure said, “It is mathematically correct. It is amazing how many hours of work has been involved in this and I would like to thank everyone involved.” Ms Llodra said, “This is the closest we can come [for what] is right and appropriate for Newtown. We believe that it shows more accurately the top students exceptional performance.”

The board has expressed concern all along that there is no standardized scale across the country with which to compare students. Board member Andrew Buzzi said, “It is a crime that something that is so critical to the future of our students has no consistent standard in all of the schools.”

 Ms Llodra assured the board that colleges convert the high school scores that come to them into their own systems to evaluate the students.

As an example of how colleges look at GPAs and class rank, the board was provided with a letter from Yale University Assistant Admissions Director Jose Ivan Roman to Newtown High School guidance counselor Deidre Croce. A portion of the letter said, “Admissions officers appreciate any and all information a school provides regarding its student body. The school profile provides information valuable to evaluating an applicant’s candidacy. Each institution’s profile is unique and we do not expect every school to follow the same policy concerning rank and GPA. When we evaluate a student’s transcript we may or may not recalculate a GPA. The most important element of a transcript are grades and rigor of program. We will do our best to work within your chosen system of grading and ranking.”

Ms Llodra and Mr Culhane assured the board that the practice of selecting a valedictorian and salutatorian will remain for each graduating class based on academic achievement regardless of the grading scale changes and the elimination of class rank.