Pumping Up High School Grades Not a Panacea for Va. Parents' Anxiety

From Marc Fisher's blog Raw Fisher

W hy are some parents in Fairfax and Loudoun counties up in arms about whether an A in a high school course means the student averaged a 90 or a 94?

The controversy coming to the Fairfax School Board this month is about one thing: anxiety over college admission. That emotionally fraught issue has blurred the vision of many parents, who have come to believe that if only schools would artificially pump up their little sweeties' grades, their just-slightly-less-than-perfect children just might get into colleges that otherwise would give them the big dis.

Fairfax uses a six-point grading system in which you need a 94 to get an A. Loudoun's scoring grid is similar. But in many parts of the country, an A represents a numerical grade of 90 or more.

Parent groups in the two Virginia counties contend that college admissions officers cannot comprehend these distinctions and therefore put applicants from these two strong school systems at a competitive disadvantage.

To buy into the parents' FairGrade movement, you have to buy two arguments that just don't hold water:

1) You'd have to believe that admissions officers at small, generally private, colleges who examine each candidate's qualifications are intentionally turning a blind eye to differences among school districts. Admissions officers at these colleges usually know each high school so well that they regularly take into account the grading idiosyncrasies of individual quirky teachers. Admissions officers generally compare students within a given school's class, knowing that it makes little sense to compare a kid from Thomas Jefferson in Fairfax with one from, say, Cardozo in the District.

I've sat in on admissions committee sessions at four major universities and heard officers discuss candidacies of students from very different high schools, speaking knowledgeably and sympathetically about those schools' strengths, weaknesses and oddities -- right down to the history teacher who doesn't give A's or the French teacher who blithely hands out high grades.

2) And you'd have to believe that large state schools that cannot afford to pore over each application are incapable of distinguishing between an A from Fairfax and an A from a system with more lenient grading. Even large universities calculate into their decisions the differences among high schools -- and especially among school systems.

Don't just take admissions officers' word for this: Look at the classes they admit. A kid from Fairfax is held to a higher standard than one from a rural county in southern Virginia; otherwise, state colleges could easily fill their ranks with high-achieving students from Northern Virginia. Northern Virginia parents are right to note that their children face a higher hurdle than applicants from counties with fewer resources, but the reason is not the grading system. Rather, it's the colleges' desire to achieve a mix of backgrounds in each class.

Parent activists also argue that there's a disconnect between the Fairfax grading system and the students' performance on standardized tests. Parents say it's not fair when students with high SAT scores are saddled with grade-point averages that don't reflect their test performances. The county's report on this concludes that among Fairfax students who scored between 1200 and 1249 (out of 1600) on the math and verbal sections of the SAT, only 5 percent had a GPA of 4.0 or higher.

Activists see this as somehow outrageous, but it seems perfectly reasonable -- those are decent but not impressive SAT scores. Nationwide, a 1200 score would put a senior in the 80th percentile. You wouldn't expect a student in the 80th percentile to have anything close to perfect grades.

Parents note that in other systems, that level of SAT score does indeed equate with straight A's -- the county report says 27 percent of non-Fairfax students who hit those SAT scores got grades above the straight-A mark.

But all that tells us is that other school systems engage in wholesale grade inflation that does both the students and the larger community a grave disservice. For Fairfax to join other systems in a grievously distorting policy that tricks parents into believing their kids are far better prepared than they really are would be folly. Superintendent Jack Dale is right to stick with his grading system; the question now is whether School Board members will have the courage to do the same.

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