Over the course of the last month, as school districts make the choice on whether to give students grades or transition to a pass/fail grading system, parents are concerned that this will certainly have an impact on their student’s high school transcript and GPA.

Some parents, students and local school board members are concerned that ”the new grading system takes away students’ opportunity to show academic progress and will hurt high school juniors’ chances at college admissions, despite public assurances from major colleges and universities.”

No true measure of achievement

“There is a huge correlation between academic achievement and learning,” Allen Weiner, the president of the Sequoia Union High School District school board, said on April 15 after casting one of two dissenting votes as the board majority approved credit/no credit system. “Kids who get better grades have learned, and we should honor that.”

Parents who have seen their students work hard during this semester even with the confines of having to attend class online, feel it’s unfair to give those students a pass/fail grade. Some teachers believe it would be better to institute a case-by-case grading system and reward those students who have excelled with an actual grade.

Parent Susannah Hill said she had a “very strong reaction” when she heard the district could institute a pass/no pass grading system because her son, a junior at M-A, “has worked extraordinarily hard this whole semester” and would like to see that work recognized. She said he’s now even putting in about 11-hour workdays with his distance-learning assignments. She thinks there could be other solutions, such as giving students a quarter grade for the first half of the semester to acknowledge their work up until the March shift to distance learning.

Impact on college admissions

Palo Alto parent Tricia Barr worried that students will be compared to applicants from districts that kept letter grades and that “it could absolutely hurt their prospects in the college admissions process,” she said during the school board’s virtual meeting on April 21.

However, private and public colleges and universities across the country have said that students applying from these districts will not be disadvantaged.

“Certainly, we understand students are primarily taking courses online and often with modified grading scales. Rest assured that we are sensitive to these challenges and realities,” said Richard Shaw, Stanford University’s dean of undergraduate admission and financial aid. “We expect coursework to be completed but will accept whatever grading scale is used by the school.” (Stanford itself has moved to a credit/no credit system for the rest of this school year.)

Parents and students are still wary that colleges will still evaluate a student’s GPA without taking into consideration the current situation. It remains unclear how any parent or student will know exactly how the colleges ultimately handle this situation.

A fair solution

A school board in Spokane, Washington came up with these grading guidelines:

• Select to receive a pass/fail grade on their high school transcript, for those who don’t want to negatively affect their grade-point average;
• Opt to receive a letter grade in hopes of improving their GPA;
• Request a credit waiver from the school principal (for students with a failing grade and those who do not need certain credits to graduate or provide competency-based model to receive a pass grade).

In some cases, teachers will use their professional judgment in assessing competence in a given subject.

So far, these seem to be the best solution. This puts the decision in the hands of the student and gives them control of their own GPA.

There is much at stake as colleges and universities weigh a prospective student’s academic progress. There is hope that colleges will adjust their current guidelines and take into account how students have been forced to study online during their spring semester.