Category Archives: GPA

college planning, college prep, GPA, high school

The Crucial Semester of Junior Year

junior year

As high school students journey through their academic careers, the junior year stands out as a pivotal time, especially as they approach the final semester. This critical period holds immense significance for those aspiring to pursue higher education.

With college applications looming on the horizon, the final semester of junior year serves as a crucial window of opportunity for students to showcase their academic prowess, extracurricular involvement, and personal growth.

Let’s delve into why this phase is so pivotal in shaping students’ future academic endeavors.

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college planning, GPA

The Pass/Fail Grading System and Your Student

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pass/fail grading

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.

GPA, Guest Posts

Recovering a Tanked GPA

 

GPA

Summer is an excellent time for students to re-evaluate their progress in college. Here are some tips for students whose GPA could be suffering after the first year of college.

The college spring semester has come to an end for most colleges and universities by this point. By now, your student probably has a sense of how well they’ve done in their classes. Soon college grades will be posted and your student’s grade point average (GPA) will be recalculated.

GPA, as many parents know, is an important statistic that can affect their academic and professional career during college and after. Here’s just a few things a low GPA can do:

  • Disqualify students from qualifying for scholarships and grants.
  • Prevent from pursuing degree programs that have minimum GPA requirements.
  • Make it harder to be competitive when seeking jobs or internships after college.
  • Prevent students from qualifying for many master programs. Many masters programs have a minimum GPA requirement of 3.0.

It can be a stressful time for the student and the parent. Did they pass? How will the last semester affect their grade point average and academic standing? When the grades are finally posted, your student reluctantly reveals their final grades. It’s not pretty. Far more D’s and F’s than you would prefer. Their GPA has tanked.

The bad news is that, at least for the next semester or so, scholarships and grant opportunities might be slim pickings. The good news is that if the student is early in their academic career, they will have two or three years to slowly increase their GPA to an acceptable level.

I’ve been there.

My second semester of college didn’t go well. Long story short. I spent more time reading than studying. And I occasionally forgot about important assignments. My GPA sank to around a 2.0.

The report card was a wake-up call. I needed to start taking school a lot more seriously. Instead of spending the entire summer beating myself up over the mistake, I decided to proactively strategize how I would slowly increase my GPA to an acceptable level. By my final year of college, I had successfully increased my GPA to a 3.2.  

Your student made a mistake, but with a little strategizing they can follow a similar recovery path.

Before we delve into tips and tricks to facilitate GPA recovery, let’s pinpoint a GPA goal. Amber Anderson, a career coach counselor, for University of Alabama at Birmingham, is a career expert. Anderson sets the minimum acceptable GPA at 3.0 in a webinar entitled Job Search, Interview, and Business Attire Strategies.

In the webinar, Anderson also points out that students can choose either to utilize their overall GPA or their degree GPA which excludes non-degree courses taken. The fact they can choose the highest score makes GPA a little more forgiving.

Below are strategies to help your student reach the 3.0 GPA they will need to increase their chances of academic and professional success.

Drop the Course

Before the cut-off date for dropping courses, students can determine if there are any classes they have no chance of passing. If it looks likely your student will earn a ‘D’ or an ‘F’ in the class, they might want to drop the course. Just warn them not to drop too many. Dropped courses, while not affecting their GPA, do show up on their academic transcript. If they withdraw from too many courses, it can look bad.

Scope Out the Professor Before the Class

Encourage your student to try to discover how the professor of a class grades while they can still drop the class without it showing up on their academic transcript. I had one poetry professor, for example, who tended to give low grades on almost all assignments. If I had known about that tendency, I wouldn’t have signed up for the class. Your student can get a sense of their future professors by asking his fellow students who have had classes with the professor and utilizing professor rating websites.

Re-Take Classes

Many universities and colleges have policies that allows students to re-take a course to improve their grade and GPA. Depending on the school, the policy tends to either replace the grade entirely or takes the average score of both attempts. Re-taking my math class changed my grade from a low ‘C’ to an ‘A.’ That was a huge boost to my overall GPA.

Appeal for Special Permission if GPA is Barring You from a Degree Path

Teaching, I know, often has a minimum GPA to pursue higher level classes within that degree path. If your student wishes to pursue that career, but does not currently meet GPA standards, he or she can appeal to be granted entrance to that degree path.

Whether not the appeal is granted, will probably be dependent on the reason for the drop in GPA, how far off they are from the minimum GPA, and how much progress they’ve made restoring their GPA to an acceptable level. If the appeal is a semester after the student partied their grade away, I wouldn’t count on having that appeal granted.

Grade point average is an important metric that can lead to academic and career success. A low grade point average early in your child’s academic career, while not ideal, won’t destroy their chances of success in the future. With a little hard work and dedication, students can gradually increase their GPA to an acceptable level by the time they graduate.  

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Today’s guest blogger, Samantha Stauf, was a first generation college student. Since Samantha graduated two years ago, she’s spent her free time writing articles meant to help current students succeed. You can find her on Twitter at the hashtag @samstauf.