Content Standards: A.S.9.1 Students will acquire attitudes, knowledge, and skills that contribute to effective learning in school and across the life span.
Competencies: Students will…
A.C.9.1.06 Make semester revisions as appropriate to their academic improvement plan based on their most recent classroom work, high school grades, standardized test scores, teacher comments, and life experiences.
GOAL: Students will learn how to use transcripts for academic and career planning and course scheduling.
Activity Statements:
Students will use transcripts to determine their personal class ranking, calculate their grade point average (GPA), and total their credits earned.
Materials:
1. Copies of students’ transcripts
2. Overhead projector (May use whiteboard or chalkboard)
3. Blank Transparency for procedure to calculate GPA including value of letter grades, formula for determining GPA
4. High School Course description book or enrollment guide (for class point values). 5. Handout 1: Typical explanation of transcript importance and GPA
Procedures:
1. Distribute students’ copies of transcripts and Personal Educational Plans begun in 8th
grade.
2. Remembering that this is an extension of an earlier lesson, explain the need for review/re-teaching and the reminder to check at end of each semester to ensure all documentation is correct. Review the purpose of transcripts. Instruct students to locate their class ranking, GPA, credits earned on their transcripts.
3. Discuss other information your high school includes on personal transcripts.
4. Explain that there are times students need to calculate their GPAs on their own (i.e. to verify accuracy). Use the transcript to show students how to compute GPAs. (Refer to website listed under “Additional Resources” for directions, if necessary.)
5. Ask students to review their transcripts and Personal Educational Plans and what they need to do to continue progress toward post-secondary goals.
6. Handout the Transcript and GPA Handout 1 for students to have for review and explanation to parents. Tell them this information should be kept in their portfolio files.
Additional Resources:
Computing GPA: http://sociology.msu.edu/documents/GPAcomputingMethod_000.pdf Extension Activities:
Encourage teachers to have students compute GPAs after each grading period. Teachers could have students keep a grade log sheet in their class.
Activities:
Have students fill out their Plan of Study with their marks, enrolled and planned courses, then reflect in portfolio about whether they are on or off track of their graduation and high school goals.
Resources:
HANDOUT 1: WHY TRACK TRANSCRIPTS AND GPA?
Your transcript is your number one most important document in the admissions process. This is the proverbial “permanent record,” at least as far as colleges are concerned. The courses you have taken and the grades you have earned tell a college most of what they need to know about you as a student. More than your test scores, more than your extracurricular, more than your community service, and more than your teacher recommendations, your transcript documents your past and is a pretty good predictor of your academic future. The rigor of the courses you take is as important as the grades you earn. If you hope to gain entry to the most competitive colleges in the country, you have to take the hardest courses offered and do well in them. So every student should take the most difficult courses they can handle—and get the best grades possible.
Your academic core courses count more than your non-academic electives. The GPA recorded on your transcript takes includes your performance in gym, choir, keyboarding, health, and the like. These courses may be required for graduation, but they are not usually part of the requirements for admission. College is not a vacation resort: it is an academic experience. So you will be judged on your academic performance in the core courses: math, science, English, social studies, and foreign language.
If you take honors, Advanced Placement (AP), or International Baccalaureate (IB) courses, you may be given “extra credit” in your GPA to compensate for the rigor of these courses. Schools do this primarily to reward high performing students with a higher class rank (which is explained in this post). But an A is an A is an A. If you get a B in an honors course, it is never the equivalent of an A in some other course. Don’t rationalize and try to convince yourself otherwise.
Colleges do look at grade trends, so if your transcript has some blotches on it, you always have an opportunity to make improvements. Bad grade in 9 grade life science? Do betterth
in 10 grade chemistry. Colleges like to see students who pull themselves together andth
begin performing to potential. You will not be able to erase the stains, but you can make the overall picture more attractive.
So what’s the bottom line? Simple rules Take the hardest courses you can. Get good grades.
Don’t rationalize poor performance.
Calculating one’s GPA is a fairly straightforward process. Except for the fact that many high schools report “weighted” and “unweighted” grade point averages. Basically, a weighted GPA takes into account the difficulty of the courses a student is taking, and those taking harder courses are rewarded with extra “brownie points” in their GPA. Usually colleges strip these brownie points from an applicant’s GPA in order to fairly compare one student against another.
But merely stripping away the brownie points is not enough to uncover your real GPA, because in today’s comprehensive high schools, we give grades for just about every class a student takes, including:
physical education
performing groups (including theater and all sorts of music) high school sports training
vocational education classes, like shop, auto mechanics, and the like health classes, including sexual education
student aide or school helper
These courses help pad a high school student’s schedule. But they do not constitute the academic core of high school. Grades in these courses do provide a measure of success (I actually have a client who received an “F” as a student aide–I’m hoping that was a clerical error!). But these grades cannot really be counted as a measure of a student’s academic abilities.
Therefore, to calculate a student’s core GPA, we have to remove the fluff. We have to calculate the GPA based solely on the five academic solids that constitute a high school student’s performance:
Math
English or Language Arts Social Studies
Science
Foreign Language
The core GPA is your “real” GPA: this is the measure of your academic performance in high school. (Again, it’s not a measure of self-worth.) Unless students come to me with a transcript with nothing but grades of A, most students are disappointed to see their 3.0 cumulative, weighed GPA fall to a more embarrassing 2.3 or lower. Those gym classes and band classes are not only fun, but they artificially prop up one’s GPA. Therefore, colleges with relatively selective admissions processes will strip the fluff right out of the GPA in order to get down to brass tacks: how well does this particular student perform in academic work?
While I hate to be the bearer of bad news, I encourage students from middle school onward to be aware of their “real” GPA as they go through school, and to not be blinded by the number printed on the grade report. They need to be aware that some courses, whether required (health, gym) or not (jazz band, sports conditioning) may artificially inflate their cumulative GPA, and may lead to academic complacency.
The lesson: don’t let yourself be deluded by the numbers on the page. College admissions officers, who must compare one student against another in deciding whom to admit, will strip your GPA of all non-academic fluff. Don’t wait until the fall of your senior year to come to the realization that your GPA may be artificially inflated.
So throw off the rose-colored classes, strip your GPA of all artificial weighting, and strike out all those A grades you received in those electives you love. Ultimately, your “real” GPA is what colleges will consider most carefully.
Now with that out of the way, let’s look at the nuts and bolts of the GPA calculation for students who are awarded letter grades. For each grade in an academic course, assign the following number values to each grade. Then simply divide the sum of these numbers by the number of courses (a simply average). This will be our “Real” GPA.
A = 4.0 A- = 3.7 B+ = 3.3 B = 3.0 B- = 2.7 C+ = 2.3 C = 2.0 C- = 1.7 D+ = 1.3 D = 1.0 F = 0
To give an example, let’s say that Stan the Student has a B- in Math, a B+ in English, a C+ in social studies, an A in Spanish, and a B in science, we add the following values: 2.7 + 3.3 + 2.3 + 4.0 + 3.0, for a total of 15.3. Divide by 5 course, and the GPA is 3.06. Also, you may want to get an idea of how to translate percentages into the numerical grade point average. You counselor can help you with understanding more so see him/her frequently!
Mark Montgomery College Counselor
GRADE 9 LESSON 25: Researching Opportunities