Faculty Council, South Senate Consider Removal of Weighted GPAs

By Lucy Kim and Chloe Frantzis
News Reporters

In a meeting on March 5 with South Senate, the Faculty Council discussed the possibility of removing weighted GPAs from Newton South.

The GPA represents the average of each of a student’s grades for the level-courses he or she is enrolled in. South’s weighted GPA expresses a student’s grades from sophomore to senior year on a scale from one through five, depending on the course level.

GPAs are one of several important factors that colleges consider when looking at an applicant’s academic profile. Therefore, GPAs can often be a source of stress for students.

Recognizing this source of anxiety for students, the Faculty Council proposed the idea of eliminating weighted GPAs altogether.

“The original inspiration had to do with…the feeling that the weighting of the GPA would motivate students to take a higher level course because it simply had a grade advantage. Students were overtaking the honors classes they weren’t that interested in which added stress,” Faculty Council member Alan Reinstein said.

Reinstein and other faculty members also feel that weighted GPAs lead to divisions among the student body by enforcing distinctions between course levels.

“In our school…there shouldn’t be a distinction between an ‘A’ in an ACP [Advanced College Prep.] class and an ‘A’ in an honors class,” Reinstein said. “Both of those grades should have the same value and because they don’t, it creates a system of segregation or separation.”

Senior Peter Klapes, the President of South Senate, recognizes the Faculty Council’s concerns regarding student stress and also supports eliminating weighted GPAs.

“It’s basically impossible to get a 5.0 at Newton South because…95% of the arts classes are ACP classes and that ‘A’ you get in arts is going to automatically bring down your weighted GPA even if you have a 5.0 in all your other classes. I think this is a little unfair,” Klapes said.

Klapes believes that taking away the weighted GPAs would not have a significant effect on the college application process as many colleges recalculate students’ GPAs using their own scale.

“We want to try to make students look as good as they can on paper and I don’t know if the weighted GPAs always make students look good,” Klapes said.

Although Klapes supports the Faculty Council’s proposal, the majority of South Senate does not.

“I would say that 90% of South Senate doesn’t like that idea. So far as I’ve seen, students are pretty much against it,” he said.

Junior Anna Kim, a member of South Senate, believes that removing weighted GPAs would remove some of the incentives for taking more challenging courses.

“As a student who takes who takes AP classes, unweighted GPAs seem unfair. Knowing that the GPAs in AP classes are weighted has helped me take risks because even though I might get a lower grade in AP classes, I knew the weighted GPA system would help my grade,” Kim said.

Despite opposition from students in South Senate, Reinstein believes that eliminating weighted GPAs would be beneficial in that it would discourage students from comparing themselves to their peers.

“It is a healthy loss to encourage students to think about comparing themselves with themselves and to discourage them to comparing to others,” he said.