Superintendent Alison Villanueva was about a month into leading Connecticut’s Watertown school district when she suddenly found herself facing a “catastrophe, PR nightmare.”
A high school principal published the names of that year’s valedictorian and salutatorian in a press release and on social media. Then, the district got a call from a parent arguing that the information was wrong and that their own child had, in fact, come in second in the graduating class.
The student whose name the district had publicized actually ranked third.
Though this may seem like a minor mishap to someone who doesn’t work in K-12 education, Villanueva “was in a frenzy,” she recalled four years later. “If you have something like this that’s so monumentally incorrect, it puts doubt in people’s minds about everything you’ve done.”
The mistake resulted in more than a corrected press release. After some fact-finding and soul searching, the district made significant changes to the way it calculates weighted GPAs and how it decides which students can take the challenging courses that help boost those averages.
The whole scenario also got Villanueva thinking about the logic behind weighted GPAs and class rank.
“We’re trying to calculate our way to the top of high school,” she said. “What’s the point of that? Just [to] have the social aspect of being deemed the valedictorian, a salutatorian?”
To be clear, Villanueva’s skepticism isn’t meant to diminish high achievers, she said. But she and other educators wonder if a system that emphasizes—and publicly rewards—grades over mastery of skills and knowledge will really prepare students for the future workforce.
After all, artificial intelligence tools can pass just about every Advanced Placement test—the capstone assessment for the courses that often carry the biggest bang for the weighted GPA buck.
Such questions are especially fraught given that low-income students and students of color are less likely to be steered toward rigorous courses and therefore earn top honors in schools that weight GPAs, experts say.
What’s more, even as K-12 writ large pushes past the “college for all” ethos of past decades, most schools’ methods for weighting GPAs and calculating class rank offer little benefit for students in career-and-technical education.
“There’s one definition of academic success, and it’s through these weighted courses,” said Kristin Klopfenstein, the director of the Colorado Evaluation and Action Lab at the University of Denver who has conducted research on the topic. “That reflects your local values, whether you recognize it or not.”
Schools’ methods for weighting GPA differ significantly
Though most high schools weigh GPAs, there’s wide variation in how those averages are calculated, including exactly which courses carry extra points, Klopfenstein said.
Some schools, for instance, give extra credit for only college-level courses—such as AP, International Baccalaureate, or dual enrollment, she said. Others offer a GPA bonus for those classes plus all courses labeled “honors.” Among those that give credit for both college-level and honors, some give students more of an advantage for taking college-level classes. Others handle AP/IB classes and honors the same.
There’s been little examination of which approach is best, Klopfenstein said.
“The only thing that’s consistent is that there’s no consistency in how schools treat grade weighting,” she said.
Weighting GPAs does indeed have a modest, positive influence on the number of advanced courses students take, Klopfenstein found. But the effect is limited primarily to white students who are not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.
That may be because many schools aren’t directing students from certain racial backgrounds to the rigorous courses that may lift their weighted GPAs, according to separate research conducted by Sarah Morris, the research liaison for Rice University’s Houston Education Research Consortium.
Morris found that Black students in Arkansas are three times less likely to be placed in advanced courses as Asian students, even when they have the same academic ability.
“That makes me feel really terrible about weighted GPAs, because we’re talking about a whole group of students that just kaboom [can’t take advantage of] those opportunities,” she said.
Educators are divided on whether grades themselves motivate students—much less the race for the highest weighted GPA or the valedictorian slot.
About 1 in 6 educators—16 percent—say that students would be more academically motivated if there was less emphasis on grades, according to an EdWeek Research Center survey of 759 teachers conducted in December.
Nearly a quarter—23 percent—believed student outcomes would improve if grades were emphasized more. Another quarter says that the current level of emphasis maximizes student engagement. And a plurality—36 percent—believe that nothing about student motivation would change if grades were emphasized differently one way or the other.
It’s typically only a small handful of high achievers scrambling to have the highest weighted GPA or become valedictorian, said David Lang, the chair of the economics department at California State University, Sacramento, who has studied GPAs.
“The rising tide, in this case, does not raise all ships. It just raises the ships that are at the top,” Lang said. “The other ones just kind of look at this as a game that they don’t get to participate in. No kid that is 312 out of [a class of] 600 is trying to battle for 311.”
The class-rank race carries unintended consequences
Some schools are responding to the fact that only a few students are motivated by class rank by reworking how they order students or weight their GPAs.
Virginia’s more than 4,000 student Winchester school district has switched from traditional class rank to designating students as summa cum laude, magna cum laude, and cum laude, just as colleges do—a change the school board approved on the recommendation of Superintendent Jason Van Heukelum.
Over his decades in education, Van Heukelum has watched students—including his own daughter—make “dumb decisions” to protect their GPAs, he said.
Some top-notch students are much less likely to take electives that don’t carry any extra points. They’ve figured out that even acing an art course, for instance, could drag down a GPA above a 4.0, since art classes don’t carry the extra points that some academic courses, such as AP, do.
“If you’re really obsessed with your GPA, then you’re going to nickel and dime that and you’re going to make bad choices as a 16-, 17-year-old,” Van Heukelum said. “You’re not going to really enjoy the offerings that your high school has available.”
For instance, an aspiring engineer who is striving to stay at the top of their high school class may opt to take AP Psychology, even if they “have no interest in the field,” because it gives them a GPA quality point. And they may eschew a welding course, which has plenty of application to engineering, because CTE classes don’t offer a weighted GPA boost.
In fact, ditching the practice of weighted GPAs altogether is worth considering, Van Heukelum said. Given the wide variance in how schools approach the averages, he’s not sure how meaningful it is to college-admissions officers or potential employers.
But that shift may make parents anxious, he acknowledged.
“I think that’s the fear factor for families in particular is that our kids aren’t as competitive [as they could be if] we don’t weigh enough,” Van Heukelum said.
California Area school district, a 900-student rural district in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny mountains, is adopting a similar approach—designating top students as summa, magna, and cum laude—and will eventually use that system in lieu of class rank, said Superintendent Laura Jacob.
The shift will be implemented gradually, so that students don’t feel caught off guard, she said.
The district already allows students to opt out of grades entirely in favor of a competency-based approach that results in a mastery transcript.
For kids who stick with letter grades, the traditional ranking system “is damaging to our top 10 kids that are in that class-rank battle,” Jacob said. “Kids are literally breaking down, balling because they got one B on a test.”
The district is trying to instill values like grit and a growth mindset in its students, she said. If students are rattled by a single less-than-perfect score, “we’re not preparing [them] for the challenges of the world when [they] leave high school,” Jacob said.
Experts advise schools to revisit their weighted GPA policies periodically
In Watertown, the wrong salutatorian blunder prompted Michael Dalton, the district’s instructional technology specialist, to look under the hood at how the district calculates its weighted grade point averages.
He found that the district’s system rewarded students who took challenging math and science classes but didn’t offer as big a benefit to those who enrolled in high-level humanities courses.
At the same time, Villanueva and other leaders realized fewer students of color were taking AP classes and other rigorous courses that could boost their GPAs.
“So, we’re thinking, ‘What the heck is happening there?’” Villanueva said. “Because that’s not fair, either.”
The district made a policy change, putting challenging humanities classes on equal footing with tough STEM courses in calculating weighted GPAs. And it made it easier for students from a variety of academic backgrounds to enroll in advanced courses.
In the past, “there had been such gatekeeping that you only [had] the [highest achieving] kids in your AP classes, but now we are essentially increasing the number of students of all races and ethnicities and backgrounds and abilities to go into these classes,” Villanueva said.
It’s smart practice for districts to periodically take a fresh look at how weighted GPA and class rank are calculated, Klopfenstein said.
“I think sometimes it’s legacy. The decisions are made, then it just becomes ‘this is how we’ve always done it,’” she said.
Instead of relying on old systems, districts should consider revisiting their polices every few years, she said. They should ask questions like: “‘Why do we do this this way? Have our values changed? Are there unintended consequences that we have not paid enough attention to?’” Klopfenstein said. “We need to be continuously more thoughtful about this.”
