Sibley High rethinks grade weighting

Henry Sibley High School again is considering giving greater weight to grades earned by students taking tougher college-prep classes, barely six months after rejecting the concept.

The West St. Paul school has appointed a Weighted Grade Task Force, which will meet for the second time today and plans to make recommendations next month. All possibilities and combinations of weighting grades and class rank are being considered, said Pat Johnson, associate principal.

Students, parents and teachers have pushed administrators to factor tougher courses into grade point averages and class rankings because they think it could help kids taking such courses with college admissions. Teachers and administrators also say weighting grades helps encourage students to take tougher courses.

"I would love for that to happen," said Michelle Schuleman, parent of a senior and a freshman at Henry Sibley. It's too late to help her oldest son, whom Schuleman describes as bright, hard-working and academically oriented with Ivy League aspirations.

Schuleman said she worries that the tougher classes he's taken could hurt his chances of getting into a top school. He scored a 35 on his ACT and will have taken 11 advanced placement courses by graduation, but he's in only the top 7 percent of his class, rather than the top 2 or 3 percent, where he would be in a weighted-grade environment.

"When you're looking at competitive schools, everything counts," Schuleman said.

School officials, however, question whether anyone has been rejected by a school they pursued due to unweighted grading.

Schuleman, whose son has just begun applying to colleges, said she is otherwise more than satisfied with the education her sons have gotten in the West St. Paul-Mendota Heights-Eagan district. "I can't speak highly enough about the district," she said, adding that it managed to provide a strong education even as it suffered enduring budget crunches.

A growing number of schools have given greater weight to grades for tougher courses in recent years. Some schools locally and nationally have eliminated class rankings entirely.

Earlier this month, the Eastern Carver County School District decided to eliminate class rankings from its high school transcripts, but it will continue to calculate rankings and make them available to students because military academies and some scholarship programs require class rank information on their applications.

The decision to reconsider grade weighting at Henry Sibley came from the teachers of its advanced placement classes, Johnson said. A student can do the hard work in an advanced placement class, "or walk three doors down the hall and take a general-level class and get an A," she said.

The task force also will determine which classes -- honors, advanced placement or other rigorous offerings -- will merit greater weight. It also will decide whether to have a class ranking system with weighted grading, unweighted or both.