Following presentations at Langley and McLean high schools, four Fairfax County mothers have succeeded in convincing the school system to take another look at the schools’ grading scale, which has been in place for 30 years.

"When it was just the four of us, it was dismissed as anecdotal and the concern of just a few parents," said Megan McLaughlin, the mother of three elementary school-aged boys in the Woodson High School pyramid and a former admissions officer for Georgetown University.

However, after the women made their presentation for an audience of about 140 at McLean High School in early March, and about 125 attended their meeting last Tuesday at Langley High School, the School Board and superintendent’s office were flooded with e-mails, said McLaughlin. The parent-teacher associations at those schools had also endorsed her group, which calls itself Fairgrade.



THE GROUP’S CONCERN is that Fairfax County’s relatively tough grading system places its students at a disadvantage in the competition for admissions, scholarships and honors placement at the college level. In most jurisdictions, scores of 90 to 100 are considered A’s, for example, while in Fairfax County anything from 90 to 93 is a B+. The school system also adds just a half point to students’ four-point grades in advanced placement (AP) classes and gives no extra weight to grades in honors classes, while most other localities add a full point to advanced placement grades and either a half or whole point to honors grades.

Last Thursday morning, the women met with Superintendent Jack Dale and a few other school officials, and they gave their presentation to Dranesville’s School Board representative, Janie Strauss, that afternoon. School officials agreed to have staff research the matter and said they would involve Fairgrade in the process as a sort of consultant.

The four women had "raised questions that are clearly of concern to a lot of parents," said Strauss.

She said school staff had now been tasked with answering three questions: how Fairfax County’s grade distribution — weighted and unweighted — compares to that of other jurisdictions; what impact different grading systems have on college admissions, honors placement and merit scholarships; and what data would counter claims that changing the grading scale would amount to grade inflation or "dumbing down" of the curriculum or expectations.

McLaughlin said she was wary of the fact that school officials were not convinced, at this point, that there was a problem, but she added, "all we can do is be hopeful." She said she hoped the process would move fast enough to benefit the class of 2009, but Strauss said the schools would be guarded against making any "knee-jerk reaction."

"We are not here talking about how well our students do once they get into college," McLaughlin told the crowd at Langley last Tuesday, April 1, noting that Fairfax County students tend to perform well at the college level.



THE PROBLEM, said Sara Pacque-Margolis, whose three children attend McLean High School, is that today’s students face an increasingly competitive race for admission to colleges and universities that have become more and more costly. While more students are graduating from high school every year and a greater percentage of those students are applying for college, the number of freshman openings in the country’s colleges has remained about the same, said Pacque-Margolis. Meanwhile, tuition has increased at rates greater than that of inflation, making scholarships more and more important.

Marcy Newberger, whose children graduated from McLean High School, pointed out that in 2005, while Faifrax County’s average SAT score of 1114 was about 100 points higher than the national average, its average student’s grade point average (GPA) was 2.91, below the national average of 2.98. This disparity, she said, was the result of both the county’s grading scale and the small weight it places on advanced classes.

The issue of weighted classes may have an especially large impact at schools like Langley and McLean, where the majority of the student body takes advanced classes. According to the schools’ Office of Community Relations, of the 1,790 students at McLean High School, 733 are enrolled in at least one AP class, and 467 are in honors classes, which are offered to underclassmen. Almost half of Langley’s 2,001 students are in one or more AP classes. Six hundred sixty-two Langley students are in honors classes, and 213 are in at least one pre-AP class, although there is room for overlap between honors and pre-AP.

Nonetheless, Newberger said more students might take advanced classes if they were weighted more heavily. "Too often, rather than challenge themselves, Fairfax County students take the easy class in favor of a higher grade," she said. Newberger said the impact of the difference in class weights could be seen by comparing the GPAs of Langley graduates with those of Churchill High School in Montgomery County, Md. While 5 percent of Langley’s 2007 grads had a weighted GPA of 4.0 or higher, 36 percent of the students graduating from Churchill that year had that distinction.

Adding to the problem, she said, is the fact that some colleges, such as the University of Michigan, drop pluses and minuses from students’ grades before calculating their GPAs. Therefore, a grade of 80 percent in Montgomery County and a grade of 93 percent in Fairfax County would both be regarded as a B.

Strauss said all high school transcripts include an explanation of the school system’s grading scale, and the women of Fairgrade said they did find that a number of schools, particularly those in-state, accounted for different grading systems when deciding on admissions.



HOWEVER, even in-state colleges rarely take grading systems into account when selecting students for honors placement or merit-based scholarships, said Pacque-Margolis. These are usually awarded on the basis of "hard and fast cutoffs" in GPA and SAT scores, she said. "Many students and parents I’ve talked to are unaware of all they’re losing in scholarship money."

She told the story of a Fairfax County student who was awarded a scholarship to Brigham Young University for half of one year’s tuition and found she had just missed qualifying for a much larger scholarship. "She would have gotten a four-year, full scholarship if she was just in a school with a 10-point scale," said Pacque-Margolis.

She said her own son lost $4,000 in scholarship money from Indiana University because the larger scholarship required a GPA of 3.75 or higher. His GPA was 3.7, and there was no adjustment to account for his school’s grading system. "I heard him telling my younger children, ‘The trick is, just don’t take those AP courses,’" she said. "Is that the message we want to send?"

McLaughlin said some school officials had told her that changing the grading system would lower academic standards. However, she pointed out that the 10-point grading scale was much more common, not only nationwide but also among the country’s top schools. Fairgrade had found the grading scales for 45 of U.S. News and World Report’s latest list of the country’s top 100 high schools, not including the three Fairfax County schools that made the list, and found that the 10-point scale was by far the most common among those schools.

Thirty-three of the schools used that scale, while one used a six-point scale, five used a numerical grade of 1 to 100, and six let teachers assign grades at their discretion. "We believe this data demonstrates that a 10-point scale can be associated with a high level of achievement," said McLaughlin.

She also compared Langley, which had been among the schools given a "Gold Medal" by U.S. News and World Report, with five other schools from the list that were considered to be traditional high schools. The 5 percent of Langley graduates with weighted GPAs of 4.0 or higher was dwarfed by the other schools’ rates of 20 to 36 percent, although Langley’s average SAT score of 1214 was well within the range of the other schools’ SAT scores.

McLaughlin said the women had discovered 15 school districts in the county that had switched to the 10-point scale in the last three years, and they had collected quotes from those superintendents. "We made the assumption that colleges look at the grading scale. Well, they don’t," a Chicago superintendent had said. In Florida, which is among the top four Gold Medal-earning states, the state legislature had mandated a 10-point scale. Fairgrade did not find any that had changed over to a tougher scale.



FOLLOWING THE LEAD of other jurisdictions, said McLaughlin, "will encourage Fairfax County students to take more challenging courses and will allow our students to receive the grades they deserve."

"Yes, our kids do well," she said. "We believe they could be doing better."

McLaughlin said she and her colleagues would continue touring the county’s schools, soliciting the support of Parent Teacher Associations and giving a presentation to any school that requests one.

The fourth member of the group, Louise Epstein, whose child attends Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, was not at last Tuesday’s meeting.

Strauss said the school system’s new research project would not be an overnight job. "Part of the challenge is trying to get information from colleges and universities," she said. "It’ll take some time. Hopefully, weeks to months."