"Don't settle for mediocracy"
The article reports some speculation on whether this year's epic levels of non-mediocracy (the word-coining Jones is long gone, by the way, after one of those "inappropriate" relationships with a student) might be due in part to grade inflation. But whether or not grades are inflated at Garfield, it's obvious that a Garfield transcript has lost much of its meaning for those whose jobs it is to evaluate transcripts (mostly, college admissions officers). The article doesn't get into this at all but, as an admissions officer, if you know that 44 kids from the same school all got straight A's, you are going to ascribe less weight to grades and more weight to all the other parts of the applicant's file. While this may not be a bad thing, it means that the achievement these 44 students have worked so hard for is worth less to them than they might have expected at the start. Admissions officers will just start looking past the perfect grades and focusing on something else. These top Garfield students take tons of Advanced Placement classes (the school has a "magnet" element to it). Perhaps the new way to separate them will be by AP scores--this person had four 5's, that person had two 5's and two 4's, etc. When the GPA lacks meaning, evaluators will look for meaning in other places.
The kids I feel sorry for are those with GPAs like 3.95. I wonder what their class rank is. I'm guessing a 3.95 would still land you in the top 25% of the class, but maybe not. So these poor kids have probably worked just as hard, or harder, than the 44 valedictorians and end up with a class rank of no better than 45/406, and probably a lot lower.
In a traditional model of grading, a major goal is to spread out the students to enable meaningful distinctions to be made. Whether you agree this is a valid goal, it's clear Garfield is not achieving it. But if you are going hold an Olympic weightlifting event with nothing heavier than a 300-pound barbell, you probably shouldn't be awarding 44 gold medals. If Garfield wants its gold medals to mean anything, it needs heavier barbells.
Or it needs to stop pretending that some of these statistics mean what they used to mean, and stop reporting them at all. Stop tracking and reporting class rank information. Don't have valedictorians. Tell the admissions officers that if they want to recruit Garfield's many excellent graduates, they will have to do it without the use of some very misleading statistics. You don't have to settle for mediocracy to take a stand against transcript mismeaningification.
posted at 6:44 PM
1 Comments:
I've participated in a couple scholarship selections for an foundation and when you're looking at 100 applicants and they all have 3.9 or better the decision is way more than grades. These kids are so well rounded that I'm not sure they sleep. The decisions came down to how well the kids balanced the education, charity work and being a kid. Note to the nerds: if all your extra curricular stuff is Math Club, spend some time with the nursing home crowd or play a sport. Have some fun for christsake!
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