One of Saint Bernard Preparatory School’s main goals is the education and encouragement of academic excellence in its students (“2015-2016 Student/Parent Handbook” 6). As the latest development of this, it plans to implement a curve of five points for Honors and ten points for AP classes. Ideally, this curve rewards students who take advanced classes and encourages students to challenge themselves. While weighting is a not a bad idea in itself, the specific curve St. Bernard is implementing does not accomplish these goals at all. The proposed AP and Honors weighting is wholly unfair and would undermine the school’s scholastic aptitude because, firstly, it is not a balanced curve, secondly, it degrades scholastic achievements, and, instead of encouraging students to challenge themselves, it actually encourages laziness. The first problem with this curve is that it results in grading imbalance because it gives such a large amount of points to a wide range of classes with diverse grading methods. For example, AP Calculus at St. Bernard implements scaled tests and dropped grades (Dabbs), while AP Chemistry’s teacher considers any A an exceedingly good grade (Perry). Additionally, this weighting gives out a significant amount …show more content…
It distributes indiscriminately while at the same time punishing high achievers. Students taking higher level classes are absolutely worthy of distinction, but this is not the way to do it. It would be more equitable and effective to apply AP and Honors weighting to the GPA of students with a slight curve giving an A a larger boost than a C. Also, to make the class rankings fairer, students would be ordered by weighted GPA first, and then students with the same GPA would be sorted by average grade. This system would give a more moderate reward to Honors and AP students without punishing high achievers and without removing incentive. The diagram below demonstrates this GPA