Madison West High School Tries New Equation To Boost GPA

Freshmen students at Madison high schools won’t receive any grade lower than 40 percent in some of their classes as part of a new grading system meant to improve students’ GPA.

The practice diverts from the norm in most classes, where students are graded on a 100-point scale and anything lower than 60 is failing. But that system makes it more difficult for students to move from a failing grade to a passing grade, said Karen Boran, principal at Madison West High School.

The grading scale would apply to English, math, science, social studies and physical education classes at Madison West. The scale also applies to U.S. History classes at La Follette High School and algebra classes at East High School.

The goal of this type of grading floor is preventing the “super F,” Boran said. Super Fs can be the result of getting zeros on a test or missing assignments. Scores between 40 and 60 percent are still considered failing grades, but they’ll give students a better chance at moving that grade up to a passing level.

Freshman will also have the chance to turn in missing assignments for up to 90 percent credit, Boran said.

Boran said it’s more important for students to do the actual work than to ask a teacher for extra credit options that might have them doing something completely unrelated to the coursework.

Offering at most 90 percent for the work is incentive for the student to turn in the assignments they missed as soon as possible. But Boran admitted there’s a still a possibility students will turn in all late assignments at once.

“These are 14-year-olds. Let’s just remember that that’s a possibility,” she said. “But we would rather they did the work and get the points than not do anything at all.”

School administrators are hoping this new grading style will have an impact on freshman students’ grade-point average, particularly because research shows GPA is twice as effective a predictor of students’ success in college compared to test scores, Boran said.

It’s also correlated to students being able to graduate on time, she added.

“The transition from eight grade to ninth grade is probably the most significant transition a kid has in their academic career,” Boran said.

Peter Goff, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said this sort of grading system could have potential for addressing the gap in graduation rates among white and black students.

At Madison West, Boran said, last year 97.3 percent of 15-year-old white students were on track to graduate. For black students in that same age group, it was 48.5 percent.

Goff said super Fs put students “behind the ball sufficiently that they lose the motivation to move forward.”

Still, Goff considers letter grades a bit arbitrary, and spoke more in favor of a 5-point scale because that could provide clearer definitions for what students know.

“At the student level (it) helps convey what the students do know, what they don’t know and where we can give them supports to build their knowledge base,” he said.

Some critics say a system such as a grading floor could lead to grade inflation, but Boran said a study completed by the University of Chicago’s Consortium for Chicago School Research debunked that.

“They found that while this practice was going on in those schools, they saw commensurate rise in student achievement with respect to graduation rate and test scores, as well as GPA,” she said.

Others have also said this type of grading scale is faulty because it doesn’t hold everyone to the same level of rigor.

Boran countered saying the true rigor is a combination of high standards for everyone and having supports in place to allow students to reach those standards.

Those types of support systems are important, Goff said. But sometimes kids have to fail, too.

“We have to be OK letting kids fail and at the same time knowing that we’re providing them all the supports possible to ensure their success,” he said.