Three NHS Juniors Urge School Committee To Reform GPA System

While Hunter Bistany, Russell Simpson, Jake Clarke, and some of their friends were on Aspen, the online platform used by Nantucket High School students to access student data, including their GPA, they noticed something peculiar about the grading system.

Simpson, who was taking an advanced placement (AP) college-level English class and earned a B+ for the quarter, received the same number of points toward his GPA as one of his classmates, who earned an A in their college-preparatory (CP) standard high school English course.

“We were like, ’That’s interesting',” Bistany said during a presentation to the Nantucket School Committee last Tuesday. “We know Russell is working on an essay per week and our friend was laughing saying, ‘Haha I only had to do one essay the whole quarter.’ We decided okay, we don’t think that is very fair, and we would like to look into it and see if we can do something about it.”

Bistany, Simpson, and Clarke presented a PowerPoint to the School Committee outlining differences in workloads across course levels, the limited incentive the existing GPA system offers students to take on more challenging courses, and the importance of GPA in the college admissions screening process. The goal of the student’s proposal is to bring the way NHS calculates GPA more in line with other comparable schools, such as Sandwich High School, which was cited in the presentation, to create a more fair differentiation between College Preparatory, Honors, and AP coursework – rewarding the students who are taking on a heavier workload in higher level courses for their success.

“The current GPA system doesn’t sufficiently show the difference between those levels of classes,” Simpson said. “In a CP class, you could have up to 10-30 minutes of homework per night, while in an AP class, you could have 60-120 minutes per night.”

Their request to the committee was to initiate a review of the current GPA weighting structure to evaluate whether it accurately reflects academic rigor, provide guidance on the best way to implement a modified system, and continue to collaborate with school administrators and student representatives throughout the process.

“We believe aligning the GPA calculations with other high school’s around the district and many colleges, it will help us accurately represent the work we do in school,” Clarke said. “We believe strengthening the academic transparency will also bring fairness to everyone.”

Bistany said based on the current scale, earning an A in a CP course is 4.4 points, an Honor’s A is 4.7 points, and an AP A is 5 points. The proposed system by the three juniors increases the gap by .2 points. An A in a CP course would be worth 4 points, an A in an Honors course would be 4.5 points, and an A in an AP class would remain 5 points.

“I think it is interesting you guys came up with this,” committee member Dr. Tim Lepore said. “It will level things out so the harder work gets a better nod.”

“Dr. Lepore and I support this. We think it is an excellent idea to bring us in with the other schools across the region,” committee chair Laura Gallagher Byrnes said. "I think it makes a lot of sense."

The trio presented two possible approaches to implement a new system. Their preferred approach is freshman-only implementation, which would mean the updated proposal would begin with the incoming freshman class to ensure long-term structural consistency while avoiding mixed-scale transcripts.

The alternative would be multi-grade implementation which means that moving forward, all grades would have the new system applied to their GPA. Some of the issues with this method include students having GPA calculations under two different systems and more clear, concise documentation and communication being required in order to avoid issues down the line.

“We would preferably do it at the beginning of next year,” Bistany said.

Committee member Vincent Murphy asked whether changing the point structure mid-year would cause complications for teachers and grading. Bistany reiterated that ideally, a new system gets implemented ahead of next year. Superintendent Beth Hallett also clarified to the members that the grading teachers implement is numeric from one to 100, so this change wouldn’t impact them, only the way the calculation comes through on Aspen.

A vote is scheduled to be taken on this proposal during the School Committee's March 24^th meeting.