Reply to What’s with all of the honors and AP courses? Why don’t they make regular courses more challenging?

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Reply to "What’s with all of the honors and AP courses? Why don’t they make regular courses more challenging?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So it seems like a lot of students (even freshman) take a huge number of honors and AP courses in MCPS. Why? I understand they get a grade boost but if so many of these students are ready for college level work years before college, maybe the district needs to adjust their own courses. I am a teacher and a parent and my son will be in high school next year. People are asking me what AP courses he will be taking. If he is ready for college level classes as a freshman, something is wrong with the coursework in high school.

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It is to make MCPS look like a very intelligent school district.  They offer these to basically everyone, give an entire point higher for even honors courses and have some type of rubric that a 79.5 and an 89.5 actually equals an A in the course.  If it is honors, you get a 5.0 GPA.  F'ing ridiculous.

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You must also consider that MCPS doesn’t give pluses or minuses.  The 79.5 issue is really not the problem.  The problem is no trend based grading and the elimination of final exams.  It is much easier to get all As than it used to be.  Grades should be numbers and not letters.  A 95 should be exactly that and not an A.  I am guessing that one of the reasons that MCPS made it easier to do well was to compete with other school districts around the nation that grade inflate.  My senior in college, who graduated before the elimination of trend based grading, has said many of her college friends had all As in high school and could barely pass their classes in college.  She has done better in college than she did in high school, which was pretty darn good but not all As.[/quote]

I believe all grades should be numbered.  The "GPA" should be a number on a 100 scale.  Across the entire country.  You get 5 points extra for a honors course and 10 points extra for an AP course.  That's it.

[/quote] Schools can still decide how hard to make the test making the grades useless.  You can give a test where the average is 75 and I can give a test in the same class one town over where the average grade in 95.  Doesn't mean my kids know more.  I just gave an easier test.  All schools give out a profile which shows the grade frequency.  MCPS does not look intelligent.  They look like a district with inflated grades.  Does that mean a college cannot distinguish between a kid that took Honors Health and Chorus for a 5 point A vs AP Physics C?  I don't think so.[/quote]

The point is to distinguish the kids in their own schools. A kid with a 98 GPA is much better than one with a 90. Right now in MCPS, they are both A students. [/quote]

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