This year our local HS enacated a new policy that grades in PE classes would be included in calculating GPA. They had not been included in the past. My youngest graduated last spring, so I have no dog in this fight. But it got me thinking about exactly how I felt about this.
My first reaction was that it would be okay so long as PE grades were awarded on effort, rather than ability. And I questioned whether I would trust the PE teachers I have known to fairly acknowledge effort, instead of favoring the athletically talented.
But then I realized that that was inconsistent with the way I felt academic classes should be graded. Your effort should only go so far if you don’t get the correct answer. In academic classes, the academically talented student is generally expected to have an edge over the merely industrious.
Further complicating matters is that I am generally pretty supportive of mandatory PE in schools. Another possible wrinkle - ought there be honors PE available?
I’ll have to ask my kids what they think - as well as what their PE grades were.
I don’t see why not to include them in the overall GPA. I mean, I think some people just get too caught up in GPAs anyway. They’re not always indicative of how well a child is learning.
I don’t think PE should be mandatory in schools.
Wouldn’t someone who qualified for ‘honors’ PE actually be on one of the school’s sports teams? Seems like that’s kind of the same thing.
Some of my teachers introduced quizes on the basics of a sport after that ‘unit’ was done. So if you played tennis for a week and a half you’d answer a one page quiz about rules of tennis. I think that’s a good approach and grading based on physical ability would be silly.
What’s a high school GPA used for, anyway? College admissions, of course. And what else? I’m drawing a blank here.
Are there any nontrivial uses of GPA (a) besides college admissions, (b) where inclusion of PE grades would make them more accurate for that use?
Unless the answers are (a) Yes, and (b) Yes, then there’s absolutely no reason to include PE grades in high school GPA. It’s hard to see how including PE grades in a student’s GPA would increase their accuracy as a predictor of college success.
In my school, PE was mandatory, and the grade did count towards your GPA.
However, the grade was based on showing up in uniform, participating (ie: not sitting on the bleachers gossiping or sneaking out for a smoke), and small quizzes like Fuzzy mentioned.
The only exception to this I recall was the annual fitness test where you had to do as many sit ups and push ups as you could, hang with your chin on the bar for as long as you could, and run as far as you could in, maybe, 5 minutes. They compiled all this into a fitness score and it counted as a very small percentage of your final grade.
I never really thought much about it being unfair. Considering how fat we are as a nation, I actually think it’s pretty important that we reward at least the bare minimum of physical effort and ability.
I don’t think they should be included (they aren’t in the UK, it’s just an excuse to let kids blow off steam and keep fit), but suppose that they are. Why should grades be based on effort, rather than ability, when in any other subject they aren’t? Why is PE always treated with this sort of double standard? Nobody gives kids an A grade for being shit at maths, so why should it be so for being shit at sport?
Colleges, for one, and colleges should have no reason to care about how well little Timmy can bounce a ball unless he’s going on an athletic scholarship. Inflating the GPA with PE grades is just another way to make the GPA useless and force colleges to insist on test scores as a condition of entry.
My high school’s PE grading was similar. It was a combination of knowledge of the sport played (rules, scoring, movements, equipment) along with effort and participation. If you played tennis for a couple weeks and could explain the scoring system, what a top spin was, what type of player should use an oversize raquet, and actually attempted to play the game throughout the class time rather than chatting it up with friends you got yourself a decent grade. Ability was never a factor.
I don’t think PE grades should be included in GPA’s, for two reasons. First, the GPA is used as an indicator of academic achievement, and PE is something else entirely. Second, my experience, and I suspect that of many others, is that PE grades essentially reflect academic ability, despite teachers’ proclamations that “anyone can get an A” or that “effort and attitude are what counts.” I think it’s plausible that in certain cases one’s chances for college admission can be negatively affected by one’s lack of athletic prowess, and I don’t think that’s fair.
I do think PE is important and should be mandatory. I just don’t think it should be allowed to affect what is purported to be an academic indicator.
PE isn’t making anything less accurate, is it? Is there a huge section of straight-A students who are failing PE? Or straight-F students who are acing it? I would imagine the A students would put in enough effort to do well in PE. And the F students, well, I’m not sure what kind of college is going to be admitting these people anyway. I dunno, maybe CSUN.
It was included in our school GPA and it sucked. Athletics should be separate from the academic average. The boys athletics director 10-12 grade in high school would only give a C as the best grade unless you went out for after school athletic activities. He ruined the GPA for many academically exceptional kids.
In my gym class you had to now be a complete lazy ass to get an A. It counted towards GPA, and I have no problem with it. GPA is basically indicative of effort and not ability anyway and so for a class that is graded purely on effort then I have no problem with it being counted. If multiple levels of PE were offered for student of a wide range of physical abilities then I think grading on ability could be considered, but not when everybody is thrown into one class.
I have no problem with them grading PE based on ability and I think it would be a good thing if they treated it more like a class and assigned homework like running a mile. Obviously the homework couldn’t be graded but if they based the final grade on progress over the semester and if you did the homework your final grade would improve more them if you didn’t.
As for including it into the GPA I really have no problem with it because it will just serve to separate the truly exceptional students from the rest. I think the kid who is athletically and academically gifted should be rewarded more then the kid who is just one or the other. Besides it is only one class and the only way it will significantly make a difference between two top candidates is if they are already equivalent academically.
If I was going to remove something from the GPA it would be the foreign language being able to learn a new language is significantly harder then the other courses and requires much more work and is about as useful in a career as being athletically inclined.
I don’t know how things work in the US, but here in Canada universities look at your HS transcript, not just your average mark. The university I went to took the average of your English, Calculus, Algebra and Geometry, Chemistry and Physics grades along with your top mark in another “academic” course(as it happened, all three of my other grade 12 courses were eligible “academic courses”, and the average of all 8 courses I took was higher than the average of the 6 courses they took into account).
I am fairly sure my P.E. grade was included in my GPA, although it might have been weighted in some way.
I’m fine with that. While P.E. classes might not represent academic ability, they represent the ability to show up and make some sort of effort to do what’s expected of you. I trust that the students are held to a reasonable standard, the same that I expect from a math class or a biology class.
And I say this as someone who hated P.E. and received mundane P.E. grades.
I currently have 3 kids in college. Whether you like the practice or not, my experience is that class rank is one of a few factors that contribute to scholarships. (I believe it also affects admissions decisions as well.) For example, my one kid was told that a certain category of scholarship is only available to kids who were in the top 5% of their HS class (in addition to other factors). My kid was 1 place outside the 5% in a class of 500, and was not even considered.
I find myself of differing opinions. Yes, it is a shame that some kids forego classes they would be interested in, simply because they do not want to risk lowering their GPA. At the top of the class are kids who take almost entirely honors/AP classes. But if everyone was required to take gym, with very few exemptions granted, at least the playing field would be level.
But even tho I can criticize the sytem, it is the current system within which kids must apply for college. So it is hard for me to criticize someone for maximizing his or her position within that system.
Personally, I think one of my reasons for not wanting PE to count towards my kids’ GPA is that a couple of the PE teachers were just about the only HS teachers I encountered with whom I was not impressed.
I think gym was pass/fail at my old high school. It wasn’t easy to fail, but if you did, it meant summer school. I don’t know if it was included in anybody’s GPA, but it shouldn’t be. I see not point to doing that, and the effort shouldn’t be mandated.
… seriously? Put in PE and take out foreign languages? Geez, and then you wonder why some people think Americans are the assholes of the world. “You shouldn’t be graded in Spanish 'cause it’s, like, hard and stuff. People aren’t good at stuff that’s hard and shouldn’t be penalized.”
ETA - trust me, foreign languages were NOT harder in high school than AP Calculus. Anybody can learn enough of a romance language to limp through two years, which I think is the requirement here. And as for career usefulness, I’m going back on my own dime to learn Spanish even as we speak, for my job.
