I honestly, honestly don’t know if this will sound consoling, or like poking you with a stick … but I work at a college and we recalc just about everything the high schools give us.
I like the idea of making PE pass/fail, or perhaps making it optionally pass/fail.
I’ll note that whether or not PE grades are predictive of college success is an empirical question, and we haven’t seen any evidence. It may well be predictive, since good health is correlated with socioeconomic status and attendance.
Still, colleges themselves generally allow classes outside the major or core requirements to be taken pass-fail.
I’m pretty sure my PE grade was included in my GPA, and I think it should be. PE is important because it is something that is supposed to teach us about being physically active and fit, and even if it fails at that, at least it gets kids who might otherwise do no physical activity other than walking the halls between classes. If it’s not counted in your GPA, it only reduces the incentive for the kids to participate.
And you may be concerned about how it affects kids who are academically gifted but not athletically so. I also think it should include those quizes about the rules for various, proper form for exercises/weight training, and it should include at least some class time learning about basic health and anatomy. All of that is important for physical fitness and is academically relevant.
Similarly, I think progress is more important than actual ability as well, and this is true for the rest of academia. I could be the smartest kid in school, but if I take all the easy classes and breeze through them, I might have a great GPA, but not get into a good college because my class load was unimpressive; that is, a 3.5 GPA in Honors and AP courses is far more impressive than a 4.0 in the bare minimum. So do some sort of basic physical fitness test at the beginning of the year, assign some “homework” to be physically active, and then reassess later. For kids who are already pretty fit, they may see little progress, but since they’re already fit, that’s fine and they can get a good grade for that portion anyway, though they’d still have to do well in the academic portion. For kids that aren’t athletically inclined, if they show good progress, even if they can’t run a 5 minute mile or do 50 pushups, they deserve a good grade for that portion too, because they’ve applied what they’ve learned to improve their physical health.
I think doing that will both help keep PE encourage more kids to be more active and keep it academically relevant enough to allow it to be part of the GPA.
The last paragraph was merely my dream and has nothing to do with what I would do in reality. For the record I failed Spanish 1 and barely passed on my second try while I got my D for done in Spanish 2 while I got a 5 on my Calc 2 AP test and never even took calc 2. So Spanish is much harder then AP calc which is one of the easiest thing I ever learned.
As for useful to careers being physically fit is helpful for attractiveness which can improve career prospects and the only foreign language that I would need to be able to do my job better would be Navajo.
I’m not a proponent of eliminating foreign languages from school but it is similar to PE in that if takes a special set of skill to memorize a list of words and conjugations that you only use for a half hour a day and never again while PE requires a special skill set to use muscles for that half an hour a day and then never again.
I’ve got complete faith that admissions and scholarship decisions are made in just about as fucked up a manner as most other decisions made by large institutions - including the one I work for! 
No worries, tho. I was just repeating something I was told directly by one individual who claimed to be in a position to know at one college. All 3 are attending the schools of their choice, with bills I can afford, so life is good.
Somehow I missed this before, and I agree. Even if you don’t apply a foreign language in your job, it’s still much more important than people think it is. I took 4 1/2 years of Spanish, and chose not to take AP Spanish since I already had a full Senior year and the credit wouldn’t help me in college anyway (my program allowed me to wave the foreign language credits if I took them in highschool, I’d just have to replace them with something else). I don’t use Spanish AT ALL in my job, nor is it relevant in my daily life; in fact, I was semi-fluent at one point, and can barely speak it now.
However, I learned more about grammar from taking Spanish than I did in all of my years of English, not because it wasn’t taught in English, but because so many of the grammar rules in English are things I take for granted, but they were things I actually had to pay attention to in Spanish and see how it related back to English. I think that, as a result, I’m a better writer and speaker because of that, and writing and speaking skills are relevant to virtually every job. Not to mention that part of learning Spanish included learning about other cultures which is also important for that “well-rounded” thing that colleges like.
Perhaps requiring 3 years or 2 and 2, as my school did for my diploma (they had different levels of diplomas with different requirements), is probably a little excessive for anyone that isn’t going to major in the liberals arts, but I certainly think it’s important. Hell, even for a science major, if the writing portion weren’t important enough, most schools these days offer latin, which I imagine has to have some additional benefits there as well.
Just remembered a somewhat relevant personal experience.
In college I took weightlifting 2 semesters in a row. The second time around the credit would not count towards graduation, but the grade counted towards my GPA. First semester I dove into the class, and added a good 10-15# to my skinny frame, significantly increasing all of my lifts, and got the A. Enjoyed it so much I took it again the following semester. The next semester a different instructor graded ENTIRELY on improvement from the bginning to end of the class. My improvement was more limited, due to the significant improvement I had made the previous semester. As such, I got a B.
Here’s the kicker - I took 19 hours that semester - all As with the exception of 1 hour of B! Convinced me that a perfect GPA was unatttainable, and that I needed to spend more time drinking beer!
I don’t think PE classes should count toward GPA because you’d be penalizing individuals who might not have athletic ability. At my high school, PE was mandatory (which I like), but it was on a pass/fail basis. If you had crappy attendance, forgot your uniform or refused to participate, you failed. If you showed up on time, dressed out and did what you were told, you passed. Of course, they did the typical physical assessments (how long does it take you to run a mile, how many pushups in one minute, how many situps), but those were provided to you and your parents as an indicator of your fitness.
Our school runs multiple GPAs. Your records show “Overall,” “Adjusted” and “Academic.” The “overall” includes PE. The others don’t. The “Adjusted” is the one used for class ranking. It includes weighted grades for AP, but doesn’t include non-academic classes like PE, ROP, TA and the like. “Academic” is the same classes, only unweighted.
Probably not failing - just getting B’s and C’s. So yes, PE’s making GPAs less accurate when included.
Is anything as arbitrary and subjective as the grading system of a given PE teacher? At my wife’s HS, they all had different standards; what your grade was depended in large part on which one you got. Which is why they make the GPA less accurate.
Effort only goes so far if your grade is based on getting under a certain time in the 440, or some such.
I’m not worried about them either, because they won’t be getting into colleges in the first place, and the colleges (and college-bound kids) are apparently the only consumers, if you will, of high-school GPAs.
I don’t think it would be horrible for high schools to allow a student to take one or two courses pass/fail each semester. They might not want to allow it for Algebra or Composition or Biology - but letting kids take a pass fail course lets them do something they might enjoy, but not be very good at - Theatre or Woodshop or whatever - without impacting their college bound GPA.
Sorry, but what’s wrong with that? Don’t GPA’s penalise those who don’t have mathematical ability, for instance? Isn’t the student who is athletic and an excellent scholar better than the student who is only good at book learning?
So basically if you weren’t a truant, didn’t “forget” your kit and actively participated in class, you passed.
This is a bad thing … how?
That isn’t that different than other variations in teaching though. In my high school there were something like six English teachers. One was EASY. One was HARD. Getting an A from Mr. Emerson meant you had worked your butt off. Getting anything other than a B+ from Ms. Bryer meant that you hadn’t even bothered to show up in class. Mr. Emerson’s lit course had a list of over 100 books, most of them pretty difficult, and you had to read 3000 pages over the semester and write multipage book reports on each one for an A. Ms. Bryer’s class was free form - any book would do, and her grading was subjective - reading one “hard” book like Grapes of Wrath was enough to get you an A. She’d even accept reports on books she knew we’d all read the year before.
If the GPA is only really used for college entry, then any inclusion of PE should weight it much lower than the academic subjects. Like other people said, your PE grade doesn’t actually predict how well you’ll do in college.
Huh? You can get a GCSE in PE, and there are various level 3 PE qualifications that count towards your UCAS score for university entry.
Sure, but a GCSE in PE is optional, and nothing like the PE that the rest of the students, who don’t take it, continue to receive, which is basically playing football, rugby, tennis etc.
1.) Lots of jobs currently require fluency in a second language, or are at least easier to get with one.
2.) If you plan on doing anything beyond a Bachelor’s, you will need at least one foreign language and probably more, because you will need to be able to read research published in languages other than your native one.
3.) Even for people who do not ever use their second language in their job, learning that language is also about being exposed to another culture and way of thinking.
This was always the way I mentally reasoned through it, but I thought a really good point got brought up byother people in this thread: if you plan on being a professional athlete, your English grade won’t matter, but if you want to go into academia, the top universities are hypercompetitive enough that the slight drop in your GPA could have an adverse effect.
For consideration: When I graduated high school, there was a big bruhaha about who should be the valedictorian. The salutatorian would have had the top GPA, but she had taken one more class than the person with the “best” GPA, and even though she got an A in it, it pulled her GPA down because it was a 4-point-A instead of a 5-point-A.
It sounded like you were saying GCSE grades never count.
Apart from maths, English and science, all courses are optional.
I oppose including PE grades in the GPA, largely because of something that happened to a friend of mine in high school. She was a bright girl…very bright, carried a 4.0 GPA all the way through school, until she got to 10th grade PE. That teacher graded on athletic ability. My friend wasn’t very good at sports. Only “B” she ever got on her report card, and it kept her from being valedictorian. Worse, the guys all had coaches as “PE Teachers”. The coaches could not be bothered to actually teach much of anything. The “exam” usually involved the coach coming in to the locker room, instructing everyone to state their name when he counted three, and then congratulating us all for getting an “A” in PE. A guy ended up as valedictorian because he got the easy A in 10th grade PE, while the girl got the “B”.
Most PE classes are worthless anyway, at least mine were. Except for my last year in high school, we had co-ed gym and Miss Krebs taught us.
Every other gym class consited of the coach tossing us a ball then we’d go out and toss the ball amongst ourselves. But Miss Krebs actaully had days where, for instance we learned fencing, we didn’t dress. Instead we got a list of rules for fencing and we had to learn them and we’d take written tests to assure we knew how each sport was played.
When we played softball we not only played but in her class we had to learn the game, take a written test and learn what actions were legal, which weren’t, we had to get together as a team and come up with a stragedy and put it on paper and prove to Miss Krebs that we implimented it.
Her classes for PE were actual schooling like any other class, but the other gym classes were a waste of time.
I especially hated gym my sophmore year, I had it last period. I was like “Jeez can’t I just go home early.” 
High School GPA is used in heavily competitive schools so I can understand some kids being wronged by it. I don’t really buy into the argument that one poster noted, that “unless you went out for sports, you got a lesser grade,” not because it isn’t true, but because that happens in other classes as well.
I was a very smart kid, and truthfully, I got away with a LOT of things, simply because the teachers didn’t check my work as hard as they should have. I believe teacher mean to be fair but in practice, it doesn’t work out that way.
Since GPA isn’t standard the whole thing is biased anyway. For instance, in my school we had we termed “tracks.” blue, white, and red tracks. With blue being easy and red the hardest. Red was like an “honors course.”
But on your transcript it says “Algebra.” It made no distinction between blue or white or red.
So a kid on blue track Algebra which was easy gets the same reward as one busing his brains for red track Algebra. It didn’t take long for kids to figure this out and get dropped down.
The biggest argument for keeping PE and other course in your GPA is simply that life isn’t fair. You’re going to have to learn to deal with things one way or another and the GPA is one of those.
It’s like when you get a review at work, sometimes the categories are bunk.
I once gave a review to my staff member Annie. I gave her a “5” (scale 1 poor - 5 best) on attendence. The H/R director says “Mark, you know it’s our policy never to give a “5” so they have something to shoot for.” I said “But she was NEVER late and NEVER absent.” The answer from H/R was "then give her a “4.”
So a PE inclusive GPA is kind of like that. It’s just one of those potentially unfair things in life so learn to deal with that stuff.
Do you actually have any data to back that up, or are you just claiming that’s the case? Looking around the web I can find numerous abstracts for papers that show links between physical fitness and academic success. I haven’t read them, but several abstracts claim to have found a statistical link. example, example.
And, even if being fit doesn’t lead to more academic success, I think we can generally agree that it’s a good thing to encourage for everyone. If some students are so focused on getting into college that they only care about their GPAs, then what’s wrong with using that to motivate them to get into better shape? College is not the ultimate goal in life, and I’d argue that living a life balanced by exercise and general fitness is more important than getting into a slightly better college, in the long run.
Of course, maybe PE doesn’t actually promote fitness or exercise. But that is at least its goal, and if it’s not meeting that goal, I think the solution is to reform the curriculum, not keep it going as a zombie and disregard the results.
The problem of grading PE classes is a little trickier than other classes, but I don’t think it’s as horribly unbalanced as some people in this thread are claiming. Yes, people who are naturally athletic will have an easy time of it. So what? This is no different than people who have natural skill in math or language excelling in those classes. Personally, I think that anyone who’s fit enough to be on an actual sports team should be excused from PE, since they’re obviously at a reasonable level of fitness without it.
For people who struggle, then effort should be taken into account, but so should results. I’m not saying that everyone should have to do 50 pushups and run a 6-minute mile (5 and a 10-minute seems pretty reasonable, though), but the vast majority of people who can’t meet a certain level of fitness should at least be able to make some progress toward that goal. Every other class carries the expectation that you’ll improve over the course of the year. Why shouldn’t PE be the same?
Will this be subjective? Sure. But what high school class isn’t? Even math class, with it’s bright line between the right answer and the wrong answer, allows for students to do extra homework, or present homework problems to the class, or participate in class discussions as ways to improve your grade… even if you’re not particularly good at math.
The biggest difference with grading is handling students with persistent medical issues or injuries. It’s a lot more likely that an injury would keep you from doing standard PE class activities than keep you from standard match class activities.