Back in the day HS PE was an easy A. Show up and participate every day and you get a straight A. It took a real screw up to get a C in PE, but apparently some people actually failed in PE. Mostly because they would cut class and do whatever it is that students who cut class do. And yes, it counted for GPA.
Hmmmm. Having a couple different PE classes would not be feasible in most schools, but what about being able to choose 3/5 different units (like, if you did basketball, baseball, football, badminton and lacrosse, choose 3 of those) to make up your mark? A lot of people above are saying that ability should count, since classes like math go on ability, not effort. But I got to choose from the three hard sciences (bio, physics and chem), so I could pick the one I thought I’d do the best in (coincidentally, I picked the one I was most interested in, so my mark suffered a bit but I had more fun).
I would not say this is true of top universities … that’s actually where it matters the least. A slight drop, that is. Because demand is high, top universities have the luxury of building the class they want for whatever reasons they want. They can afford to boot someone with a high GPA but a bland application overall in favor of another student with a lower GPA, if that student has something the university wants. And it happens all the time.
Dangerosa, one of the best admissions essays I ever read was called “Why There is a D on My Transcript; Or What I Have Learned About Band Saws.” That kid got the green light before his recommendations came in.
People should be encouraged to be physically fit, but this thread wasn’t about whether PE should be mandatory.
Phyiscal fitness almost definitely does help with academic skills (and all sorts of other skills), but being good at sports is not the same as being physically fit.
Is PE grading about being good at sports or being physically fit? From the sounds of it, it can be about anything at all.
In my school (in the 90s) we got graded on effort and those little quizzes, just like others experienced. I know we took those physical fitness tests but I’m not sure how they were calculated into the grade, if at all.
Do you guys that think PE shouldn’t be counted also think that home ec, shop, art, photography and music classes shouldn’t be counted either? After all, performance in those classes is also subjective and takes skill. Yet, as far as I know, at least one of those classes is mandatory in two years at my high school.
I think it should count and it should be graded on participation. The #1 thing that sinks college students is not showing up to class or not turning in work. Gym requires that you show up and participate. Therefore, failing gym class is a good indicator that the person isn’t right for college.
CS, guy who failed Gym but passed college.
Silly Brit. They invented the language, and they don’t even know the ‘s’ goes on sports, not math! ((seriously though, awesome use of both words in the same sentence w/o trying))
When I graduated HS the difference between Valedictorian and Salutatorian was PE. Specifically 10th grade PE which was taught by some idiot who gave grades based on who he liked. Other years, grades were pretty “much show up and get an A”.
The policy has been changed since then. PE no longer counts towards GPA.
Most of my college classmates were amazed that we got letter grades for PE at all. Pass/Fail seems fine to me.
To me it sounds like a bad idea. Assuming the goal of PE is to promote general fitness, the best way to do that is to make the students like getting exercise. Treating it as Serious Business is just going to make the unfit kids resent the class.
Count me as another whose GPA was messed up by PE. I had a 3.98. What messed it up was a B in PE and one B in a drama class (which was my own fault, so I won’t complain about that one).
The problem with PE is not that it’s required (I think it should be, in some form) but that, unlike academic classes, I don’t think most schools take varying abilities into account. At least they didn’t when I was in school (admittedly back in the Dark Ages). Honestly, I was hopeless at anything athletic in school. I was the equivalent of the inner-city kid with a single working mom, no academic role model, and no books in the house–only I was a middle-class kid whose parents had absolutely no interest in anything athletic. Thus, I grew up holed in my room reading, writing, having a great time, and doing nothing physical.
I wasn’t a fat kid (I thought I was chubby, but looking at pictures, I really wasn’t). I just had no endurance and no athletic prowess. I would have done great in “remedial PE” or “PE for nerds,” if there’d been such a thing, but there wasn’t. So I had to compete with the kids on the sports teams, the kids who could run and jump and do pullups…and I couldn’t. I showed up, did what I was supposed to, and tried my best, but it didn’t happen. Most of my teachers did give A’s for effort, which was good. But some didn’t, and there was the problem. At least if you’re going to insist that kids take PE and that it counts for their grade, make an effort to segregate them by ability, so those of us who always get picked last for teams don’t get made to feel even worse because we’re competing with people we can’t hope to beat. It would be like tossing an average student into a class full of kids like me (all A’s, type A academic overachiever)–it wouldn’t be fair to them. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and mine was athletic.
Since when does your PE grade have anything to do with being in shape? I spent over a decade of my life doing Irish dance–from age 7 to 17. I was in **great **shape in high school: in my sophmore PE class, during the weightlifting unit, I was able to **max out **the weight on the machine for leg extensions (at least 200lbs). I was also in the advanced academic classes. Guess which had the better grades and which had the worse ones.
At my High School, PE grades did count towards the overall GPA. You got an A if your attendance was good enough. They were happy so long as we showed up, didn’t stab or shoot one another and kept our drug use on the baseball diamond to smoking pot. I was one of the least athletic guys out there. All I did was change into shorts and sit on a bench and I always got an A. Ironically, I am now in better shape then 90% of the men my own age.
I don’t disagree but there are just as many jobs like manual labor that require a level of physical fitness. As a requirement for grad school at least for the couple of school and Masters degrees I’ve looked at I haven’t seen a single one that requires a foreign language. Admittedly I’m look at engineering, geology, and MBA programs. As for the third one you are the second person to mention this but I must have had a very different Spanish class since all of them were just memorizing word lists and grammar, I learned nothing about Hispanic culture and there were no homework, projects or tests on anything besides translating sentences. I didn’t even learn what was being celebrated during Cinco de Mayo until I graduated from college.
This is how PE was for me I got PE credits all of the way through high school and college and after my freshman year I never went to a PE class. Even in college PE (actually it was PA since the Pet. E department got PE) was a requirement and counted for your GPA but if you were on a varsity sports team you could count that towords the number of PE requirements you needed.
We had PE included in our GPA, and I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t have been. In every school I went to (4 different elementary schools, middle school and high school) the grade for PE was determined by level of participation, so people who had little athletic ability but tried anyway were as likely to get an A as a jock, which still seems appropriate to me - I know people who failed PE the first time around, and they had to work hard to get an F…or make that not work hard, since they sat around and failed the day. On the other hand it still steams me that my high school art teacher decided to grade people in a required class on creative ability - I did fine, but there were people who did every project, tried hard, and still got Cs or Ds because they weren’t very artistically inclined. It’s not as though art is something that has correct answers like math, science and history.
Anyway, PE should count towards one’s GPA and they should have it more often, too. I hated the fact that we had 185 days of PE as high school Freshman, but we probably should have had to do it again as Juniors too.
My two cents is that PE should be included, but it should be a pass/fail grade and not an A/B/C/D/F grade. It should count against you only if you fail, and you should only fail if you don’t give any effort at all.
PE is very important, but it should go to teach lifetime participation sports and physical fitness - running, walking, weight training, golf, tennis, etc, but that’s another topic. In my high school PE class we had gymnastics, for God’s sake, which was a complete waste of time. No offense to pommel horses.
And those jobs don’t require any high school degree at all, let alone one with high marks, Thanks for making a point in support of **my **argument.
That might be more of a PhD thing, especially for the sciences.
No offense intended, but damn, you got stuck with some shitty language classes. There are also some languages where you have to learn at least some of the culture while learning the language. Japanese was my foreign language in college, for example, and you literally could not learn it without learning at least some culture, or you’d get your verb forms all wrong.
I think PE should be a pass/fail based on effort and participation instead of graded against a standard level of fitness.
Most other classes such as math, science, history, etc are to prepare the student to be a productive member of society. Employers can look at a transcript to see how well the student does at different subjects and can get an idea of how well the student would do as an employee. For those types of classes effort is not enough. It is important to know how well the student does according to a standardized measure.
But PE is not like that. Some people would not be able to reach an A level of fitness without a tremendous amount of effort. I would rather the student spend their time studying other subjects instead of trying to get their 100 meter time below X seconds.
The best outcome from PE is not that the student is fit–it’s that the student develops a love for fitness that they carry throughout their life. A teenager is almost naturally fit. Where they really need to have good fitness habits is in their 30’s and above. That’s why I say it’s important to encourage effort rather than attaining an arbitrary level of fitness.
I agree 100% that our language classes sucked, I only knew one person who did well on the AP test who wasn’t a native born speaker, and she ended up majoring in Spanish in college (and couldn’t find and job and had to go back to school).
I know a lot of engineer that basically work manual labor jobs where being physically fit is one of their most important characteristics; agriculture, mining, petroleum. There are a lot of jobs that require a college education that also require lots of field time and I have seen people transferred jobs because they could not keep up with the crews they were running. I don’t consider manual labor jobs only to be uneducated.
On the other hand I have never been asked if I speak Spanish except for a job where they wanted me to teach well control in South America. I only know a handful of people who are fluent in Spanish and none of them have spoken Spanish at work. Outside of customer service jobs I can’t think of why a second language would be required.
This. Especially for students who don’t particularly want to go to gym class. A lot (50% in the first year, 80% overall) of my incoming universityclass flunked out. All the ones I know were because they didn’t feel like going to class. Pretty much ever.
Then they aren’t manual labor jobs, which are generally defined as jobs that require physical effort but little education. For the jobs you cited, do you think any of those employers are asking about their PE grade? And has been discussed, one’s PE grade often has little correlation to one’s level of fitness.
Not to mention that for real manual labor jobs these days (not the kind you have to have a college degree to do - do words mean nothing anymore?) you’d damned well better have some Spanish. Hell, there are a lot of jobs around here that you need a degree in horticulture to do but that you won’t get very far in if you don’t know any Spanish. I guess you could be a menial landscape worker without any, but it would be pretty lonely.