The Nexus

For some students, the drive to boost and maintain a high GPA that will set them apart in an increasingly competitive college admissions process shapes their four-year schedule at Westview.

With the opportunity to take AP classes and earn grades that are weighted on a five-point scale instead of the traditional four-point scale, the possibility of extending one’s GPA ever-closer to the ideal pinnacle of a 5.0 may be enticing. Or, perhaps when a 4.0 GPA no longer falls within the top 10 percentile, some students find it necessary to rearrange their priorities. Whatever the reason, a conflict often arises between maximizing GPA and taking classes for the sake of the learning experience. Willie Yao (12) said he has seen the trend escalate in graduating classes before him and sees this stratification between learning at school versus competing at school escalating if it is not curbed now.

“It’s going to be a real mess and has to be taken care of at some point,” Yao said.

Learning vs. competing

As higher and higher GPAs are achieved each year, more students are affected by “the game,” the competition for the highest rank.

Flournoy said that while each and every class has always had a core group of individuals competing for the Nos. 1 and 2 spots, she has seen the competition increase since the she started her career as a guidance counselor about 10 years ago.

“At that point in time, I was teaching and counseling at a school that had both an AP and IB program,” Flournoy said. “It was just a small segment of students who felt the need to compete at those levels. Students were competing there for GPAs, but it hadn’t permeated as deeply [as at Westview]. The depth of that competition has expanded.”

Flournoy worked in the Vista Unified School District before coming to Poway Unified School District. She noticed the difference in competition level, and said that the demographics of Westview within PUSD provide a supportive environment for it, because it is seen as a reflection of achievement.

“I think it is pressure from community, from parents, student-to-student – and even probably some educators – that promotes that competition,” she said. “It’s not competition for competition’s sake, but that the more AP classes you can take, the higher your GPA, the better prepared you appear to others. In that sense, I do think, that pressure to do-more, be-more, have-more is greater here at Westview and in PUSD as a whole.”

Flournoy said she recognizes that a select group will always compete for valedictorian honors. However, she also said that the pressures students feel to achieve an astronomical GPA for acceptance to a highly selective university is a bit misplaced.

“I think that those kinds of schools such as Harvard, Yale or Stanford of will look at a student’s other activities anyway, and that in the end that student just cheated themselves out of a learning experience or a chance to become a more rounded person,” Flournoy said. “The myth that the best students, the most attractive students to a high-performance university are students who have earned the highest GPAs, is beginning to get debunked.”

Nonetheless, students continue to concern themselves with their GPAs at the expense of limiting themselves to other classes. Yao said this happens because of an inherent inequity in the way that GPA is calculated.

Across PUSD, educators agreed on the same policy to calculate GPA in the same way at each high school: Traditional college preparatory courses are on a 4.0 scale while AP courses and designated honors courses are on a 5.0 scale. These points are totaled and then divided by number of courses taken.

At the other PUSD high schools, 4.0 prerequisite classes are not tied to year-long AP courses as they are for most year-long AP courses at Westview – a practice adopted due to the nature of the 4-by-4. The result is that, when averaged, year-long AP classes at Westview are worth significantly less than a one-term AP class paired with an off-roll, making it appear that the system awards those who choose classes only with the intent of boosting their GPA and penalizes those who take classes solely for the purpose of learning.

“The Westview 4-by-4, as far as GPA goes, is fundamentally flawed in that students are penalized for taking a harder two-term AP class as opposed to an easier one-term AP class,” Yao said. “And the problem is, we calculate our rank solely based on GPA.”

A short-term solution

Attaining a noteworthy GPA may have at one point been as simple as taking a full course load with a good dose of AP classes, and doing well in all of them. But some students have tried utilizing various methods to compensate for extraneous 4.0-scaled classes.

Students have the option of taking certain classes pass-fail, but only if they are not CSU/UC-approved courses required for college entrance. Then, the class is not factored into GPA. However, Area Administrator Sally Flournoy said that the pass-fail system is not used very much, since very few classes fit these criteria.

The method Flournoy said she finds interesting is when students have tried to “audit” certain courses, in order to bypass the quarters within an AP class that are not AP-weighted, and therefore, are only worth 4 points towards the GPA if the student earns an A.

Auditing, a practice commonly available to college students, allows a student to simply attend the class and observe what is being taught, without being graded. Flournoy said that Westview definitively does not allow auditing, primarily because of liability.

“We don’t have auditing,” Flournoy said. “We don’t let kids audit classes. A student is welcome to learn whatever they want to learn, and I always encourage learning, but we can’t ask our teachers or represent to parents that we are monitoring where their children are if they are not enrolled in the class. We can’t be held accountable for monitoring their attendance. High school is a different environment from colleges because students are mostly under 18, and schools have a certain responsibility to the parents and community to know where students are.”

Yao took a different approach. He chose to self-study material from the first term of certain year-long AP classes without enrolling in them or attending class, and then enrolled at the start of second quarter – when an AP A would add five points to his GPA.

Yao said he generally doesn’t approve of the idea of trimming a course designed to be year-long, but has done it anyway to keep ahead of competition.

“I felt the need to do it in order to keep my appropriate rank,” he said.

Flournoy said that due to Westview’s policy of open AP enrollment, this practice is legitimate, but she said she hesitates from suggesting it for everyone.

“We cannot prevent students from adding or dropping a class quarter one or quarter two, and they can certainly choose to do that, but at the risk of being very far behind the rest of the class,” she said. “It is the student’s responsibility to make sure they are capable of taking the class – they shouldn’t expect the teacher to catch them up because they’ve chosen not to take the class for a quarter. The onus is on the student.”

Yao said he has met reluctance from some teachers in regard to this method, and he understands the reason.

“From the teacher’s perspective, he or she cannot be sure that you can get the material on your own,” he said. “And they definitely don’t want like five students each year bugging them about this.”

The future

Yao said that the competition caused by the system in place is yielding a downward spiral.

“One day, the Westview system will become saturated and it will be an issue,” he said. “Rancho Bernardo’s system is saturated. What that means is that everyone has the [same inflated] GPA, except the one guy who took one less math class because he was a year ahead. Saturated is when you can’t max out any more. Westview will be like that one day, but not for a while.”

Flournoy said that she believes students will realize the widespread irrationality in the practice of trying to maximize GPA before it reaches that point.

“One of the wonderful things about this is that some students have come up to me and said ‘This is really getting to be a ridiculous game and I’m not playing,’” she said. “And I have a lot of respect for them.”