<p>How can this be? A high school is refusing to take the previous grades and will “give credit but not use any of the grades”. Is this fair?</p>
<p>Hard to tell. What year is the student in, type of school transferring from and to, classes, … I would certainly think the new school would accept at least part of the students previous grade record (the parts that lineup with similar courses at the new school) and not just the credits. I do know that some college will accept credits for transfer but not use the transferring gpa but most high schools certainly accept most incoming gpas and credits.</p>
<p>No, it’s not fair. But it wouldn’t be fair the other way around, either.</p>
<p>The student who worked hard and gets high grades, then transfers schools and gets only “credit” for her previous grades really has lost something. But presumably, a capable and hard working student will continue to earn high grades in her new school. So she won’t be damaged terribly.</p>
<p>Consider the alternative. Consider a student who transfers in from an inferior school. In her old school, she’s been able to accumulate good grades with very little work, and she’s learned very little. Is it fair to the scores of students in the new school to let her bring in two years’ worth of worthless A’s, when the students in the new school may have been busting their backsides for A-'s and B+'s from which they’ve actually learned something?</p>
<p>It’s very common for schools to give credit for classes completed in other schools, but not to use those grades for purposes of calculating GPA or class rank. I think it’s the less bad alternative, too. When this system creates unfairness, one person is adversely affected. If a school did just allow students to transfer in with the grades from their previous school, when that system created unfairness, lots of kids would be affected.</p>
<p>That happened to me many years ago. The grades and previous class schedule were used to place me in different classes. I think including grades or not from prior schools depends on the policies of the HS.</p>
<p>I don’t think it is unusual - I believe many colleges also do the same thing with transfer students. One thing my daughter had to do when she went to college was have the original transcript from the HS she went to for the first two years sent to her college. They calculated her GPA for scholarship and honors college purposes based on her transcript from her first HS and the transcript from her 2nd HS. </p>
<p>I think it is fairly reasonable at both the HS and College level for the reasons Sikorsky mentioned. I know that our flagship state Us do count the transferred GPAs for students transferring from CCs so that can have a huge impact on departmental scholarships, honor stuff like cum laude designations etc. I can see how students that have taken the harder classes from day 1 (they are harder at the flagship U - I have done classes at both) might think this is a little unfair (if they are aware of it).</p>
<p>There doesn’t seem to be a fair way to do it. Our HS doesn’t include grades from a former school. A couple of years ago, the Val of the class had transferred in junior year, taken almost all AP classes, and had a much higher GPA because freshman and sophomores took few if any AP’s and their grades included all 4 years of less weighted classes.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what the problem is. The grades will count. The student will have to submit two hs transcripts with college applications.</p>
<p>Yes, this is what colleges do with transfer students as well. So do law schools. It’s not a perfect solution, but it is the best one out there.</p>
<p>We’ll just have to try requesting transcripts from both high schools and HOPE the colleges will recalculate the GPA. I just spoke to one college admissions officer who said, “We don’t normally do that”. </p>
<p>So, not using previous grades is wonderful for the students with low grades, but unfortunately, in our case, my student’s good grades won’t be used. I would think that more students with bad grades tend to transfer, so this “fresh start” benefits the most students.</p>
<p>Assuming the same rigor of classes at both schools, wouldn’t you expect a student transferring with a 3.5 GPA (which is ignored) to earn about 3.5 at the new school anyway? There is somewhat of an advantage to a student who is improving each semester, but not a huge advantage, IMO.</p>
<p>Well I think the problem is when trying to decide whether or not to transfer grades you can’t really assume that two classes taught by different schools have the same difficulty. Each school seems to have their own idea on what grade is deserved for such and such amount of achievement and effort. Even if the course name is the same at both schools (e.g., Honors Chemistry), the teachers might have different ideas of what “honors” even means and how rigorous the course should be.</p>
<p>Heck, even some teachers within the same school can’t even agree, lol. At our high school, there are two 10th grade English teachers. One gives out A’s to 90% of the students like it’s candy, and the other hasn’t given out a grade higher than a B+ in more than a decade. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, it’s kind of a toughie to figure out how to do handle this like everyone else has said, because only using half of somebody’s transcript to calculate GPA and class rank will prove unfairly advantageous for some and disadvantageous for others.</p>
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<p>Really, don’t personalize this. It may kind of work out to your daughter’s disadvantage, but it really isn’t about her. In a perfect world, students would finish at the school where they started, and perhaps all schools would be comparable. But this simply isn’t a perfect world.</p>
<p>This is the way it is for students who transfer. But the good news is, students transfer *all the time. *No college that your daughter applies to will be unable to evaluate her application fairly just because she transferred schools during high school.</p>
<p>^ This person is right: students will absolutely not be discriminated against for transferring high schools - it’s not their fault. My friend’s brother went to 3 different high schools after moving twice in high school - one school freshman, one school sophomore & junior, one school senior year. He was admitted into HYP no problem. Heck, one of the schools he went to wasn’t even in this country, lol.</p>
<p>I still don’t get it. No grades are ignored. Transcripts from all high schools a student attended have to be submitted. The college application isn’t considered complete until they’ve all been received.</p>
<p>Well, there’s something to get.</p>
<p>For example, some schools exclude transfer students from class rankings or don’t consider them eligible for valedictorian. Those are usually indicators of high academic that make students attractive to a lot of colleges. But since colleges really can evaluate the applications of students who have transferred between high schools–and do it many times over, every single year–most of the losses that do occur are on the high-school level, and not the college level.</p>
<p>After a lot of thought on the issue, we’ve decided to keep our student at the current school. Yes, I’m giving in, and playing the college admissions game. I’m betting that most colleges, outside our area, won’t know that the high GPA came from a much easier school. All high schools are not equal. They should be, but they’re not.</p>
<p>D2 transferred junior year. It was a pain in the neck to transfer her grades over. She had a very accommodating GC who went out of her way to help us. They had a very transient student body, so I was surprised that they didn’t have more standard way of handling it.</p>
<p>They didn’t rank, but they showed both weighted and unweighted GPAs. D2’s first school didn’t offer APs 9th and 10th grades, but had honors. The new school didn’t want to give D2 credit for honors because they weren’t sure how honors were taught. They said they would send in both school’s transcripts and let college decide how they want to calculate. It would have been fine it weren’t for the fact that D2 was in the running for Val or Sal at her new school by end of Junior year (even without giving her credit for those honors courses).</p>
<p>I kept all of my conversations very friendly with the school administration about what would be the right thing to do. I think they tried hard to be fair. The academic dean did come out with a policy at the end - no weighting for honors for anyone, students would have to be at the school junior and senior years to be Val or Sal. They assured us that D2’s LORs would be glowing. We left it at that. In the spring of senior year, we were notified that D2 was going to be the Sal for her graduating class.</p>
<p>OP is smart in looking into this before making the decision to move. We didn’t have a choice. I was naive to assume it would be very straight forward. I was glad that I started having the conversation with the school junior year, and not wait until senior year when D2 was applying to colleges.</p>
<p>I’m glad everything worked out for you D, oldfort. </p>
<p>This whole thing came up coincidently, when I mentined that my student had already taken AP Spanish and was told, “Take it again here”. </p>
<p>The decision to stay at the current school is costing me $$$. Most people wouldn’t have a choice. I just thought people should know that this COULD happen to them. All school districts have different policies.</p>
<p>I had sort of the opposite problem. My daughter transferred from a private school with great academics, no grade inflation, no class ranks, and no APs or honors classes to a public school where everything was about APs and a weighted GPA of 100 put you at about the 80th percentile of the class. At the private school, she had taken what was regarded as an insanely challenging curriculum – overloads in 9th and 10th grade, two languages, science out of sequence, accelerated math, and a killer double-credit combined language and history course. Her grades were not perfect at all, but she was easily in the top 10-15 students in her class.</p>
<p>The new school insisted on including her grades in their transcript, on an unweighted basis, and using them to rank her. She was assigned an initial class rank of 162, out of about 550. </p>
<p>I was pretty upset about that, and argued strongly that they should just leave her out of the rankings, but that went against everything they believed. They didn’t want to ignore her previous grades, because they thought calculating her class rank based only on 11th and 12th grade grades – which included lots of extra-weighted courses – would be unfair to four-year students with a year of unweighted 9th grade grades. They assured me she would be in the top 10% by the time she graduated, if she performed academically, and she was. But of course I didn’t care a whit about where she was ranked at graduation; I only cared about where she was ranked when she applied to college, and that was still in the second quintile. In addition, they wouldn’t let her into AP Calculus in 11th grade, which was her natural next math course, because the class was full and seniors had preference, but then the next year her guidance counselor refused to say she had taken the most challenging curriculum because she hadn’t taken AP Calculus.</p>
<p>The story had an OK ending. I am sure all of this hurt her in the college application process, but she still had good choices, and wound up fine. The school became much more supportive after she had been there a few months and people saw first hand what kind of student she was (and also saw that she was going to be a NMSF, one of only five in her class). Except for her guidance counselor, teachers and administrators made a concerted effort to help her present a strong college application, notwithstanding her triple-digit class rank.</p>
<p>My DD had the same experience as JHS, her grade 9/10 school had much tougher grading, her marks there put her in the top 15% or so, but at the new school those marks put her in the bottom 50%, but she was immediately recognised as very bright and had straight As.</p>
<p>The school she chose for university was a small LAC, I explained the circumstances and they agreed to consider her for merit based on her SATs alone. I am sure it could have hurt her if she applied to Ivies or formulaic state schools. Her old school offered to include a transcript explanation letter with ranking and I asked her new school to give her ranking just based on her time there. We were not even thinking about Val/Sal ranking, just for scholarships. It’s a real conundrum.</p>