Weighted Grades Now!

By Sleeping Disorder
[The following article is presented in all seriousness.]

Wauwatosa School Board, mark this day. This is the day The Underground begins its campaign for weighted grades and it will not cease until Wauwatosa East High School is granted the full function of weighted grades for advanced classes. Notice the word 'privilege' was not used. This is because the issue of weighted grades is not a privilege. It is common sense.

The following is just one example of how Tosa East's sluggish discard of this fair and rational policy directly affects students in a negative way. The University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota offers scholarships based on the following chart.

GPA	AMOUNT (PER YEAR)
3.91 to 4.00	$2,300
3.75 to 3.90	$1,750
3.65 to 3.74	$1,200
3.50 to 3.64	$850

St. Thomas, like most colleges, does not set it's own specific value for a specific class and goes by the policies of the student's high school instead. What this means is that a student at a school with weighted grades (Brookfield East for example) that takes advanced classes may stand to gain $850 more for doing the same quality of work as a Tosa East student taking advanced classes, if that Tosa student earns a 3.45. Even if the Tosa student is already eligible for receiving scholarship money in this particular instance, that student may lose out on as much as $350 or more, depending on the amount of advanced classes that student has taken.

Aside from showing specific monetary loss due to a lack of weighted grades, this example is good for another reason. That reason is this: Nothing is more important than the numbers. Colleges don't always credit having a lot of homework in a class or the difficulty of the subject matter. The end number talks the loudest and the students of Wauwatosa East are at an obvious and unnecessary disadvantage. It is up to the Wauwatosa School Board to fix this problem. This should by no means be taken as an idle assertion. This issue has been danced around for too long and real movement towards ratification needs to begin now.

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