Weighting for Recognition: Accounting for Advanced Placement and Honors Courses When Calculating High School Grade Point Average

Abstract

Honors and advanced placement (AP) courses are commonly viewed as more demanding than standard high school offerings. Schools employ a range of methods to account for such differences when calculating grade point average and the associated rank in class for graduating students. In turn, these statistics have a sizeable impact on college admission and access to financial aid. The authors establish the relationship between the grade earned and type of high school science course taken for 7,613 students by modeling their later performance in an introductory college course. The sample is drawn from more than 100 introductory science courses at 55 randomly chosen college and universities. Accounting for variations in college grading systems, strong evidence is found in favor of the practice of adding bonus points to students’ high school course grades in the sciences, namely, on a 4-point scale, 1 point for AP courses and .5 for honors courses.

The Impact of Participation in the Advanced Placement Program on Students' College Admissions Test Scores

“…The impact is not slight: for AP English the marginal mean outcome value was about 2.8-4.1 points for ACT composite scores; for AP calculus, the impact was about 1-2.7 points for ACT composite scores. We believe that our study can be added to the rich body of literature that indicates that the AP program is beneficial for students (e.g., Chajewski et al, 2011;Duffy, 2010;Long, Conger, & Iatarola, 2012;Mo et al, 2011;Sadler & Tai, 2007a, 2007bTai et al, 2010).…”

Estimating High School GPA Weighting Parameters With a Graded Response Model

“…Previous researchers have relied on an external criterion to estimate GPA weights for advanced courses. Although they reached different conclusions, Geiser and Santelices () and Sadler and Tai (, b) employed similar, criterion‐based empirical strategies. They used multiple regression where the outcome was a measure of college achievement, and the independent variables included indicators for participation in advanced coursework.…”

“…A fundamental challenge for the Sadler and Tai (, b) methodology is that one must select an external criterion. For example, one could use all college grades, first‐year college grades, total credits accumulated, persistence beyond the first year, or degree completion.…”

“…For example, one could use all college grades, first‐year college grades, total credits accumulated, persistence beyond the first year, or degree completion. In selecting college science course performance as a criterion, Sadler and Tai (, b) implicitly assume that college science course performance suffices as a scale for measuring the equivalency between and . In this framework, the correct high school grade adjustment is the one that minimizes prediction error in college course performance, either because one cares about predicting college course performance for its own sake or because college course performance is considered a sufficient measure of a broader construct of interest.…”

“…The data for this section of the study are from the Factors Influencing College Success in Mathematics survey (FICSMath), which was gathered in a very similar fashion as the data used by Sadler and Tai (, b). The FICSMath survey was administered to 10,492 first‐year college calculus students from 135 randomly selected U.S. colleges during the 2009–2010 academic year.…”