For most of her 28 years teaching at Soldotna High, Sammy Crawford wanted to see the Advanced Placement courses she taught have weighted grades. It wasn't until four years after she was elected to the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District Board of Education and began pushing the issue however, that it finally became policy in 2004.

Now, weighted grades are before the board again, and some are questioning whether the system is equitable.

At the board's Sept. 14 meeting a high school student from Homer asked the board why she was receiving less credit for taking college courses than some of her cohorts who were taking AP courses.

The issue reared its head again at Kenai Central High in October when the site council rewrote their valedictorian policy out of concern that some students had an unfair advantage over others by enrolling in AP courses at Soldotna High or online.

According to Jim Jump, president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, grade weighting is an issue across much the country. He's recently seen similar equity issues pop up in Virginia, where he works.

The problem however, is that colleges have had to learn to read between the lines when looking at students with weighted grades and are starting to pay less attention to a student's GPA as a result.

There are no national or even state standards on grade weighting.

Jump said that in many cases colleges will pay more attention to class ranking. Herein lies a disconnect, he explained.

"I think, a lot of high schools are trying to move away from ranking students, and yet I think a lot of colleges will tell you it's more useful and will tell you where a student fits in that school group," he said.

Locally, class ranking attracts significant attention from college-bound high school students because of the University of Alaska's rank-based Scholars Program. UA offers a four-year, $11,000 scholarship to students ranking in the top 10 percent of each qualified high school graduating class.

Rewarding challenge

The AP Program, run by the College Board, offers college-level courses in high schools nationally. Students enrolling in these courses have the chance of earning college credit if they score high enough on the final exam and the college or university they attend approves of the course. District high school students may take AP courses offered at their own high school or at others.

Crawford helped pioneer the AP program at Soldotna early in her career.

"One of the things I saw and heard when I first started was that courses were not preparing kids for college," Crawford said.

She said a former student returning from Cornell University after his first year told her that most of his peers had taken AP courses. He said he felt unprepared for classes compared to those who had completed an AP course. She looked into it and ultimately launched an AP U.S. history class at Soldotna.

Crawford felt AP students should be rewarded for their effort and shouldn't have to jeopardize their GPA for taking a tougher class. As a board member she continued to advocate for weighted grades.

In 2004 the district passed a policy stating that for each passing semester grade in an Advanced Placement course, 0.021 would be added to the student's cumulative grade point average.

Questions of equity

Since Crawford taught her first AP course, district offerings have widened, but not all schools offer the same number of AP courses. According to Soldotna High principal Todd Syverson, his school offers AP language arts, government, calculus, U.S. history, biology every other year and this year for the first time, chemistry. Alan Fields, principal at Kenai Central High, said his school has just two AP courses, U.S. history for juniors and an English literature for seniors.

The comparatively limited offering at Kenai is based on staffing, Fields said. Soldotna has a higher ratio of teachers to students than Kenai, according to Fields, and that means more staff members are available to teach those courses. This year, for the first time, Fields said a large number of Kenai students are taking AP courses at Soldotna.

Additionally more students are paying to enroll in AP courses offered online. Students who take those courses have the potential to boost their GPA to a higher level than a student who only takes what's offered at Kenai Central. This recently raised concern about how the valedictorian from Kenai will be chosen.

As a result, Kenai's site council voted in October to change how they select their valedictorian. Now, any student who earns a GPA of a 4.0 out of 4.0 or higher and qualifies for the honors graduate program will be recommended to be a valedictorian.

Fields is hoping the board will take the issue back up again and thinks the policy may need changing.

Earning college credit

Some have questioned whether grades from actual college courses, such as those offered by Kenai Peninsula College, should be weighted as well. With the present policy, a student enrolled in a college calculus class for example, would earn less toward their cumulative GPA than a student who earned the same grade in an AP calculus class.

Crawford argues this is fair for a number of reasons.

"I don't want to disparage KPC courses, but I've taught them, and they're not as rigorous as (AP courses)," she said.

She also believes this is justified by the fact that AP courses are national, and all students must take the same final exam at the end. Taking an AP course does not guarantee college credit either.

Crawford also prefers seeing students taking courses offered by the district rather than college courses.

"If courses are available in our high school I would like to see students to take those," she said.

At a recent school board meeting District Superintendent Steve Atwater said he would research the issue by speaking with the high school administrators and return with his findings to the board at their Jan. 11 meeting.

He considers the issue to be divisive, but said discussion at the board meeting he leaned toward the value of AP courses.

Dante Petri can be reached at dante.petri@peninsulaclarion.com.