In the Greater Amsterdam School District, students are ranked through what is commonly called a GPA, or Grade Point Average. This number is not the same as the Average Weighted Grade (AWG) you see at the bottom of the quarters on a Quarterly Report Card. A student’s GPA shows up only on their Official Transcripts. The AWG does not affect the GPA as will be explained below.
Note: Any course dropped after Nov. 9 will receive a designation of either WP or WF on a transcript. No course may be added after Nov. 9.
AWGs
Average Weighted Grade (AWG) is the average of the grades in an individual quarter on a report card. The weighted part comes from applying a 1.025 multiplier towards Honors classes, allowing them to be worth a little more in terms of calculations.
The AWG also matches the number used to generate the Merit List, Honor Roll and Principal’s List for the quarter. That number is generated separately, but should match the AWG.
The main purpose of an AWG is to quickly see how a students does from one quarter to the next.
The formula for the AWG is basically the same as for GPAs, with two differences. The first difference is Physical Education is included in the calculations (it is not used in GPAs). And the second difference is only grades in the column above it are used for the calculations.
It is possible for the AWG to be incorrect when a grade change is done after the fact, and a new report card is printed. The AWG is run separately from a report card (it is a stored value) and it is not calculated as report cards are run (on the fly). So depending on how and when the report card was created, the math might not be consistent. These problems are fixed in the 4th quarter when the Final Report Cards are run, as we rerun each quarter’s marking period totals to compensate for grade changes that may have been missed.
GPAs
The GPA is calculated from the Final Course Grades of the credit bearing classes that students attend throughout their time in the district. These would be listed on transcripts or in the Final Grade column on a report card. This usually consist of student’s grades in High School as well as some classes from the middle school.
Please note that Physical Education IS NOT used to calculate GPA. This is also true when doing calculations for the National Honor Society.
We use weighted grades for GPA calculations. This means certain classes are worth more than other classes. This mainly applies to Honors classes at the high school level. For example a 90% in an Honors English Class is worth 92.25% when we calculate the student’s GPA (and AWG). The value of a weighted class is 1.025.
The formula for a Student’s GPA is the following:
(SUM of (Final Grades x Credit Value x Weight))/Total Credits Attempted
Calculations during the year
During a typical school year, GPAs are rerun after each quarter. Usually they are run one to two weeks after the reports cards to compensate for grade changes. This allows transcripts to be run for colleges before the end of the school years and to track students’ progress overall. This also allows the Valedictorian (#1) and Salutatorian (#2) to be chosen and preparations to be made ahead of time. These prestigious positions are chosen at the end of the student’s second quarter in their senior year.
Since there are no final grades during the year (for most classes), the system uses the current years quarters averaged together to substitute for the missing final grades when calculating GPA.
Since transcripts are sent out during the school year (to colleges or for grants/awards) we do not rerun the Ranking until the next scheduled time. This is to eliminate the problem of potentially reporting the same rank for different students.
A student’s final official ranking for high school is calculated at the end of their senior year and stored in their final transcript.
Honor roll
The district’s Merit Lists, Honor Rolls and Principal’s Lists are run every quarter, typically 1-2 weeks after report cards. The delay is again to compensate for grade changes. The results are mailed for publishing to the local paper after they are generated. For this reason, we do not rerun them since the paper will only publish them once. Any grade changes should be made within one week of publishing the report cards in order to make it to the newspaper.
The formula for quarterly reporting is the same as the one used for the AWGs.
Honor Rolls, Merit Lists and Principals Lists are not used for National Honor Society calculations. Even though the names are similar, NHS does not use Physical Education in calculations whereas Honor Rolls, Merit Lists and Principals List do use Physical Education grades.
- Principal’s List: 95 -100 GPA
- Honor’s List: 90-94.99 GPA
- Merit List: 85-89.99 GPA