The Palmetto Fellows Scholarship submission for June is in
the mail!
Here at the PHEA office we spend a lot of time thinking
about, preparing for, calculating and re-calculating the semi-annual class
ranking. It would be fair to say that
working on transcripts and GPA calculations is a big part of what we do. The June Palmetto Fellows submission went in
the mail last week, and we are busy printing and mailing the Senior
transcripts. So, what is the big to do
over GPA’s and Class Rankings? Read on
to find out!
The state of South Carolina offers scholarships for students
who attend an in-state college and meet certain academic criteria. I’m not going to go into all that here, as we
have it pretty well set out on our website. Suffice it to say that in order to establish
who meets those criteria, schools, or in our case, homeschool associations are
the ones who compile and submit the information for eligible students. The top scholarship, the Palmetto Fellows, is
awarded in part based on a student’s standing in his high school class ranking. Anyone
who fits the other criteria and is in the top six percent of the class rank
qualifies and will be nominated during their senior year. But we can also nominate anyone with high
enough test scores no matter where they fall in the class ranking. And we can do this for any sophomore or
junior who qualifies as well. This means
that with high enough test scores, your student could qualify before senior
year. The submission for the scholarship
takes place twice: in December of the senior year for any senior who qualified as
a sophomore or junior, and in June for any senior who qualified during senior
year.
So to determine who qualifies, we collect all the grades of
our high schoolers and calculate the GPAs (more on that in a minute), and rank
them from highest to lowest. We do this
for each class. Then we assess test
scores to see who might qualify. Next we
contact the families with a qualifying student and have them fill out the
necessary paperwork, sign the transcripts and fill out our part of the
paperwork. Finally Martha drives the
submission packet to the post office and with a huge sigh of relief sends it on
its merry way.
Sounds easy, right? So
why do we spend so much time on this?
Well, the time consuming part is calculating GPAs for each of our high
school students.
A GPA or grade point average is calculated by converting
each numeric grade into a number between 5.875 and 0. These numbers are higher or lower based on
the difficulty of the course. For
example a 96 on a college prep level course will be converted to a 4.375, while
the same score as an honors level course or a dual credit course will be
converted to a 4.875 and 4.375 respectively.
We then weight each class by how many credits are earned. So a 96 college prep course that is half a
credit becomes a 2.1875. Then we add all
the weighted scores up and divide by the total number of courses to get the
GPA. Lost yet? We take care of the complicated part, but for
some handy guidelines on what to submit to us click here.
We used to do all these calculations by hand – twice to
catch any mistakes. Then we would type
all the information into the transcript sheet.
Now we have a handy Excel spreadsheet which does the calculations for us
and produces a nice transcript at the same time. We still have people checking each transcript
for errors, but it is a lot less time consuming. However we are now doing the class ranking
for three classes (sophomores, juniors, and seniors) so the time we saved with
the new program is filled up with the extra transcripts.
One thing that is important for you, the parent to consider
is this. We normally have 20-25 students
who have the GPA and test scores to qualify if they are in the top 6% of the
class. The top 6% of the class is
usually only 6-7 students. Obviously this
makes for a fairly large group of disappointed students. If the students have the higher test scores,
they can qualify whether they are in the top 6% or not. We consider it very important for the parents
to give their student experience at taking standardized test so that they will
be able to perform well on the qualifying test.
So there you have it – our process for calculating GPAs and
the Class Ranking in a nutshell – believe me our files fit in nothing so small. I’m sure this brief overview has left some of
you with questions, so please submit them in the comments section and in a week
or so I will post a Q&A on the blog.
