Academic Standing in iGradePlus 12

A grade point average is a small number that carries a lot of weight. It goes on transcripts, decides eligibility, opens and closes doors. Schools care a great deal about exactly how it is worked out — and they don’t all work it out the same way.

iGradePlus 12 will rebuild how academic standing is calculated. How hard a course is will become a property of the course itself rather than something encoded in the grading scale attached to it, and two things schools currently do by hand — Honor Roll and Class Rank — will become features that maintain themselves.

How it works today

iGradePlus calculates a grade point average for each student and keeps it current as grades are entered. It counts credits, so a four-credit course influences it four times as much as a one-credit course.

For most schools that number answers the question well, and it arrives without anyone having to calculate anything.

Here is where it reaches its limits.

Course difficulty is expressed through the grade scale. A school that wants an AP course to count for more builds a second grade scale whose A is worth 5.0 instead of 4.0, and assigns that scale to the AP classes. It works, and plenty of schools run this way. But the weighting rides on the scale rather than on the course, and two things follow from that.

A grading policy has to be maintained in every copy. The AP scale isn’t a variation on the standard one, it’s a whole separate scale. Moving the boundary for an A, adding a plus-minus grade, or changing how rounding works means making the same edit in each scale that carries it.

Only the weighted figure can be reported. Because the bonus is built into the grade points themselves, the record shows a 5.0 rather than a 4.0 with a point added for difficulty — so the unweighted number can’t be recovered from it. A transcript that wants both figures side by side, which is common practice, needs the second one produced by hand.

Honor roll is worked out by hand. Someone exports grades at the end of a period, applies the school’s rule, checks for failing grades, and assembles the list.

Class rank is worked out by hand too, with the added difficulty that it has to be recalculated from scratch whenever anything changes, and that ties and exclusions have to be handled consistently by whoever happens to be doing it.

None of these are defects. They are the shape of a gradebook that calculates faithfully from the scale it is handed, and leaves the questions around it — how difficulty should be expressed, what earns recognition, who is being compared with whom — to be worked out alongside it. Version 12 will bring those questions inside the product.

What will change in iGradePlus 12

Three things, each building on the one before it:

Course levels            →  make a GPA reflect course difficulty
GPA                      →  a consistent, configurable calculation
Honor Roll · Class Rank  →  standing derived from that GPA, maintained automatically

Honor Roll and Class Rank both read the GPA, so the GPA is where the story starts.

Two GPAs, weighted and unweighted

Version 12 will calculate both, in parallel, and both will count credits. What separates them is course difficulty:

• Unweighted — every class judged on the same scale
• Weighted — the same, plus the additional weight your harder courses carry

Having the pair is what lets a transcript say both things at once: how the student did, and how hard the courses were that they did it in. Neither figure has to stand in for the other.

Course levels will carry the weight

The mechanism behind the weighted GPA will be a course level — a named category you define and assign to a class, carrying the extra weight that class earns.

This is the significant change, and it is worth stating plainly: grade scales will no longer carry the weighting. Today a grade is worth exactly what its scale says it is worth, and that single number is the whole calculation — which is why weighting means running a second scale. In version 12 the scale supplies the base value and the course level supplies the difference on top:

Today        grade value  =  what the scale says   (the weight lives in the scale)

Version 12   unweighted   =  what the scale says
             weighted     =  what the scale says + the course level’s bonus

Two decisions that are currently bound together come apart. The grade scale goes back to answering only what it should — which letter a percent earns, where the boundaries sit, how rounding works. What that letter is worth toward a GPA becomes the course level’s business.

An AP class and a standard class can then share one ordinary grading scale and still differ in what they contribute, with the extra weight stated once on the level instead of encoded in a copy of the scale. And because the bonus is applied on top rather than built in, both figures come out of the same record: the unweighted GPA counts the base, the weighted GPA counts the base plus the bonus.

You will name and configure them yourself. A school might define Standard, Honors, Advanced Placement, and Dual Enrollment; another might need only two. Each carries its own bonus, its own abbreviation, and its own transcript label, so a course level can print on a transcript the way your institution words it.

Levels are set once at the top and can be adjusted further down where a campus or school genuinely differs, in the same set-once-and-inherit way as other version 12 settings. And because a level is a definition rather than a number typed onto each class, changing what Honors is worth updates every class carrying it — one edit rather than a pass through the catalog.

When one student is taking it at a different level

A class normally sets the level for everyone in it. Sometimes one student is the exception: a standard section taken for honors credit under a contract, a dual-enrollment student sitting in an otherwise ordinary class, or a student taking a course for no credit while their classmates take it for credit.

Version 12 will let a single student’s enrollment carry its own course level, overriding the class’s. Their weighted GPA reflects the level they are actually working at, and nobody else in the room is affected.

This is the exception rather than the rule, and it stays out of the way until you need it — but it is the case that otherwise forces a school to create a duplicate section purely so that one student’s record comes out right.

What will count toward a GPA

Several things that schools ask about, all of which will be answerable:

• Courses without credit won’t count. A course carrying no credit stays out of the calculation, which is how a study hall or an audit is normally handled.
• Special grades will count on your terms. For marks like Pass, Incomplete, or Withdrawn, you decide whether each one enters the GPA at all and, if it does, what it is worth.
• Transferred and imported grades will count. A student arriving mid-program brings their record with them, carrying its own credits, so their GPA reflects their whole transcript rather than only the part earned with you.

Which GPA, over what period

A student will have more than one GPA, because the question has more than one useful form:

• Grading period — how they did this quarter or semester
• Year — how they did across the whole academic calendar
• Cumulative — how they have done across everything

For cumulative, you will also be able to say which years count. Version 12 will let you define named groups of grade levels, and a student will carry a cumulative GPA for each group you define. It will arrive with a High School group covering grades nine through twelve, which is what most secondary schools want — a cumulative figure that doesn’t carry middle-school work onto a transcript. A K–12 institution can add groups of its own, and a school that wants one continuous figure across everything can turn the grouping off altogether.

Classes count toward the group for the grade level a student was in when they took them, not the grade they are in now — so a course stays where it belongs on the record as the student moves up through the school.

You will also choose what feeds the calculation: a course’s final grade, or its grading period grades. Both are in use in the field, and which one a school uses changes the answer, so it becomes a setting rather than an assumption.

Student Average Grade (new)

Not every institution thinks in grade points. Plenty describe a student’s standing as a percentage — an overall average across the subjects they are taking — and want that figure rather than one out of four.

Today iGradePlus averages a student’s grades within a class, across its grading periods, to arrive at the class result. What it doesn’t do is average across the classes themselves, so the single number describing how a student is doing overall has to be worked out outside the product.

Version 12 will keep an overall average grade alongside the GPAs, calculated and kept current the same way.

Individual classes will be able to sit outside it. Where subjects like art, music, and physical education are graded but aren’t full-credit subjects, and shouldn’t pull a student’s average one way or the other, those classes can be marked as excluded — so the average reflects the subjects your institution counts and leaves the rest to be reported on their own terms.

Honor Roll (new)

Honor Roll will become something iGradePlus works out and keeps current.

You define the levels — a name and the minimum GPA that earns it, and optionally a requirement that the student have no failing grades. A school might set Merit at 3.0, Honor Roll at 3.5, and Principal’s List at 4.0 with no failing grade permitted.

From there:

• Awards will be worked out each period, so a student earns recognition for the quarter they actually had
• You choose whether a student receives only their highest level, or every level they qualify for
• You choose whether the weighted or unweighted GPA decides it
• Failing is whatever your grade scale says failing is, so the no-failing-grade rule means the right thing on every scale

Levels are archived rather than deleted when a school changes its policy, so awards already earned keep their meaning.

Class Rank (new)

Class rank will also become automatic. Ranking is a question about who is being compared with whom, and version 12 will answer it at the school — students are ranked against the other students at their school, which is how rank is normally reported and what a transcript means by it. An institution running several schools ranks each one separately rather than pooling them.

Within a school, you choose how the students are divided. Most schools rank within a grade level, so seniors are ranked against seniors; some rank the school as a whole.

Beyond that:

• Rank will be computed from the cumulative GPA, weighted or unweighted as you choose
• Tied students share a rank. Two students tied for second are both second, and the next student is fourth — the standard convention, applied the same way every time
• Each rank will carry the size of the group it was drawn from, so “12th” is always reported as 12th of however many, and a percentile comes with it
• A student can be excluded — and when they are, they drop out of the count as well as the list, so nobody else’s rank is distorted by a student who was never being ranked

What this will mean for you

• If you offer honors, AP, or dual-enrollment courses, this is the change that matters most. Difficulty stops being something you encode by duplicating a grade scale, so one grading policy can serve every level of a course — and both the weighted and the unweighted GPA come out of the same record instead of the second one being produced by hand.
• If you publish an honor roll, the list will assemble itself each period from rules you wrote down once — including the no-failing-grade rule that is usually the fiddly part of doing it by hand.
• If you report class rank, it will be maintained continuously rather than reconstructed under deadline, with ties and exclusions handled the same way every time.
• If you run a K–12 institution, cumulative GPA will be able to start where your transcript starts, instead of carrying every year a student has been with you.
• If you teach your own classes on the free gradebook, all of it applies at your scale — your course levels, your honor roll levels, and ranking across your own students.