Exam Grades Going Higher

TAMPA - Higher grades are in store for Hillsborough County's nearly 50,000 high school students when they are handed their first-semester report cards in a couple of weeks.

After decades of grading semester exams one way, the district has created a new system sure to boost grade-point averages.

It's no longer 90 percent correct for an A, 80 percent for a B, 70 percent for a C and 60 percent for a D.

Just 62 percent correct on the physics semester exam equals an A, for example. The Spanish IV exam still requires 90 percent right for an A, but the district's other hundreds of semester exams are all over the place on the new scale.

"I can guarantee you no student is going to get a worse grade," said David Steele, the Hillsborough County School District's general director for secondary education. "Our goal is to ensure the grade on the semester exam mirrors the class grades for the nine weeks."

That's not grade inflation, say officials, because some teachers have been adjusting semester exam grades anyway when they realized the tests were too difficult. The new scale is based on the classroom grades of all students throughout the district for each subject.

Semester exams make up one-third of a semester grade. Classroom grades, which are not affected by the change, make up two-thirds of the grade. That means an A or B on a semester exam instead of a C is significant. Passing a course with a D boosted by a higher exam score can mean the difference between failing or earning a credit needed to graduate or move up to the next grade.

Students See Difference

Marissa Hutek, a junior at Tampa Bay Technical High School, already sees the difference.

"Last year and the year before, I was so frustrated," she said. "I was an A student. I would get Cs and Ds on the exam. It would bring my whole average down."

Headed to college and a career in medicine, Hutek said, "I wish this would have started last year and the year before; my GPA would have been a lot higher."

Last year, during the holidays, Hutek says some of her friends were called at home and told they failed a class and had to take it over even though they had gone into the semester exam with passing grades.

When Hutek returned to school this year after the holidays, a couple of her teachers gave students their grades, explaining there was a new scale for semester exams.

"Everyone was surprised," Hutek said. "They were really happy."

Most students don't yet know about the change, principals and teachers said. Hutek figures she knows more about the changes because her father is a high school principal.

Marc Hutek, principal at Armwood High, said, "I'm glad that we picked up on the fact that there is a discrepancy" and "I like it for my daughter's sake," but he has had few complaints from teachers or parents about the difficulty of some tests.

"The exam scores will certainly increase," said Hutek, who said he has seen that the difficulty of some tests doesn't match the grades students earn in class.

"It's known," he said. "That's why so many kids are so into exempting their exams."

Hillsborough allows students with few or no absences and at least a C average during the nine-week grading periods to exempt up to four semester exams each semester. Seniors who qualify may exempt all their last semester's exams.

"The brightest kids will tend to exempt their most difficult exams," said Richard Bartels, principal at Freedom High School. "They weigh all their advantages. We all know grades matter when kids are applying to college."

The new grade scale offers consistency, he said. Differences in teacher grading include everything from their own classroom exams, extra credit, projects and papers, he said. And, "you could have 50 teachers teaching one course and 50 different ways to arrive at a final grade."

"What the semester exam does do is provide a common experience for everyone taking that particular course," Bartels said.

Building a quality test is difficult, said Joe Pedulla, associate professor and senior research assistant for the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational Policy at Boston College. "I teach whole semesters on that. "

"You're talking about an impossible task to say 90 percent should always be an A within a subject area," he said. "Assigning of grades is always a subjective process."

Hillsborough's new scale is "unusual - not unheard of," Pedulla said, but then again, so are district-created semester exams. "It's just not where public schools are right now."

"There is no absolute right or wrong," Pedulla said. "The judgment has to be defensible." What Hillsborough is doing is "a defensible approach," he said.

Earning an A with just 62 percent right "has the appearance of being easy," but he said it's a matter of how the test is scored: "You're adjusting the various cut scores for the grading for the difficulty of a test."

Semester Exams Draw Attention

Hillsborough's semester exams - unique for decades - are attracting more attention as the state begins considering statewide end-of-semester exams. They are also useful to help districts gauge teacher effectiveness for its merit pay programs.

The state's annual standardized testing program covers only reading, math, writing and science, and not all those are tested in all grades. Hillsborough was first in the state to have a merit pay plan approved because it could use its semester exams to gauge student performance for other subject area teachers. But teachers are evaluated on actual scores, not on letter grades.

The district is paying $3.1 million during five years for the software was used to scale the semester exams, said John Hilderbrand, Hillsborough's testing and accountability chief. But it is also used by teachers to create their own tests and improve exams.

"I know they're tough tests; we've done the analysis," Hilderbrand said.

Hillsborough is changing the grading of its semester exams at the same time high school teachers have added one class period to their day. They now teach six out of seven periods, a move by the district to save money that drew fire from teachers. The district has agreed with the teachers union to evaluate the effect on students and teachers of the heavier workload.

Steele confirmed he has heard from principals that some teachers suspect the timing of the new grading scale was done to ensure student performance would improve.

"We will not compare semester grades," Steele said. "We will be comparing raw scores on tests that are new or have changed."

For now, principals and teachers said they are taking a wait-and-see approach

"Teachers are on board with it; they want consistency, too," said Mark West, principal of Bloomingdale High School in Valrico. "Having a district test is better, it prepares the kids for the kind of college exams they'll have."

"I think it's fair. I think it's right," West said. "So now a kid taking an elective at Bloomingdale and a kid at Jefferson get a consistent, fair shake, just like a kid at Plant or Newsome."