Starting next school year STA will begin using percentage reporting, which means all assignments will be based on a 100-point scale, grades on transcripts will show up as percentages rather than letter grades and GPAs will be in the form of percentages. By making this change, the administration hopes to improve opportunities and level the competition for students, appeal to colleges, and increase the college atmosphere on campus.

The administration first announced the change when a letter was attached to students’ first semester grade reports announcing the switch. According to principal for academic affairs Barbara McCormick, the new system will hopefully give students a better advantage in the eyes of colleges.

“It may open more opportunities for scholarships and acceptance to certain colleges,” McCormick said. “It allows our students to have an equal playing field. You’re competing with every other school so it puts [STA girls] in the same boat as any other student.”

McCormick said STA is also in the process of switching to a new web-based student information system called Power School. This new database would allow students, teachers and parents to log in and

• view grades
• manage homework
• look up course information
• get live updates from teachers
• keep calendars
• record and view class attendance
• improve access to technology

According to Power School’s website, the database supports almost 8 million students across the world.

“PowerSchool enables today’s educators to make timely decisions that impact student performance while creating a collaborative environment for parents, teachers and students to work together in preparing 21st century learners for the future supports almost 8 million students across the world,” the website said.

McCormick said STA is continually trying to improve STA’s technology; the database would allow for more access, live updating and increased access to grades.

“It’s live, cumulative and very active,” McCormick said.

College counselor Debi Hudson said that although colleges usually take a high school’s grading scale into consideration, the exactness of this new style of grading appeals to both the administration and colleges.

“We like the exactness of the percent,” Hudson said. “It’s an exact grade instead of a range.”

Junior Demi Ribaste agreed the exactness will give an advantage to students.

“It will let colleges and parents know how a student did exactly,” Ribaste said. “Right now our system is definitely unfair. In other schools they get a 90 percent and get an A; we get a 92 percent and we get a B+. Colleges just see B+ and not a number, which is a huge disadvantage.”

One concern about the grading scale is that STA will lose some of its reputation as an academically rigorous school with a college preparatory curriculum. However, Director of Admissions at Rockhurst High School and STA school board member Jack Reichmeier said this decision will not affect credibility at all.

“St. Teresa’s, as a college-prep high school, is already more academically rigorous than most public and diocesan high schools, so I think it only has penalized students to have a more narrowly defined grading system,” Reichmeier said. “Rockhurst has been on the 10-point grading scale for years, and it has not watered down our curriculum one bit.”

According to Hudson, this has been a long process of researching, discussing and deciding what is best for students along with what will give them the biggest advantage.

“This has been our grade scale since forever and we’ve been researching for a long time trying to decide what’s best for us,” Hudson said.

Currently, most major colleges and universities use the NCAA Clearinghouse’s grading scale, which is a traditional 10-point scale (90-100 is an A, 80-89 is a B, 70-79 is a C, etc.). However, according to Hudson, about one-fourth of high schools across the country use the same grading scale as STA — a more difficult eight-point scale.

Reichmeier agreed that a more difficult grading scale can improve students’ opportunities.

“[Colleges] don’t weigh their formulas to accommodate the more rigourous grading scales, so it ends up hurting STA applicants, potentially costing parents thousands of dollars in lost scholarship opportunities. The percentage grading scale is a step in the right direction…” Reichmeier said.