Percentage Grades, Letter Grades, Dual Credit

[zuzu_]

At my CC, dual credit is big business. Overall, it's a win-win and I like teaching it.

Lately, we've had a few schools demanding that instructors (employed solely by the college) provide percentage grades (emailed to the school counselor) in addition to the formal grades that are reported to the registrar (which are letter grades only). While I'm not in theory opposed to sharing detailed information with the HS about student performance (FERPA is all handled), I do not like being forced to provide percentages. Nor do my colleagues. Here are the reasons:

-Our CC has no formal percentage scale (which percentage equals an A, B, etc), and even if we did, the high schools all have their own scales. This could lead to a lot of confusion about how letters correspond to percentages.
-Some instructors use points--not percentages. No college policy requires us to use percentages.
-Percentages are not part of their formal college grade record
-Some instructors are adjuncts, employed PT by the CC and FT by the HS. I understand if they have these requirements, because they also report to the HS. But it seems like the HS shouldn't be able to dictate grade reporting requirements for those of us who are employed by the college only.
-My students can see their percentages on the LMS at all times, so it's not like my grading process is opaque

Trying to decide if I should raise a stink about this or not. I don't want to die on a silly hill. What do you think? Am I right? Is this worth raising with our CAO?

[pepsi_alum]

I see the reason for your concern. If it were me, I probably would raise the issue with my higher-ups with the point that there should be a consistent collegewide policy about it which applies to all employees regardless of whether they're also employed by the school district. You're not dying on a hill as long as you raise the issue in a factual and reasonable manner.

[Aster]

Dual-credit is not so bad, until a college decides to tap into dual-credit for the purposes of its own revenue generation.

You'll know when that happens. There is no more than a tiny sub-percentage of A+ level high school students that should ever be put into a college environment.

But if a college has more than 2% of its student body made up of dual-credit high school students, I would take a hard look to see if the college has prostituted itself by drastically lowering the GPA requirements. For example, dropping the (appropriate) 3.5/4.0 range GPA requirement down to something just outright unethical, like 2.0.

And *that's* when all of the matriculation transfer problems suddenly explode in the prostituted college's face. The items zuzu listed above are just a taste of things to come.

[scamp]

-Our CC has no formal percentage scale (which percentage equals an A, B, etc), and even if we did, the high schools all have their own scales. This could lead to a lot of confusion about how letters correspond to percentages.

If the high schools all have their own scales, why can't they just apply their own scale accordingly? I realize it might be a few percentage points off if you choose the middle of the scale for each letter, but that seems better than you saying that Sally had an A/92% when an A translates to 95-100 at their high school.

[Antiphon1]

Our college scale happens to be the same scale used by our dual credit high schools, so no worries with the alignment of letter grades to percentages.  To further accommodate  the dual credit students, I switched to a weighed grading scale using percentages for my courses.  This system works fine for the college students since most of them are accustomed to a percentage grade.  Fighting about a grading scale isn't worth my time.  I'd rather focus on making sure the students grades reflect their performance.