School Messes Up GPA Calculations
Navya Kaur
Staff Writer
When sophomore Emily Wang went to go request a transcript to send along with her application to Brown University’s summer program, she found some surprising news: transcripts could not be requested until further notice.
“I was really confused,” Wang said. “With new grades, counselors should have known that students would be asking for transcripts.”
After report cards were distributed to students in their third period classes on Friday, February 7, counselors soon realized there had been a glaring mistake in calculating GPAs.
The issue was brought up by senior Jacqueline “Jackie” Barnes, whose report card had significantly rounded up her GPA from a 3.8 to a 4.0. To fix the problem, Barnes approached the registrar, Ms. Dunsford, who was in charge of the report cards and transcripts. Further investigation discovered that the software American High School uses to calculate grades was the source of error: it had miscalculated the GPAs by rounding them up.
The mistake only affected one class of about 30 students, including Barnes, but since the counselors and registrar were unaware of the problem the first time, they took extra precaution while going back through each grade individually, to make sure no other mistakes had been made. Because of the time it took to ensure the legitimacy of each grade, students were unable to request transcripts during the week of February 10.
Barnes’s GPA was rectified the following Monday, ending the long and tiresome confusion the miscalculations had caused.
“It was cool that I had a 4.0,” Barnes said, “but I wasn’t going to take something I didn’t deserve.”
The counselors declined to comment for the Eagle Era. However, now that the school has recovered from this error, official and unofficial transcripts are available to be requested at Gateway for a fee of $5.
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