Stellar students or grade inflation?

Some BPS schools join private schools in giving perfect grade point averages to exam school applicants

The intense desire of many parents for their children to get into Boston Latin School may affect grades at some of the schools that have sent the most students to exam schools in the past.

By Alain Jehlen Grade inflation at both private and public schools strongly affects who gets into exam schools, BPS data suggest.

The grades that some schools bestow on exam school applicants seem just too good to be true.

In a 2017 report, WGBH spotlighted Holy Name Parish School in West Roxbury for the amazing number of A+s awarded to its exam school applicants in 2017. The story raised the question of whether Holy Name and perhaps other private schools give their students an unfair advantage over BPS students.

It turns out, some BPS schools are also super-high graders.

At least 70 percent of Eliot 6th graders had perfect GPAs

The Eliot School in the North End is the standout example. Fifty-five Eliot sixth graders who were invited to exam schools for the 2020–2021 school year had perfect grade point averages: 12 points.

They were in the last cohort who applied before the admissions system was changed in the wake of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd.

The Eliot had 79 sixth graders that year, so those 55 amounted to 70 percent of the class.

The Eliot stands out in another way: It has the smallest percentage of low-income students among all BPS schools.

We don’t know the GPAs of the other 24 Eliot sixth graders. The BPS list only included students who were invited to exam schools. Some of the other 24 could have had 12-point GPAs but weren’t on the list because they didn’t apply, or they applied but didn’t get in.

Apparently, three Eliot students with lower GPAs were also invited to exam schools. A separate BPS document shows that a total of 58 Eliot students were invited. The first list, with 55, only included students if at least 10 shared the same GPA.

(A 12-point grade point average doesn’t necessarily mean every single grade was perfect. BPS rounded the numbers so, for example, if the average of scores making up the GPA came to 11.6, that would be rounded to 12.)

Demand for data was part of battle over exam school admissions

The grades of exam school invitees were reported in a spreadsheet that BPS released last year to Darragh Murphy, a leading opponent of the new exam school admissions. She filed a public records request to get this data.

Murphy says she wanted to compare the GPAs of students invited under the old system with those invited under the system that used zip codes. She also wants to look at exam school performance going forward: Are more B and B– students being admitted? If so, will that lead to lower academic performance at the exam schools?

BPS only gave Murphy grades for the 19 schools that had 10 or more students invited to exam schools. Those schools accounted for a little less than half of exam school invitees. Officials said releasing grades for schools with fewer than 10 exam school applicants could violate student privacy.

We’re posting the full spreadsheet here along with BPS’s description of the data.

(The image below shows part of the spreadsheet, but the image itself isn’t clickable. There’s a clickable link in the caption.)

A small portion of one of the spreadsheets BPS gave Darragh Murphy in response to her public records request

The Eliot wasn’t the only school where the GPAs of exam school invitees were concentrated at the top. That was true at 13 of the 19 schools listed on the BPS spreadsheet. But the Eliot students with top GPAs made up most of the school’s total sixth-grade enrollment. At least for BPS schools and charter schools, that was unusual.

For example, the Frederick Pilot Middle School had 10 students invited with perfect GPAs. Those 10 students made up seven percent of the Frederick’s sixth graders. We don’t know the GPAs of other Frederick students.

We’ve posted the data on GPAs alongside each school’s sixth-grade enrollment copied from the state website. We left out private schools because the state doesn’t list their enrollments. That new spreadsheet is here.

Here’s the information for just three schools, chosen because they show a strong contrast:

BPS did not release information when the number of invitees with a particular GPA was less than 10.

Few if any of the students invited from Mario Umana Academy and Quincy Upper had a 12-point GPA (fewer than 10 from each school). But almost all of the Eliot invitees did. Does the difference between the Eliot grades and those at the Umana and Quincy Upper reflect higher achievement at the Eliot, or a different grading policy?

One Eliot parent who looked at these numbers suggested we check MCAS scores to see whether the Eliot grades show superior academic skills. So we did. Eliot students scored very high on MCAS, but not high enough to account for their stellar grades. (To go into the weeds on MCAS scores vs grade point averages, click here.)

Asked to comment on the differing grading patterns at BPS schools, spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo said, “BPS celebrates the many accomplishments of the students and staff at the Eliot school and of all our students and staff across the entire district.”

We’ve asked BPS for the grades of all sixth grade students (no names, of course), so we can see better how the pattern varies from school to school.

New grading policy may reduce variation among schools this year

Superintendent Brenda Cassellius is introducing a new grading policy across the district that’s intended to make grades more accurately reflect what students know and can do at the end of each year. As with her other initiatives, we’ll see if her successor follows through.

Cassellius told the School Committee her purpose is to cut down on subjective judgments of effort and class participation.

(More on that here and here.)

From the slide presentation on the new grading policy presented to the School Committee May 26.

Studies of other schools that tried this approach to grading found that racial and ethnic gaps were reduced.

The new system may also lead to less dramatic variation among BPS schools in the grades of exam school applicants.

(Note: This story has been corrected to take into account that the BPS spreadsheet did not say how many students had a particular GPA if the number of students was smaller than 10, so we can’t assume that number was zero. Thanks to an Eliot parent for pointing this out.)

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