AUSTIN, Texas — Hundreds of high school seniors could have their college admissions impacted after Austin ISD uncovered a grading discrepancy.
The school district told KVUE it is in the middle of recalculating rank GPA at all of its high schools and reviewing the effects across each campus.
Officials said they are conducting the review after being alerted to a discrepancy in the fall. The district uncovered that grades of "P," or "pass" which were used in Spring 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, weren't being calculated with numerical scores.
During the Spring 2020 semester, the current AISD high school seniors were in eighth grade, but several of them took advanced math and science courses before going into high school.
Students that received a "P" for those courses were seeing the "P" removed from their rank and not replaced, meaning only seven semesters of grades were being used instead of eight.
District policy states that if students earn credits beyond their graduation requirements, the ranked GPA will be calculated using up to the eight highest weighted GPAs. What the district discovered was that practice was not occurring if a student received a "P" for math or science classes.
Austin ISD said it is unsure what effect the change could have on current high school seniors and the different acceptance timelines and criteria among universities. However, they did say these recalculations would have changed prior classes' GPA rankings, but they won't be recalculating for classes that have already graduated.
That begs the question for many if their college admissions process would have looked different because of the Top 10 Percent Law.
The Top 10 Percent Law, or House Bill 588, states that the top 10% of all Texas high school seniors get automatic admission into all state-funded universities. The top 6% of seniors get automatic admissions into the University of Texas at Austin.
Austin ISD said if a family believes the changes could put a current senior at risk of acceptance from their desired university, counseling staff is available for support during the process.
The district said students who have been waitlisted by universities already based on their previous class ranking from the "P" grades can appeal that decision and Austin ISD will help them through the process.
At Anderson High School alone, 47 of the top 83 students saw their rank GPA go down, while a handful of students saw their rank GPA stay the same. Thirty-one students at Anderson saw their rank GPA go up.
While the corrections also affected student ranking, Austin ISD said valedictorian or salutatorian statuses did not change. They said the corrections would also have not effect on the students' cumulative GPA.
The district said any students within the top 15% of their class will be notified of changes before March 8. The remaining students will be notified of changes by June 18.