Effective immediately, accelerated courses, such as English I, II and Algebra II/Trigonometry, will now be weighted on a 5 point scale, according to a press release from CUSD.

If you’re a junior or a senior this applies to you too. Taking these classes in the past qualifies you for the grade boost.

This is the result of action by the superintendent, Kirsten Vital, and the school board to increase the number of honors courses available to students in CUSD.

“I applaud district staff who worked quickly to solve this problem, ensuring that our students can apply to college with transcripts that accurately reflect the hard work and dedication they have invested in their education,” she said.

Some classes are not recognized as deserving of the retroactive grade boost. World History Accelerated and World History Two-Way Dual Immersion are not included in the action.

CUSD will certainly acknowledge the resulting retroactive GPA boosts, which are often used to calculate class standings and things like Valedictorians and other high school honors at graduation.

However, the UC system will not always recognize these courses when calculating a student’s transfer GPA.

“I believe what the UC is saying is that the retroactive grade bump will only be recognized by CUSD and not by the UC and CSU system,” said Eric Paulsen, Assistant Principal of Guidance at SJHHS.

Marc Patterson, Executive Director of Grade 6-12, K-8 Schools, and Alternative Education at CUSD explains:

“Each of these courses will be weighted by CUSD but this weighted grade is not recognized as a UC Honors weighted course.  Even though the weighted grade would not be counted by UCs there are many other universities that would recognize this grade bump,” he said in an email to all high school academic advisors made available to The Express.

These types of title and transcript abbreviations cannot be made retroactive on a school’s “a-g” course list, he said, explaining why UCs might not recognize the adjusted GPA’s.

“These courses have been approved by the University of California system as district level honors courses which means that they are considered honors courses for our own Grade Point Average calculations,” according to Patterson.

In other words, students may have two different GPA’s, one “local” CUSD GPA and another, perhaps lower one, recognized by colleges like UCs. It remains unclear how students will know how to calculate their GPA’s.

Also unknown is whether the CSUs will recognize the GPA boosts.

“Each college will handle it as they see fit and probably different from the next one,” said Paulsen.