Recently, with no prior warning, MCPS announced changes to the new grading policy, affecting current high school students. Previously, the policy would have affected students in grades 6-9 for the 2025-26 school year, but now it affects students in grade 6-12. This drastically changes things for students who are already in high school and will experience a major shift in grading in the middle of high school, causing a significant drop in grades that will negatively harm students when applying for scholarships, internships, or colleges. In addition, high school students who signed up for challenging classes under the old grading policy will be affected, not expecting this change, making it harder to earn high grades and causing them to avoid challenging themselves in order to avoid risking their GPA. While grades are currently inflated, changing the policy in the middle of high school will unfairly impact students going into the most important and difficult years of school.

Applying the new grading policy to current high school students will result in inconsistencies within their transcripts, leading to a perceived drop in grades between school years, especially for rising juniors and seniors, who take more challenging classes and will see their grades drop in the most important years of high school. This will negatively affect them as they apply for internships, scholarships, or colleges, which will see a sudden drop in grades, which would reflect negatively on the student, even though the system was changed to be significantly harder to get high grades. 

This decision to apply the new grading system to all high school students was made without community feedback or prior warning, and it should be reverted to affecting students going into grades 6-9, rather than grades 6-12. If we allow it to apply to current high schoolers, transcripts will be unnecessarily harmed by a sudden drop in grades. We need to keep the old policy for current high school students to keep consistency throughout high school, and to avoid the issues that come from changing the grading policy in the middle of high school, before the most important years. The new policy uniquely affects current high school students, who will deal with sudden impacts to their transcript, while incoming freshmen and current middle school students will have the same grading system all four years and their transcripts will reflect that, while current high schoolers' transcripts will not.

The new grading system, as per MCPS, is that “Final grades will be based on the average of marking period grades for all secondary students. Other changes will include providing clarity on reassessment opportunities, due dates and deadlines, and providing timely feedback on student work. Additionally, required summative districtwide assessments will be implemented during the second and fourth marking periods for select courses.