The Daviess County Public Schools Board of Education has approved an updated grading policy that will, for the first time, give students in dual credit courses a weighted GPA. The change was championed by board member Trey Pippin, who has advocated for the adjustment for nearly a decade.
Pippin, a former college and career readiness counselor for DCPS, said the change ensures fairness for students who take rigorous college-level courses outside of Advanced Placement (AP) offerings.
“We have a robust and growing dual and concurrent enrollment program here in our district,” Pippin said. “I had students who were taking college classes that I was aware were rigorous college-level coursework, but they weren’t receiving the GPA weight that AP students were receiving.”
Pippin said after researching grading practices at institutions across the country, he found near-universal agreement that AP and dual credit courses carry the same level of academic rigor.
“From Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to our local schools, state schools, and community colleges, the answers were unanimous,” he said. “They said, ‘We don’t assign a difference. We believe that these are the same level of high-rigor classes.’”
That consistency, he said, made it clear DCPS students should receive the same GPA weighting for both types of coursework.
“To me, it looked like an opportunity for us to really give those students an extra leg up when it comes to paying for college, which is already outrageously expensive,” Pippin said. “Lots of districts are already weighing these dual credit classes, and many of those automatic scholarships allow students to use their weighted GPA for them.”
He added that helping students qualify for those GPA-based scholarships was a key motivator.
“One of the reasons that I decided to run for school board was I think our district needs to continue being a leader in dual and concurrent enrollment,” Pippin said. “This is a step in that direction that I’ve advocated for for a long time. From a personal standpoint, I’ve truly been fighting for this for almost 10 years. So now the chance to kind of implement the change at the board level is huge.”
Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning Jana Beth Francis said the policy creates a consistent structure for how GPA weighting will be applied districtwide.
“Historically, only Advanced Placement classes had been weighted,” Francis said. “The new policy allows the board to set the GPA weights every year and determine which classes get to be counted as a weighted GPA.”
Francis said the board plans to apply the weighting uniformly across all dual credit and AP classes.
“They’re all the same weight,” Francis said. “If you think of an old GPA, an A would be a four. In a weighted class, an A is a five, a B is a four … and so we line up with what a lot of schools are doing with their dual credit. We also now mirror what Owensboro Public Schools is doing.”
The change goes into effect immediately for current students enrolled in dual credit or AP courses. Francis said the timing was intentional so that students could benefit from the updated scale before the end of the semester.
Francis said the district will not apply the change retroactively, as doing so would affect students who have already graduated. However, she said the district will provide official letters for recent graduates if needed for scholarship or college admissions purposes.
“If they would like an official letter from the school office explaining the change and listing the classes that would have been considered weighted, we will provide that,” she said.
The board will review the weighting decisions annually by Jan. 1, and individual school councils will be required to ensure their site-based grading policies align with the district’s updates.
Francis added that beyond GPA weighting, the updated policy also emphasizes improved communication between schools and families regarding student progress.
“We really wanted to focus on increased two-way communication between families and schools to make sure that families felt informed about what was going on with individual student grades,” she said. “The policy talks about if a student all of a sudden has grades below a C, that the family needs to be informed. It also talks about the number of times that a teacher submits grades and those types of things.”
