Jennifer Riordon, who will be a senior at River Hill High School in Clarksville, has a resume likely to impress any college admissions office.

Besides her good grades in upper-level classes -- including molecular biology -- she recently made the cut of 42 out of 350 applicants accepted to a weeklong engineering and science program for girls at Penn State University.

Yet, 17-year-old Jennifer and her parents worry that when college scholarships are doled out to the graduating class of 1999, other top students from across the country will have a distinct advantage over her:

Weighted class rank.

Families like the Riordons have urged the Howard County school board in recent weeks to switch to such a class ranking system in high schools, one that gives students extra "quality points" for excelling in upper-level courses.

"She's the fifth of six children," said Jennifer's mother, Elizabeth Riordon, "and we're looking for scholarship money."

In a weighted system, a student taking an advanced placement (AP) or gifted-talented (GT) English class might receive an extra half grade-point.

At a recent school board meeting, parents said a weighted system is crucial to ensuring that Howard County's high-achieving students are compared fairly to others nationwide, many of whom receive a weighted rank.

Some told stories about their older children who had been denied scholarship dollars because their unweighted class rank placed them too low. Some students even avoid taking high-level classes to preserve their grade-point average, they said.

Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll and Harford counties all have some type of weighted class ranking system that takes course levels into account. But in Howard County -- which also does not recognize valedictorians and salutatorians -- schools use a "decile" ranking system that divides the number of people in a graduating class by 10. Students are then grouped according to their grade-point averages, with the students having the highest averages in decile one, and so on.

Because rank and grades are unweighted, a student who received B's in advanced classes could be knocked out of the top decile by students getting A's in regular classes.

"I've got [a child] who is also taking AP classes and GT and doing well except that he's a little worried if he should get a B in a class," said Susan Seigel, whose son will be a junior in a technology magnet program at River Hill High School. "He's thinking that if he gets one B, it could knock him out of the top 10 percent of his class. That's a lot of pressure to put on a kid."

A staff report to the Howard County school board -- which recommended leaving the system unchanged -- reached this conclusion: Most colleges nationwide prefer some type of ranking system, but the colleges that Howard County graduates usually attend, including University of Maryland, College Park, Virginia Tech and University of Delaware, "show no preference for or work around the ranking issue."

Ronne Patrick, associate director of undergraduate admissions at University of Maryland, College Park, estimated that about half the counties in Maryland use weighted GPAs or class rank. She said her office conducts a thorough review of transcripts and applications in either case.

"We don't believe that they're being hurt in our process at this point," Patrick said of Howard County students.

Robert Massa, dean of enrollment at the Johns Hopkins University, agreed.

"Class rank is a snapshot of the student's academic performance relative to others in the school," said Massa, who has a daughter at Ellicott City's Mt. Hebron High School. "It is unfair in a comprehensive admissions process to look only at the snapshot and not the context."

Since transcripts come with a school profile, Massa said, admissions officers know Howard County does not weight grades, and they also know the difference between regular and upper-level courses, which are indicated on the transcript. Massa said that students should be more concerned with their performance than their percentile ranking.

Still, some believe weighted class rank could be advantageous for some students. "Personally ... I'm in favor of making a switch for purposes of college applications," Howard County school board chairman Stephen C. Bounds said. "There is little or no downside to doing it, and there are certainly some pluses for some of our students."

The school board is expected to vote on the issue in the next few weeks.

Jennifer and her parents hope the change, if it takes place, is made before she graduates.

Because the Riordons have moved several times, River Hill is Jennifer's third high school. Her last school in Arizona gave students taking upper-level classes an extra grade point to recognize the difficulty of the course. For example, a B in an honors class was worth four points instead of the usual three.

After researching schools from Annapolis to Carroll County, her parents settled on River Hill and bought a home nearby in Clarksville. But when Jennifer and her mother visited the school, a counselor disregarded Jennifer's weighted grades, changing them to an unweighted numerical grade, they said.

"She started crossing them out," said Jennifer, who lists UMCP and University of Maryland, Baltimore County among her college preferences.

Though Allen Dyer can't predict that his son would ultimately benefit from weighted class rank, he believes the schools should switch to such a system. Dyer's son will be a junior at River Hill, where he has taken AP government and calculus.

"My concern is I want the grades that my child receives to be comparable to grades received by children in other parts of the country," Dyer said.

Other school systems in the region have grappled with the weighted class rank issue.

In May, Carroll County's Board of Education adopted a weighted grading system to reward students taking challenging courses. But students are allowed to choose between a weighted or nonweighted calculation to determine grade point average.

In Baltimore County high schools, official class rank is based on a weighted grade point average, said spokesman Donald I. Mohler III. But the schools also provide an unofficial non-weighted class rank, giving students the option to submit whichever they prefer to colleges.

"We have looked at this issue from every possible angle," Mohler said. "Each student's record is very individual."

For more than a decade, Harford County high schools have weighted grades for students taking advanced placement courses, said spokesman Donald R. Morrison.

"Some kids were staying away from taking the AP courses because of the damage it might do to their GPA," Morrison said. "We want to have incentives for kids to attempt more rigorous material."

If there is a downside to weighted ranking, it may be that "weighting lowers the class rank for others who do not take AP or GT classes and suggests to students that some courses are less worthy because they are not weighted," the staff report to the Howard County school board concluded. The report also cautioned that "it may encourage some students to take work beyond their capacity."

Perhaps for those reasons, the weighting would be used only for college admissions purposes and not for other activities requiring the report of a grade point average, such as National Honor Society, according to the staff report.

But parents see another side: incentive to try harder and, ultimately, recognition for excelling while doing so.

"I would boil it down to just leveling the playing field," Seigel said. "There's no reason why our kids should not be as advantaged as other kids in the country."

Pub Date: 8/03/98