In recent years, the Upper School curriculum has undergone many changes to its course offerings. With the addition of new opportunities such as Honors English 9 and 10 and Honors Geometry with Proof, students are now able to take more honors and higher level courses as an underclassman than in previous years.

As TAS gives an extra 0.5 weight for honors courses, many underclassmen have found their GPAs being higher by these new opportunities. However, the administration claims that that is not the reason why these changes have been implemented.

Upper School Principal Dr. Richard Hartzell said, “The honors courses for underclassmen will attempt to prepare students for more difficult courses in the future; preparing students for higher level courses is a benefit but it wasn’t the main reasoning, as our goal is still to prepare students for college, not for IB/AP courses.”

According to Dr. Hartzell, the addition of new honors courses was not aimed at boosting students’ cumulative GPAs or preparing students for future higher level courses, but to improve the differentiation system. In general, schools which differentiate use one of two formats: streaming or grouping. Streaming is when students are split by overall ability, which means that students are split in all classes based on how well they do in all subjects. Therefore, even if a student may be doing poorly in a certain subject, the student is still enrolled in the higher level course. The current system of grouping, however, splits students based on performance by subject, and groups based on abilities in that particular class without considering performance in other subjects.

Dr. Hartzell said, “The idea of differentiation is to help both students and teachers, as students do not all have the same needs and it is hard for teachers to teach with exaggerated differences present in the class.”

However, Linda Ding (12), who did not get the chance to take honors courses as a freshman, thinks that the school may be taking the idea of streaming too far.

“I think it’s ridiculous how they’re making so many categories of the same subject,” she said.

English Department Chair Mr. Leon Maggio supports the addition of more honors courses, and says that differentiation and needs are the main reasons why honors courses were added to the English curriculum. Mr. Maggio said that honors classes will “allow [the English department] to challenge all abilities equally.”

According to Mr. Maggio, the honors courses are “more quantitative and qualitative; more content, reading, and writing, as well as a different level of qualitative skill, independence, initiative, and density.”

Joyce Yu (10) agrees that the main difference between honors and non-honors courses is the amount of freedom students enjoy.

“In general, honors courses are less limiting, and there is very little instruction given,” she said, “The homework is around the same length but it is more analytical.”

Furthermore, Dr. Hartzell also said that the GPA boost does not benefit the students in any great way, as colleges usually “strip the GPA,” so even though the GPA may be boosted here, it actually makes no difference for applications.

Grade 12 Academic Counselor Mr. Paul Fredette agrees, and says that “opportunities are different from school to school, and colleges generally value how one does within his/her own school and how one takes advantage of the opportunities offered,” not the number printed on the transcript.

However, Dr. Hartzell also said that even though the boost is insignificant, the school is still going to keep the weighting system.

“This GPA boost with honors courses is already being practiced, so adding more honors courses won’t hurt anybody, while eliminating the current extra 0.5 weight for honors courses will unnecessarily anger students,” he said.

Linda thinks that those courses would have helped her in the long run. “In terms of GPA, an extra 0.5 [for honors courses] is a big boost, and it would help if we had that before,” she said. “Also, it would probably have prepared us for harder courses in the future.”

Currently, all the grouping changes have not yet been implemented, and are an ongoing process.

“This process is continuing for some departments such as science, which will undergo major overhauls to the current system; for other departments such as English, the process is culminated, as there are no new possible honors courses to be added,” Dr. Hartzell said.

Additionally, he also said that even though students are grouped based on abilities, the system is not set.

“Even if you are initially placed at one level, things are not set; you can go anywhere,” Dr. Hartzell said.