High school is easily one of the most formative places for finding who you are and figuring out what you want to be when you grow up. Within recent years, there has been a resurgence of students applying for college and trying to obtain a higher level of education post high school. Many colleges have been going test-optional, which is not forcing students to submit their standardized test scores like the ACT and SAT, with their undergraduate students, which makes your grades and GPA all the more important as of late. But what if I told you some high schoolers have an unfair advantage in obtaining this success and a higher GPA. To show you, I’ll use lawyers as an example. To achieve great success in becoming a lawyer, it would be ideal to attend a top university to further your studies. If said university were to look at West Forsyth’s top students to find a suitable pick (since they are looking for the best of the best), they will come to realize that almost every single student, if not every, at the top of our class attends Forsyth Tech, online classes. At first glance, it just seems like these students are overachievers and are looking for higher education by using the local community college to their benefit. That isn’t the case. In reality, Forsyth Tech classes completely ruin competition amongst students who do not take them; the outlook and benefits that these classes grant should be completely reformed.
GPA: what every student thinks about and compares with others when it comes to academic value. A number that defines you as a student solely based on how well you do in classes, graded on a 5-point scale. Regular courses receive a 4 for receiving an A, whilst honors and AP courses receive 4.5 and 5, respectively. Forsyth Tech’s online courses also receive a 5 for completing the online courses, but the question is, why? Well, understandably, it is college-level work that you are doing remotely with a professor/teacher’s assistant that you can email or message at any time to receive help on an assignment. However, this doesn’t account for the difference between the two environments, one being online and the other being in person. With Honors and higher-level students being the most susceptible to cheating because they want their GPA to go up and outperform their peers, the average amount of cheating on any assignment provided for Forsyth Tech is through the roof. Speaking with fellow students, I’ve heard of and seen multiple instances of cheating on provided Forsyth Tech work with Quizlet, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, you name it. While Forsyth Tech students are able to openly cheat and continue to receive high grades without consequence, students who attend college-level classes in school don’t have that barrier, and while they do still have the ability to cheat, it’s just much harder to do so and receive top marks in class. The two environments aren’t even comparable because of this disparity, and it makes it completely unfair for the students who are on campus taking AP courses compared to the online Forsyth Tech versions of the very same class. Not to mention, the students who take Forsyth Tech classes aren’t even forced to take AP exams for the classes they take because they are dual-enrolled in the public community college, while in-person West students are forced to attend the AP exams for that same course.
While the grading scale and disparity between environments are massive problems, the biggest problem is the number of classes that you can take in comparison to the students who only take classes at school. In a regular school year at West, you can take up to eight classes. You are required to take electives in addition to the core classes you need to graduate, and these follow the same grade scale as mentioned above, with the 5-point scale. Compare this to Forsyth Tech. They have much shorter class times, and you can stack way more classes into the year, with upwards of 16, and you are granted 5 points for every class taken there. How could this possibly be fair in the eyes of a school system or a public institution? These students are given an unfair advantage over other students, with the ability to take more classes and are given more points for these classes than other students. Furthermore, Forsyth Tech classes aren’t even granted to every student who attends West Forsyth. The ability to take these classes is locked behind a 2.8 GPA line, and you have to be over that to even begin to take these classes. Now, from the other side, this could be justified by saying that if you wanted to achieve high marks, your GPA would already have been above this line, so this line wouldn’t matter to you. But is that any way to view a situation like this? The fact that this opportunity is given to certain students and withheld from other students should never be the case, and it gives them an unfair advantage over other students. This leads to part of the problem with the gap between the high GPA students and the students who have a low GPA, creating a massive gap between the two.
Finally, while not as “important” as the other topics, it’s still just as problematic. The social skills that you gain from high school just aren’t given to the students who take an absurd amount of Forsyth Tech classes. While these dual-enrollment classes were offered before COVID-19, they received a boost in usage after COVID and the online learning that followed. With these classes being online, these students’ grades and GPA go up, but they don’t get to be in the public environment of the school anymore, and lose out on some valuable social skills that you should have when you are an adult. In the media, there’s always a topic of how technology and social media are making it harder for teens to communicate with adults and or each other, but Forsyth Tech does not make this any better. Actually, it even incentivises not having much social interaction between your peers because of how much of a boost it gives to your grades in comparison to taking classes at school.
- Forsyth Tech is just one instance of this happening, and it actually happens across the nation at schools with community colleges near them. Now I’m not an admissions officer for colleges, but of course, students with a higher GPA are more likely to get into prestigious schools, and certain schools have the unfair advantage of being near a community college, and those online courses affecting GPA just don’t seem right. This should be changed, and this isn’t fair to students across the nation. I feel as if Forsyth Tech shouldn’t have advantages over students or just shouldn’t affect GPA at all because of how it affects grades. Also, what if this starts to get rid of teachers’ jobs, since it would just be easier for students to take all online Forsyth Tech classes? I hope one day someone looks into this and creates a change.
