So.... the sixty million dollar ( = 92.4 million euros) question is....
How is the grade average calculated? Where can I see the maths?
I am starting to think this system is not totally 100% transparent because I have never met a teacher or a rehtori who is capable of explaining it to me. If I understand correctly, only "academic" subjects are included in the calculation (please... which are academic? ...everything except cookery, art and PE??? What about ethics, civics, health etc??) Then some subjects are weighted differently to others.
I sat through a presentation on this about a year ago. The presentation was in Finnish but my SO was there too. So I just sat and smiled in the right places. But when, at the end of the explanation, I asked my husband for a recap, he told me that he hadn't really understood much and neither had anyone else, which was why so many people had been sking questions
It is slowly becoming apparently to me that my son is in a double whammy situation where Finnish Foreign Language (which he is not too good at) has a MUCH higher weighting than A1 English and A2 French which he does quite well in. I am also guessing that a subject called English MotherTongue (which is tagged on to the end of the school report) is not actually included at all in the academic grade average.
The "double" whammy is that although his English is fluent (he is a native speaker), he is getting the same grades (8s and 9s) as Finnish kids I know in Kerava who are "good " at English but way off native speaker level. It seems that the "international" schools are not using the same scale for grading as the Finnish schools. Unfortunately the Grade Average caulculation is the same for all. Unfair!
And the lukio admission criteria are the same for all too.Now I understand how kids who are barely able to write a coherent sentence in English are able to get into IB lukio, but immigrant kids with fluent English are not....
( <- rant )The other whammy is that if your Finnish Foreign Language (FFL) gets good enough the school transfers you into a Finnish Mother Tongue (FMT) class. When that happens your subject grade takes a serious hit! So we are in the situation where my eldest is getting a 7 for FFL and his younger brother is getting a 6 for FMT even though the younger brother speaks Finnish waaaaay better. Unfair, again
Would be interested to see the algorithms though. Are they published? Anyone else been through all this yet?
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). The final grade point average takes some courses from 7th grade (like cooking because it is a 7th grade subject only) and then some courses are in 8th and 9th grade but some are only in 8th grade and some are only in 9th grade. For the courses which last two years the first year has a lower weighting in the final average than the score from the second year (ie ninth grade). So, you see, I have all these snippets of info but no clear picture. I have his last report card in front of me. There are over 50 grades on it (not included the ones that have letters rather than numbers for grades). If I add them all up and divide by 51, then I get more than the "official" average that he was given in school. And that is if I look at ALL SUBJECTS not just the academic subjects (which I am unable to identify). And overall, as I tried to explain above, he seems penalised by the fact that English is his mother tongue yet English mother tongue is not a "proper" subject, which is crazy when applying to an IB school where all subjects are taught in English and Finnish is optional anyway. He is also penalised by his Swedish grades even though he gave up Swedish in 8th grade (because it was taught in Finnish). Grrrr...
I converted the wrong way! €39M What a bargain!
) But I specifically remember mention of some kind of weighting whereby 8th-grade grades counted for more than 9th-grade grades in the final calculation, which seems fair as that would benefit kids who have made an effort to improve their grades, or who have maybe matured a bit slower than the others.