How a COVID coding glitch could change Austin area high school seniors' class rank

Some Austin seniors who in the spring or summer of 2020 took a high school-level math class could see changes in their class rank this year due to a coding discrepancy, according to a letter the district sent to parents this week.

The issue won’t change a student's overall grade point average, but it could affect their class rank, which has implications for who is a school's valedictorian or salutatorian as well as for automatic admissions into Texas’ public universities.

The Austin school district sent letters to high school parents warning them that the pass-or-fail grades students received in the spring and summer four years ago, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, have created issues in the district’s system for calculating class rank.

The district implemented a pass-or-fail grading system during the beginning of the pandemic to accommodate the disruptions in students’ school schedules.

Normally, when the district’s computer system calculates a student's class rank, it tosses out the student’s lowest grade in a subject if the student has more than the required credits to graduate, said Jacob Reach, the district's chief of governmental relations and board services.

The rank calculation glitch meant the program didn’t necessarily eliminate the lowest grade for students who took a high school math class in the spring or summer of 2020, when this year's seniors would have been in the eighth grade, Reach said.

“We understand that this can cause stress for our students,” Reach said. “It definitely can cause more unknowns, especially for those that have a strong focus on, ‘What is my final ranking?’ We very much regret that we did not catch this sooner in the year.”

Who does the rank calculation glitch affect?

It’s common for students to take high school-level math courses, such as Algebra 1, in middle school, which are calculated into the child's high school GPA.

“If you only took four years of math, this would not apply to you,” Reach said. “If you didn't take a high school math class in spring of 2020, this doesn’t apply to you.”

Reach stressed this doesn’t change a student’s cumulative, or overall, GPA and has no effect on a student’s ability to graduate. Class rank normally fluctuates as students get new grades in senior year classes, he said.

The glitch didn’t affect high school-level foreign language classes, Reach said. The district is still investigating the effect on some limited science classes, he said.

Why does a senior's class rank matter?

Class ranks determine a high school’s valedictorian, the top scoring graduate, and its salutatorian, the second-highest scoring graduate.

In Texas, students who graduate in the top 10% of their class get automatic admission to any public university in the state, except for the University of Texas, which, because of high enrollment demand, limits its automatic admissions based on its available slots. This year, students who were in the top 6% of their class were admitted automatically to UT.

More: 'Significant crunch in the timeline': FAFSA delays impact Austin area high school seniors

It is possible that students who weren’t in the top 10% of their class at the end of their junior year are now in it because of the coding issue, and some who were in the top 10% could have been bumped off, Reach said.

Universities typically allow students to appeal an acceptance decision, and the district would support any student who wants to appeal, Reach said.

'Did they not notice this before?'

For parents, the coding error just introduces more stress and confusion, said Sharyn Vane, whose son is a senior at James Bowie High School.

“I want another email and I want someone to say something at the board meeting to say, ‘Here's what happens,’” Vane said. “What happened? Did they not notice this before?”

Vane's son took Algebra 1 in eighth grade, but he isn’t applying to Texas colleges. Still, the change so close to the end of senior year is nerve-wracking.

“For some colleges it is not a big deal, and for other colleges it is a very big deal,” Vane said.

So far, the district has only finished recalculating ranks at Anderson High School, Reach said. The coding issue affected about 10% of students, he said.

The discrepancy will affect different high schools differently, he said. Some Austin district high schools give every student their class rank. Other schools only tell a student if they’re the first or second rank, or if they’re in the top 10%, he said.

The discrepancy could also affect students who are currently high school underclassmen if they took a high school-level math class in fifth, sixth or seventh grades, but the district is aware of the issue now, Reach said. It is possible the glitch might have affected students who have already graduated from Austin high schools, he said.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: COVID coding glitch could change Austin area high school seniors' rank