Honor students run in circles to keep up with the busy workload of their advanced classes yet aren’t taken seriously enough to receive the same grade point average boost as Advance placement (AP) kids.

Hundreds of schools across the country recognize honor students with a GPA boost, so why can’t Ike? Honors students work twice as hard compared to a standard class, yet they continuously struggle to keep up their GPAs and never receive the needed reinforcement.

Weighing honor students’ GPA the same as students who take standard classes is wrong. Academically, they struggle more with passing tests, completing homework and time management.  

Accelerated classes are the ones contributing to the majority of homework loads and stress levels for honor students. They also move at a faster rate requiring them to constantly keep up with the changing curriculum.

Only 40 percent of kids who qualify to take AP exams take them according to a recent study done by the College Board. This implies the majority of AP kids only take the class for the GPA boost.

Truthfully, the reward for taking an AP class shouldn’t be a GPA boost but rather having a chance to earn college credit. A chance often passed over. At the end of the day they know how to possess the upper hand for having a high GPA and AP written across their applications even if they failed to earn the college credit.

AP students receive praise while honors students feel discredited for not taking the college level version of the class. While the challenges of AP evidently show, honors classes still prove more demanding, stressing and taxing than standard classes. 

Do honor students receive any benefits like AP students? Primarily, no.

GPAs tell college administrators how well applicants performed in their classes as a whole. It gives them insight on how they performed in those accelerated classes and if the pressure proved too much. The same increased level of intensity grants AP kids a boost to help their GPA. So the question still stands; why don’t honors students acquire the same reimbursement?

It’s stressful to see a student’s GPA drop due to an honors class. Earning a 93% for a second semester grade in accelerated geometry caused me to lose my 4.0.

If we followed the trend of giving honors students a 0.05 GPA boost, it’d indicate that while honors students’ work differentiates from the work of AP, honors students still deserve recognition for their work.

All in all, honors students’ strenuous work counting against their GPA is an injustice in need of change.