FARMINGTON – SAD 9 directors are scheduled to take up a proposed increase for weighted grades for advanced placement and honor courses at the high school Tuesday.

The board voted to table Mt. Blue High School Principal Joe Moore’s request at their Nov. 14 meeting until they received more information.

The issue will be taken up at the board’s 7 p.m. Tuesday meeting at the high school library.

Increasing weighted grades is an effort to level the playing field for Mt. Blue’s students with other high schools that weight grades for the most challenging courses, Moore has said.

The weight of the advanced placement and honors courses are added to numerical averages at the end of the year for class standing and transcript purposes for colleges.

Moore proposes to increase the value of the advanced placement courses from five points to eight points, and for honor courses from three points to five points.

If a student taking an advanced placement course received a grade of 84, which is a B, and the eight-point weight was added, it would bring the grade to a 92, which is an A-minus, Moore said. The five points added to the 84 for an AP course would make it a B-plus, he said.

He would like to see more students taking the school’s most challenging courses, he said, but noted that the students also need to see there is a value for taking the more difficult classes.

Schools statewide are ratcheting-up standards to prepare students for post-secondary education, he said.

Director Bob Flick of Farmington said that he’d like to know what percentage of students are taking advanced placement courses and what percentage should be taking them. He also wanted to know how students and faculty feel about increasing the grade weights.