Students at Saline High School who take Advanced Placement courses will receive a helping hand when applying for college now that the district has decided to begin weighting grades for those courses.

Steve Laatsch, assistant superintendent of instructional services for Saline Area Schools, said last week’s change is a result of years of debate and research. He said the decision could benefit the 300-400 Saline students who take AP classes.

“If we can give our students every advantage to getting into a college or university or getting scholarships, then we should try to do it,” he said. “It’s the right way to go.”

Laatsch said the district had been discussing the issue for about eight years but had never felt compelled to begin weighting grades until recently. The district formed a committee of administrators, teachers, parents and community members that pored over research data from schools around the state and country.

However, the critical point in the process came last year when the University of Michigan stopped recalculating the grade-point averages of prospective students. Laatsch said the district became concerned that the large amount of students from Saline who apply to Michigan would get overlooked without a weighted GPA. Until then, U-M had recalculated grades according to their own criteria.

“We said, ‘We might actually be putting kids at a disadvantage,’” he said. “A number of schools are going in that direction, it’s expensive to have admissions officers just to recalculate GPA. … They might just take the highest GPA that comes in.”

U-M made the change because the margin of difference in GPA recalculation was not significant to sustain the effort, according to documents provided by the university. Ted Spencer, executive director of Undergraduate Admissions, said AP and honors classes have been, and will continue to be, evaluated differently than cumulative GPAs.

“We have always evaluated AP and honors courses separately, and not necessarily considered them when included in the weighted GPA,” Spencer said in a statement to AnnArbor.com.

Students will get a 1-point boost for grades in AP classes. For instance, if a student in an AP class gets an A, normally weighted at 4 on a 4-point scale, the grade will be assigned a value of 5. All transcripts were changed to reflect the changes on Aug. 25 and the changes are retroactive for students’ entire career.

Other area districts also give additional weight to grades in AP classes. Among them is Ann Arbor, where students get a boost of a third of a point for AP course grades below an A. An A still gets a value of 4.

Jason Gumenick, a Saline High School teacher who teaches an AP government class, said a high number of students at Saline already take AP classes and he doesn’t anticipate the change to weighted grades to cause a bump in enrollment.

“A lot of kids in Saline want a challenge,” he said. “If they want to get into a competitive university, they have to take an AP course. It’s a good opportunity to experience college rigor and get college credit.”

Despite making this change, Laatsch emphasized the district is till making sure it focuses on other, non-AP courses as well. He said there was a lot of debate over whether or not this decision would make other courses seem less attractive.

“We’re trying to be sensitive to the fact that there are lots of other great courses and there are people working hard in those courses,” he said. “We don’t think this is going to hurt those courses, it will just benefit those that were in AP classes."

Kyle Feldscher covers K-12 education for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at kylefeldscher@annarbor.com.