A new Seattle Public Schools’ policy, effective this semester, replaces the N grade with an E grade when a student fails a class.

“It was a long time coming,” says Garfield High School head counselor Ken Courtney. “It was actually against board policy to have N grades. This was not Garfield’s decision, or Mr. Howard’s decision. It was a district decision.”

The district only realized that the N grade, which stands for “no credit,” was against its own school board’s rules this year, seven years after the N grade policy was first implemented in 2001. The idea behind the N was to give students a second chance at earning good grades in their classes and to protect their grade point averages from suffering when they failed a class.

Since the N grade did not show up on report cards or in GPA calculations, Seattle was one of the few districts in the country in which failing a class had absolutely no effect on a student’s GPA. That has changed, however, with the new E grade policy. If a student fails a class, the E grade is entered as a zero when used to calculate their GPA.

Since student athletes are required to maintain a 2.0 GPA in order to participate in sports, some community members have raised concern about the effect of the E grade on athletic eligibility. Many athletes already have trouble staying eligible, without any failed classes factoring into their GPAs.

“I think it’s going to make it harder on people,” says senior and varsity volleyball co-captain Shantea Cardenas, who missed part of her sophomore season due to ineligibility. “But it helps me become more focused. Now I check up on my grades more often, and I never used to look on the Source.”

Despite some people’s concerns, more policy revisions are expected.

“I don’t think this is a final product,” says Courtney about the athletic eligibility issue. “There will be more changes in graduation requirements in the next couple of years. When those happen, we’ll see changes in athletic eligibility as well.”

Possible future changes to grading policy include pluses and minuses, which would give teachers a greater range of evaluation, and weighted grades for AP and honors classes, which would reward students for succeeding in more challenging courses.

“This is just the first step,” says Courtney.