I find the 3.0 lower limit to be disconcerting all on its own. Since education schools routinely give A's out like candy (and a B is a "gentleman's" pass for making the effort to show up), a 2.9999999999 does not impress me in the least. Rounding up is the least of the worries here.
Bob at PC
________________________________________
From: Phys-l [phys-l-bounces@phys-l.org] on behalf of Robert Cohen [Robert.Cohen@po-box.esu.edu]
Sent: Friday, August 24, 2012 4:44 PM
To: Phys-L@Phys-L.org
Subject: [Phys-L] rounding
I thought the following item might be of interest to some.
As background, the Pennsylvania Department of Education has mandated that all candidates for teacher certification must have a 3.0 GPA. This has naturally led me to question whether the use of one zero was intentional. Our institution, for example, used to report GPA to the hundredths and, as such, concluded that a 2.99 GPA was not sufficient. Now our institution reports GPA to the thousandths (due to a change in our registration system) and so now a 2.999 GPA is not sufficient. I know a student who has a 2.996. She was basically told "sorry - last year that would have been good enough but not this year."
So, I asked the Pennsylvania Department of Education for a clarification. Here is the "official" response:
Rounding Up Not Permitted for Calculating GPA
The position of PDE on rounding up is described below.
Program providers may not round up the final GPA to a 3.0 for the purpose of recommending a candidate for certification. The cutoff has to be applied at some point. If the cutoff is not 3.0 then it becomes impossible to draw the rounding up line. For example, we would be debating whether a 2.99 or 2.98, or perhaps a 2.95 is to be rounded up to 3.0 We understand that there will always be someone who misses the cutoff by the smallest of margins. The exception has already been made by permitting the acceptance of 2.8 with the qualifying test score scale, which is permitted in §354.33(6).
And so the answer is...?
Robert A. Cohen, Department of Physics, East Stroudsburg University