"Mom, in my senior year I will get no honors credit for Spanish 5 because it's not an honors course. That seems really unfair. It will affect my GPA," she said.

My knee-jerk response was to agree. She would be in the minority, taking an advanced class and receiving no additional recognition. I piled on to her concern and said, "Well, maybe you should stick with history honors your senior year to balance out that problem." She looked at me frustrated because it's languages not government that excites her.

Weighted GPAs have become a hot topic lately. If a student earns an A in a regular class, the numerical equivalent is a 4.0. If the student earns an A in a honors class, the numerical equivalent translates to a 5.0. The concept was developed to give extra recognition to honor students, raising them above their non-honors counterparts. It definitely skews the GPA. A student getting a B in an honors class is the same as a student getting an A in the subject's non-honors class.

Looking at my daughter's report card during freshman year it was odd to see a GPA over 4.0. During my high school years ( I went to an extremely competitive East Coast school in New York) there was no such thing. An A was an A, no more, no less, and I believe its time we returned to that system.

In the grand scheme of things, once a person actually enters the working world, who is going to care or remember what his or her GPA was in high school? And, more importantly, is it going to matter if that individual is missing the skill sets needed to make it in life?

Educators from Silicon Valley to Chicago to Taiwan are beginning to recognize that students need to get more out of high school than top grades: They also need to acquire the street smarts and life skills to develop as individuals.

In Santa Clara and San Mateo counties 460 parents cited school-related stress as their child's top concern in a 2003 study conducted by Stanford University School of Education.

The bottom line is clear, the weighted GPA is simply unhealthy. This method of grading is compromising the mental and physical health in teens, as youth feel pressured to do everything they can to get top grades.

Stanford University School of Education lecturer Denise Clark Pope and a team of educators are working to combat this problem. Her book, Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students, points out that although stress and achievement have been studied, no solutions to the problem have yet been addressed.

To that end, Stanford University School of Education, Lucile Packard Foundation and a number of other organizations have teamed up for a conference, "SOS-Stressed Out Students: Helping to Improve Health, School Engagement, and Academic Integrity."

The conference was first presented last May. During the panel portion of the event, students openly talked about their cheating experiences to guarantee good grades.

This year's conference, which is scheduled for May13-14 is open to the public for the evening session on May 13, and it is free. The May 14 portion of the conference is only available to selected school teams. Information about the conference, including a list of resources can be found at http://sosconference.stanford.edu.

The good news is it looks like the educational community might finally be coming to grips with this issue that has spiraled out of control in high-achieving communities.

In addition to educators, we, as parents, also need to take a hard look at the learning environment we are creating for our children. We need to step back and take a deep breath. There are thousands of good colleges out there--not just elite ones. Our number-one priority should be to develop our children as whole, creative, healthy individuals.

As Deborah Stipek, a dean at Stanford said, "School for many kids is not a place to learn but a place to perform. We need to begin to change the culture so our youth can take joy in learning."

After all, don't we want our future citizens to have a full set of tools as they go out into the world?

Moryt Milo is the editor of The Willow Glen Resident. She can be contacted at 400.200.1051 or mmilo@community-newspapers.com.