have an A or A- average now. In 1998 38.9% had A averages. I'm not a stats guy, but that seems like a pretty steep up tick in a 20-year period. The modern gpa's help students and especially their parents feel good about the high school experience.
Erik Furda, Dean of Admissions at U Penn, recently said ". “Our evaluation process looks at where they are right now and what can we expect from them once they come to our campus. Take, for example, applicants from private high schools or top public schools. We expect them to have high test scores and grades,” he said. “That’s a given. We need to know more. We need to know what they did with the opportunities they were given? How far did they travel in their high school journey?
Most all selective colleges re-calculate gpa's today based on the strength of the curriculum, the grades, and the perceived rigor of the high school. Very few are looking for well-rounded students any more. Selective colleges want mini-specialists. My two cents worth.
We calculated that he needed to take Honors or AP classes for half of his classes all 4 years and get straight A's in everything. His speech was classic, "Enjoy high school - don't do what I did."
Even when the boys were in high school. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.
Much more important, would they make a living and have a passion on the side? Thank God, both have. Jazz for my older son, literature for my younger son.
(Edit): what a joy it is when my older son calls and says that he found an LP, in good condition, in a Harlem record shop of Thelonious Monk’s Solo Monk. Or, my younger son calls and asks if I have Isaac Bashevis Singer’s collection of stories In My Father’s Court. Of course I do. Could I send it to him? You bet.
Only those of us with a touch of Yiddishkeit would understand. Nu?
Auf Deutsch, Ich verstehe.
"My [Susie or Johny] has a choice of taking Honors calculus or AP calculus -- should s/he take the Honors and get an A or the AP and risk getting a B?"
Every damn time ND says "Take the AP and get an A."
Let's say a high school student got an A in every class he/she took. Let's say 25% of those classes were AP classes, which care scored on a 5-pt scale vs. a 4-pt scale.
That student would have a 4.25 GPA. It's probably not easy to find students like that.
To land at an average of 4.04 across nearly 6000 new freshman, UGA either has to find an awful lot of them, or refuse to accept any students with a GPA of 3.8 or lower. That's hard to believe for the #54 national university (per US News & World Reports).
One other note: According to the linked page, the numbers you cite are for "High School Core Grade Point Average", which I assume is different than overall high school GPA. Is that true?
My kids all had in the 4.4 to 4.6 range. GPA's in excess of 4.25 were pretty common.
That said, UGA does draw good students. It has the distinction of being a flagship state school in a state that will give you an 80% tuition scholarship just for maintaining a "B" average in high school. When you have a crazy low tuition in a flagship school, you will attract a very bright cross section of students.
at an IB HS. The father hopes he doesn't become an EE or patent lawyer.
I quoted a 4.04 average after watching a local news report. It’s acrually 4.07 acording to the school. To your point on the arithmetic of getting to that average, I think the “middle 50%” stat below explains how they get there. If I read that correctly, it mean a student with a 3.97 is essentially at the 25rh percentile. It also means that the top quartile have GPA’s greater than 4.21.
High School Core Grade Point Average
Middle 50% of All Admitted First-Year Students: 3.97-4.21
Overall Average of All Admitted First-Year Students: 4.07
Average of Admitted Honors Students: 4.12
I work for admissions for USAFA- sort of... I'm a local liaison.
What we're told is we look at GPA but ultimately we care about 2 things:
Did you take difficult classes?
How well did you do in those difficult classes?
On top of that we assign level of difficulty to High Schools. A 4.0 who took normal classes at an average school isn't likely to get in. A 3.5 who went to a good school and took a bunch of honors and AP has a chance.
For me, it's personal. My wife was the valedictorian of her high school class. Way back in the Seventies, there was only one per class. Now they've dumbed-down the concept. Soon, the top half of the class will be named valedictorian.
92 valedictorians. Nearly one student in five.
With valedictorian/salutatorians in favor of Latin honors. Carmel, Westfield, and Noblesville are all doing this.
Doesn’t address grade inflation but at least there aren’t 20 valedictorians for a class of 500.
Or so they say at Tesoro High School in South OC. Apparently done so as to make sure no one feels left out. They still have one of the students give a speech as a valedictorian would. They call this student the "Scholar of Scholars." You can't make this shit up.
Really silly and frustrating. The academic version of the participation trophy.
young scholar!”
pressure on the kids to the point that a couple in a neighboring district died of suicide.
Class rank and GPA doesn't matter to colleges. Many calculate their own GPA and use that for scholarships.
Until this year, I think, the high school was on a 5 point system with extra credit for harder classes. I never bothered knowing my kids' school GPAs or how it was calculated.
but they don't look at the GPA the high school calculates or the high school class ranks. I think one exception would in Texas, where public schools admit the top 10% of students.
class rank. Valedictorian was determined by class rank.
The school did not distinguish between pluses and minues or weight grades for rigor. There were valedictorians that never took an honors class. There were valedictorians with transcripts littered with A-.
My high school was the same: no pluses or minuses, no weighted grades, only the full course grade mattered (so if it was a full-year course, the semester grades did not count).
The class ahead of mine only had about a dozen, but one of my friends met with the (very Baby Boomer; this was 2000) superintendent to complain about it. His response was, "If it were up to me, every student would be a valedictorian." The superintendent was the only person who actually spoke at graduation, so by the actual definition of the word, he was the valedictorian.
Despite 27 valedictorians, there was only one salutatorian because she transferred from a school that had 8 class periods instead of our 7, so she had a few extra As to average against her one B.
I took every AP and accelerated class that was available at my small Jesuit HS. Two of the kids who finished ahead of me in class rank never took a single AP or accelerated course.
I was ahead a year in both math and French, starting as a freshman. I got no credit or recognition from the HS for that, either.
And they didn't weight minuses or pluses, either.
My wife's younger cousin graduated from Sunset two years ago and there was 40+ salutatorians.
What a disservice is being done to these kids.
In the state.
Poor school board leadership made it averi at best.
It was a great middle class institution. The leadership of the last decade has turned into something I don't recognize. The new principal is awful. I won't send my kids to my alma mater. They also tripled tuition in 15 years so it's now a rich kids school.
My grades were things like 91.3%. GPA was calculated based on the weighted average of your class scores. We did get extra credit for certain "college prep" classes like Calculus and Physics, but it meant that they were just weighted higher than the standard classes. In no case could you get more than 100%. I'm not sure why more schools don't do this.
but more important to that is simple numerical score. Which is good for her because my daughter typically gets at least one or two B's every semester but they have been a 92 each time (A is 93 and above). So although her GPA is 3.77, they can see that she is literally one percentage point away from a 4.0
That is, if it was bad to get a C in a regular class, was it really bad to get a C in a college prep class?
We went and attended a meeting in mid-February where they discussed their profile kids and the stats on the admitted students
It was something like a 32 ACT and a 4.3 GPA. I was laughing/seething the entire time because the recruiting coordinator was so obviously full of shiite. (my wife is awesome, but VERY trusting and even she questioned it) Our daughter was a 3.93 and a 31 ACT and he was recruiting her like crazy to come to SLU. I actually found the guy to be untrustworthy and found that he left out a lot. He'd brag about the new frosh dorm...but didn't tell anyone that it was an extra $1,000/semester to live there. He'd brag about the SLU campus in Madrid (he'd never been there) to which we later visited and it was 3 small buildings.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that all the colleges pump up the #'s to look good to their Board of Trustees. That's why they practically beg a student to apply as soon as one can in late August or early September...they want to get a report into the University President's hands showing what great enrollment potential the class has. I guess it's okay...I'm in sales and so full of shiite too.
I would fight in a foxhole any day with any guy courageous enough to take on tackling that fullback as you did.
You are mighty.
But I’ll take it
You are important to this world. Show it.
Those are not the numbers I am given to communicate at high school college nights. Was your SLU rep an official admissions coordinator? We give hard, true numbers to the student and parents. Sure there isn't more to this story?
the guy bled SLU blue (he was an alum)...but now works at Washington U. which I kind of find funny.
He was kind of a jack, imo. But the kids loved him and I don't matter. What bothered me about him was the inflation of everything that just wasn't true. He oversold the school and that was one of the areas I just didn't find him credible. The icing on the cake was the visit we made to the Madrid campus as my daughter had decided on Creighton but was really looking to do a semester to study Spanish at SLU's campus. We walked around, saw the buildings, and her reaction was "that's it...Kyle made it seem like this unbelievably amazing place" (fwiw, Creighton, Loyola, and Regis just didn't play the game like this guy did)
SLU has an amazing med school and med school track. My daughter is a business major at Creighton where 25% of the kids are in the biz school. The SLU biz school has, I want to say (you have the figures), under 10% of the kids in the biz school.
SLU loses to Creighton and Creighton loses to SLU. Both fine schools. they're lucky to have you pushing the truth, that's for sure
1. Do I send my kid to a high school with a challenging curriculum (perhaps a private school, costing tens of thousands), and run the risk of a “substandard” GPA (3.5)?
2. Or, do I send them to a less challenging school, where they can cruise to a 4.2, but may end up underprepared for elite college level work?
You take 6 courses (one in each subject group) plus Theory of Knowledge (think epistemology) and an Extended Essay (a research paper in one of your six subjects). At the end of Grade 12, you take exams--everyone in the world sits the same exam for the same course. Grades for exams are scaled 1-7 (7 being the highest) and ToK + Extended Essay are graded A-E (A being the highest) and can give you a maximum of 3 points. So, your score is very easy to compare to all of the other students who took these challenging courses and exams.
For the record, universities will tell you that 1 is the right choice. Our students tell us that first year of university is a breeze compared to the IB, so it sets them up really well.
evidently they look at the level of challenge of the curriculum that the student has taken. If a student is always taking the harder course, they say they will weight that in the student's favor versus what you describe in #2.
I am unsure if they do that or not. I have four kids and three are smart and one is as dumb as a box of rocks. First kid...pretty smart and did the #1 scenario and she has found college coursework to be easy. We'll see about kid #2 as he starts college in a week and he is the dumb (but lovable) one.
They want to see that you’ve challenged yourself to the fullest extent possible given your specific circumstances and have been successful with that challenge. It is often easier to show that you’ve taken the most challenging schedule possible at an average public school than it is at an elite boarding school (which may have three times the AP offerings and a boatload of other students taking them and earning As).
If Applicant A and Applicant B have identical scores, scheduled and grades and A went to Horace Mann and B went to Central High, it is not unusual for the admissions reaction to be:
“Wow B - you did all that at Central High?” vs. “You went to Horace Mann A - you could have done more with the opportunities available to you.”
Whether or not it is ultimately the best preparation for succeeding in college, being the absolute biggest fish possible in a small pond typically results in more success than being a big (but not the biggest) fish in a gigantic pond from a purely admissions standpoint.
UGA doesn’t advertise how many students from rigorous high schools who graduated with a 3.38 (while competing with other high achievers) were admitted. They choose to focus on GPA. I’m hearing more and more parents say that the challenging route (and often the associated cost) isn’t worth it. On top of that, the very popular state HOPE scholarship program is driven by GPA. More and more parents/students are opting for example #2.
Basically what you think should be a GPA is outdated. People recognized that an A in a honors or AP class should be recognized with a higher numerical “grade”. Giving an A in an AP class a 5.0 helped diminish the problem.
At my high school, AP classes were worth an extra 10%, so the max your grade could be was 4.4 (or 110 on the 0-100 scale). That was enough of a boost to ensure that the student ranking accurately reflected which kids were the best students.
but then the school also differentiated between weighted GPA and unweighted GPA. Universities asked for both if I recall correctly. Is that still not the case?
I would bet that many schools in Georgia use a system along those lines, and that's where the average 4.whatever stats originate, and they just fail to mention the scales.
For an A:
4.0 for regular classes. 4.5 for honors. 5.0 for AP.
I think A-:
3.67 for regular classes. 4.17 for honors. 4.67 for AP.
So I guess a B+ in AP was equivalent to an A in a regular class. And that is probably still underweighting the AP class.
GPA is pretty much worthless when compared across schools. Not arguing with that.
But I don’t see how that translates into a 4.04 AVERAGE for the incoming class. Either thousands of students are taking nothing but AP/Honors classes (and receiving A’s in every one), or there is rampant grade inflation. This isn’t Harvard we’re talking about.