So many unweighted 4.0s.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When I was in high school in another country, we sat nationwide exams in all our subjects. The school newsletter said that the 91% I got in English was the highest grade for any student in any subject for my entire school. I have to laugh that it wouldn't even be an A in many US schools.

This is what my parents describe in their home country. Very few kids could go to college, and those who could were relentlessly sorted by score.

When I was a kid there was a board game called "head of the class. By answering question your game piece could end up in the upper right corner of the grid of desks, or in the back corner with a dunces cap. Completely antiquated even then, no classroom I had was structured that way. Time marches on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Despite 10 pages of concerns, highly selective colleges have no trouble choosing excellent kids and building a great class.

Their problem is the opposite: choosing whom to reject from the large number of qualified kids.

Your concern that these issues, whether real or imagined, are causing colleges to select kids that are unqualified and incapable is just not borne out by evidence.

You're completely speaking out of your A$$. How do you know this? Have there been studies? Has enough time passed for there to even been evidence to accrue?

No.
We don't have graduation rates of the test-optional and grade inflated Covid cohort.
We don't even have GPA data. We certainly don't have post-graduation employment data.



You are being all very authoritarian about total BS.

[Anonymous]

These reams of unweighted 4.0s are coming out of the west county schools. I'm certain every admissions officer knows this. That's why they get so excited when a kid from a sh*t school shows up with a high GPA and high test scores.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We’re in CA now and the GPA in high schools is REALLY inconsistent. We have lots of smaller school systems and there is no consistency. Everything is the discretion of the teacher. You can get teacher A in chem who allows retakes, rounds up, everyone gets an A or B or teacher B who doesn’t allow retakes, doesn’t give back tests, is generally really crappy most kids get B and Cs, DS only got an A because he learns independently and did a course on line/college board stuff in tandem. The range is so extreme that some English teachers give As for 80% and other give it at 90%. Some have changed their grading scale a month before the semester ends. Grades on transcript are semester based not year based. If you have an 89.7 in one semester, it calculates as a B. If you have an 89.7 in the other teacher you get rounded up to 90 and it’s a full 4.0. This even happens in AP and honors classes.

UC and Cal State do not look at which schools inflate and which ones deflate. It’s all equal. The joke about privates is that you are paying for your gpa. Class rank doesn’t help much because kids game the system. They take only enough APs to get the UC boost allowance in their area of study and then take easy classes for the rest.

DD lucked out and hit the easy teachers while DS ended up with the worst ones. DS is a much better student but keeping straight As has been hard not because the coursework was challenging but because he ended up with teachers that had a totally different scale and level of expectation then other teachers.

At the end of the day DD had better in state options than she should have while DS will likely end up at a school below his capability despite having an unweighted 4.0 with more rigorous courses. I’m thrilled for DD but it sucks for DS.

This is all true (another Californian here), except that there is some nuance to the private HS point. The most rigorous private high schools do not grade inflate much. Some barely accept weighted grades, so you can have situations where the highest GPA possible in private is 4.2 weighted while it is 4.9+ weighted for public. What that means is that they graduate kids who are well-prepared academically but with much lower GPAs. Because the UCs and CSUs now go by essentially straight GPA (no testing, ECs barely considered), many of the most competitive California private high schools are steering their kids away from the CSUs and UCs. The schools view their lack of grade inflation as a point in their favor for the Ivies and other high-ranked schools (and that does seem to be true), but it means that their kids go to the public in-state options far less than they used to.

One sad part of all of this is how high the UC drop-out rate for kids who get into the UCs has become. The UCs don’t like to talk about it too much, but the drop-out is much higher than it should be.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When my kid graduated from RM there were 17 unweighted 4.0s. Probably too high but this thread makes it seem like half the class has straight As.

That was likely the norm at RM: 15-20 unweighted GPA 4.0 per year (out of about 450-500 graduating seniors including about 115 IB magnets) before the current grading system (of no semester final exam, etc.) was implemented. For comparison, any data or guesswork on the number of unweighted GPAs per year at RM in recent years?

2021-22 shows 53% at RM had uw GPA between 3.51and 4.0.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Despite 10 pages of concerns, highly selective colleges have no trouble choosing excellent kids and building a great class.

Their problem is the opposite: choosing whom to reject from the large number of qualified kids.

Your concern that these issues, whether real or imagined, are causing colleges to select kids that are unqualified and incapable is just not borne out by evidence.

You're completely speaking out of your A$$. How do you know this? Have there been studies? Has enough time passed for there to even been evidence to accrue?

No.
We don't have graduation rates of the test-optional and grade inflated Covid cohort.
We don't even have GPA data. We certainly don't have post-graduation employment data.

You are being all very authoritarian about total BS.

First, you can go ahead and use pejoratives, but it is best not to follow them up with a post that agrees with the premise you object to: that there is no evidence to support the claim.

Not one elite college I am aware of has said they have a problem caused by grade inflation (OR test optional even though that was not part of the thread!). In fact, most of them are doing just fine in admissions, taking pretty much the same kind of kids, and not reporting spiked first year dropout rates.

If you want to wait a few years for employment data and 4 year graduation rates and come back and mea culpa, that's fine. I can wait. But we agree there is no evidence to support your claim, other than your random speculation which is likely driven by ideology.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Despite 10 pages of concerns, highly selective colleges have no trouble choosing excellent kids and building a great class.

Their problem is the opposite: choosing whom to reject from the large number of qualified kids.

Your concern that these issues, whether real or imagined, are causing colleges to select kids that are unqualified and incapable is just not borne out by evidence.

You're completely speaking out of your A$$. How do you know this? Have there been studies? Has enough time passed for there to even been evidence to accrue?

No.
We don't have graduation rates of the test-optional and grade inflated Covid cohort.
We don't even have GPA data. We certainly don't have post-graduation employment data.

You are being all very authoritarian about total BS.

First, you can go ahead and use pejoratives, but it is best not to follow them up with a post that agrees with the premise you object to: that there is no evidence to support the claim.

Not one elite college I am aware of has said they have a problem caused by grade inflation (OR test optional even though that was not part of the thread!). In fact, most of them are doing just fine in admissions, taking pretty much the same kind of kids, and not reporting spiked first year dropout rates.

If you want to wait a few years for employment data and 4 year graduation rates and come back and mea culpa, that's fine. I can wait. But we agree there is no evidence to support your claim, other than your random speculation which is likely driven by ideology.

MIT did.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Despite 10 pages of concerns, highly selective colleges have no trouble choosing excellent kids and building a great class.

Their problem is the opposite: choosing whom to reject from the large number of qualified kids.

Your concern that these issues, whether real or imagined, are causing colleges to select kids that are unqualified and incapable is just not borne out by evidence.

You're completely speaking out of your A$$. How do you know this? Have there been studies? Has enough time passed for there to even been evidence to accrue?

No.
We don't have graduation rates of the test-optional and grade inflated Covid cohort.
We don't even have GPA data. We certainly don't have post-graduation employment data.

You are being all very authoritarian about total BS.

First, you can go ahead and use pejoratives, but it is best not to follow them up with a post that agrees with the premise you object to: that there is no evidence to support the claim.

Not one elite college I am aware of has said they have a problem caused by grade inflation (OR test optional even though that was not part of the thread!). In fact, most of them are doing just fine in admissions, taking pretty much the same kind of kids, and not reporting spiked first year dropout rates.

If you want to wait a few years for employment data and 4 year graduation rates and come back and mea culpa, that's fine. I can wait. But we agree there is no evidence to support your claim, other than your random speculation which is likely driven by ideology.

Both Purdue and the UC system noted that gpas were becoming less predictive of college success in recent years, with Purdue noting that grade inflation has particularly occurred in schools with wealthier populations.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Despite 10 pages of concerns, highly selective colleges have no trouble choosing excellent kids and building a great class.

Their problem is the opposite: choosing whom to reject from the large number of qualified kids.

Your concern that these issues, whether real or imagined, are causing colleges to select kids that are unqualified and incapable is just not borne out by evidence.

You're completely speaking out of your A$$. How do you know this? Have there been studies? Has enough time passed for there to even been evidence to accrue?

No.
We don't have graduation rates of the test-optional and grade inflated Covid cohort.
We don't even have GPA data. We certainly don't have post-graduation employment data.

You are being all very authoritarian about total BS.

First, you can go ahead and use pejoratives, but it is best not to follow them up with a post that agrees with the premise you object to: that there is no evidence to support the claim.

Not one elite college I am aware of has said they have a problem caused by grade inflation (OR test optional even though that was not part of the thread!). In fact, most of them are doing just fine in admissions, taking pretty much the same kind of kids, and not reporting spiked first year dropout rates.

If you want to wait a few years for employment data and 4 year graduation rates and come back and mea culpa, that's fine. I can wait. But we agree there is no evidence to support your claim, other than your random speculation which is likely driven by ideology.

MIT did.

Wrong and untrue. They simply went back to using test scores after Covid. They never said they were unable to admit an MIT quality cohort without them.

But again, this thread, and the post above, was not about TO, but about GPA, so it is irrelevant anyway. They definitely never said grade inflation was causing them to have a poor class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's crazy to me how many kids there are on here with unweighted 4.0s. I feel like even last year it was rare. This year 10 replies out of 15 each time the results from another school come up are ALL unweighted 4.0s.
Many are MCPS--it makes sense with their wacky grading scale: you can get 69.5 (C) quarter 1, 79.5 (B) quarter 2, 79.5 (quarter 3) and 89.5 (quarter 4) and end up with an A or 4.0 for the year for the class.
THAT IS INSANE. Many districts are similar. You are a hair what is traditionally failing for a solid quarter (a 69.5) and you still get an A for the year.
And they don't have A minus grades. So an A is a 4.0

Plus retakes (in many classes), no penalty for late work, etc.

Does anyone who does the work, not end up with a 4.0? It really seems like you have to try to do poorly.

Has a 4.0 ceased (even unweighted) ceased to mean ANYTHING? It seems like this is really hurting the kids who are actually super smart. They are lost in the shuffle of so many kids getting "perfect" grades
for doing very average work.

Huh? You can't believe the stats parents post on the Internet:

Maybe they don't understand how weighted and unweighted differ (seriously, this happens).
Some are reporting semester and annual GPA, not cumulative.
Many school districts award A-pluses that provide a post-4.0 bump to unweighted, yes unweighted, GPAs.
Some are reporting the GPAs colleges recalculate, such as Stanford's 10th and 11th only, no plus or minus.
Maybe they're simply lying.

The best study out there says that grade inflation crept up for a couple of decades until the pandemic, then a period of grade deflation began.

WE LIVE IN A TIME OF GRADE DEFLATION.

There are a lot of forum posters out there who seem to be mentally ill, and the core of their mental illness is that it's easy to get As in large, highly competitive public high schools with robust AP or IB programs. And that's totally false.

Yep. In fact grade inflation was 3 times higher in private schools.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/07/17/easy-a-nearly-half-hs-seniors-graduate-average/485787001/

Actually, they said, the upward creep is most pronounced in schools with large numbers of white, wealthy students. And its especially noticeable in private schools, where the rate of inflation was about three times higher than in public schools.

That article is from 2017, which is completely irrelevant to the post-Covid public school grading systems.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Despite 10 pages of concerns, highly selective colleges have no trouble choosing excellent kids and building a great class.

Their problem is the opposite: choosing whom to reject from the large number of qualified kids.

Your concern that these issues, whether real or imagined, are causing colleges to select kids that are unqualified and incapable is just not borne out by evidence.

You're completely speaking out of your A$$. How do you know this? Have there been studies? Has enough time passed for there to even been evidence to accrue?

No.
We don't have graduation rates of the test-optional and grade inflated Covid cohort.
We don't even have GPA data. We certainly don't have post-graduation employment data.

You are being all very authoritarian about total BS.

First, you can go ahead and use pejoratives, but it is best not to follow them up with a post that agrees with the premise you object to: that there is no evidence to support the claim.

Not one elite college I am aware of has said they have a problem caused by grade inflation (OR test optional even though that was not part of the thread!). In fact, most of them are doing just fine in admissions, taking pretty much the same kind of kids, and not reporting spiked first year dropout rates.

If you want to wait a few years for employment data and 4 year graduation rates and come back and mea culpa, that's fine. I can wait. But we agree there is no evidence to support your claim, other than your random speculation which is likely driven by ideology.

MIT did.

Wrong and untrue. They simply went back to using test scores after Covid. They never said they were unable to admit an MIT quality cohort without them.

But again, this thread, and the post above, was not about TO, but about GPA, so it is irrelevant anyway. They definitely never said grade inflation was causing them to have a poor class.

MIT did say that grades alone were not sufficiently predictive of success after admission.

https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-sat-act-requirement-for-future-admissions-cycles/

“Our research shows this predictive validity holds even when you control for socioeconomic factors that correlate with testing. It also shows that good grades in high school do not themselves necessarily translate to academic success at MIT if you cannot account for testing.”

They also noted the impact of the pandemic on student preparation:

“The pandemic has only made this more clear, because classroom work and assessment have been just as disrupted as access to the tests, if not more so, and for longer periods of time, disproportionately affecting the most socioeconomically disadvantaged students. We know that the pandemic’s effects on grades and courses will linger for years, but the tests can give students a more recent opportunity to show that they have made up lost ground.⁠”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:These reams of unweighted 4.0s are coming out of the west county schools. I'm certain every admissions officer knows this. That's why they get so excited when a kid from a sh*t school shows up with a high GPA and high test scores.

What west county schools do you mean?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Despite 10 pages of concerns, highly selective colleges have no trouble choosing excellent kids and building a great class.

Their problem is the opposite: choosing whom to reject from the large number of qualified kids.

Your concern that these issues, whether real or imagined, are causing colleges to select kids that are unqualified and incapable is just not borne out by evidence.

You're completely speaking out of your A$$. How do you know this? Have there been studies? Has enough time passed for there to even been evidence to accrue?

No.
We don't have graduation rates of the test-optional and grade inflated Covid cohort.
We don't even have GPA data. We certainly don't have post-graduation employment data.

You are being all very authoritarian about total BS.

First, you can go ahead and use pejoratives, but it is best not to follow them up with a post that agrees with the premise you object to: that there is no evidence to support the claim.

Not one elite college I am aware of has said they have a problem caused by grade inflation (OR test optional even though that was not part of the thread!). In fact, most of them are doing just fine in admissions, taking pretty much the same kind of kids, and not reporting spiked first year dropout rates.

If you want to wait a few years for employment data and 4 year graduation rates and come back and mea culpa, that's fine. I can wait. But we agree there is no evidence to support your claim, other than your random speculation which is likely driven by ideology.

MIT did.

Wrong and untrue. They simply went back to using test scores after Covid. They never said they were unable to admit an MIT quality cohort without them.

But again, this thread, and the post above, was not about TO, but about GPA, so it is irrelevant anyway. They definitely never said grade inflation was causing them to have a poor class.

MIT did say that grades alone were not sufficiently predictive of success after admission.

https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-sat-act-requirement-for-future-admissions-cycles/

“Our research shows this predictive validity holds even when you control for socioeconomic factors that correlate with testing. It also shows that good grades in high school do not themselves necessarily translate to academic success at MIT if you cannot account for testing.”

They also noted the impact of the pandemic on student preparation:

“The pandemic has only made this more clear, because classroom work and assessment have been just as disrupted as access to the tests, if not more so, and for longer periods of time, disproportionately affecting the most socioeconomically disadvantaged students. We know that the pandemic’s effects on grades and courses will linger for years, but the tests can give students a more recent opportunity to show that they have made up lost ground.⁠”

MIT is one of the very few - if not the only T25 - that went back to requiring the SAT after TO. It's a niche tech school that doesn't attract a wide swath of applicants, and it has board members aligned with the College Board. An outlier. Thousands of colleges - including HYPS and the other Ivies - are test optional. It's not going away.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Despite 10 pages of concerns, highly selective colleges have no trouble choosing excellent kids and building a great class.

Their problem is the opposite: choosing whom to reject from the large number of qualified kids.

Your concern that these issues, whether real or imagined, are causing colleges to select kids that are unqualified and incapable is just not borne out by evidence.

You're completely speaking out of your A$$. How do you know this? Have there been studies? Has enough time passed for there to even been evidence to accrue?

No.
We don't have graduation rates of the test-optional and grade inflated Covid cohort.
We don't even have GPA data. We certainly don't have post-graduation employment data.

You are being all very authoritarian about total BS.

First, you can go ahead and use pejoratives, but it is best not to follow them up with a post that agrees with the premise you object to: that there is no evidence to support the claim.

Not one elite college I am aware of has said they have a problem caused by grade inflation (OR test optional even though that was not part of the thread!). In fact, most of them are doing just fine in admissions, taking pretty much the same kind of kids, and not reporting spiked first year dropout rates.

If you want to wait a few years for employment data and 4 year graduation rates and come back and mea culpa, that's fine. I can wait. But we agree there is no evidence to support your claim, other than your random speculation which is likely driven by ideology.

MIT did.

Wrong and untrue. They simply went back to using test scores after Covid. They never said they were unable to admit an MIT quality cohort without them.

But again, this thread, and the post above, was not about TO, but about GPA, so it is irrelevant anyway. They definitely never said grade inflation was causing them to have a poor class.

MIT did say that grades alone were not sufficiently predictive of success after admission.

https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-sat-act-requirement-for-future-admissions-cycles/

“Our research shows this predictive validity holds even when you control for socioeconomic factors that correlate with testing. It also shows that good grades in high school do not themselves necessarily translate to academic success at MIT if you cannot account for testing.”

They also noted the impact of the pandemic on student preparation:

“The pandemic has only made this more clear, because classroom work and assessment have been just as disrupted as access to the tests, if not more so, and for longer periods of time, disproportionately affecting the most socioeconomically disadvantaged students. We know that the pandemic’s effects on grades and courses will linger for years, but the tests can give students a more recent opportunity to show that they have made up lost ground.⁠”

MIT is one of the very few - if not the only T25 - that went back to requiring the SAT after TO. It's a niche tech school that doesn't attract a wide swath of applicants, and it has board members aligned with the College Board. An outlier. Thousands of colleges - including HYPS and the other Ivies - are test optional. It's not going away.

I agree. I would never use MIT (or Georgetown) as an example of anything. Those two have always been outliers - requiring their own application, Georgetown's past fixation on subject tests, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Between MCPS absolutely ridiculous grading scale and the fact that they are not allowed to administer final exams, it’s a wonder those kids are prepared for college. And it’s absurd that MCPS students are compared to students from schools that have strict grading scales, no test retakes, homework graded for accuracy and no weighting for honors/AP classes.

Test retakes are why my oldest failed out of university. Smart young man with zero study skills or time management. I vividly recall him saying in 9th through 12th how such and such bad score didn't matter because he'd be able to retake it. How such and such missed assignment didn't matter because he'd turn it in later for full credit. He was sent off to university with the executive functions of a elementary student.

This is defrauding parents and I wish parents would call it out as a scam. But nobody wants to admit the As their kid has are fake.

His siblings were put in private school. Hard lesson. The oldest still hasn't gone back to finish college and probably never will.