Big College Admissions Year at St. Albans

[Anonymous]

It is a different world. Far more difficult to get into college or university than it was in late 70s/early 80s. Back then the highest you could go was a 4.0 and no AP classes and there was one valedictorian. Now you can have a GPA up to 6.0; carry 15 AP classes and public high schools have 60 valedictorians (don't ask me why - I have no idea - I can only assume its everyone over a 4.0 GPA). And your kids are competing against a huge international market wanting to send their kids to American schools and very happy to pay full freight. And the colleges, in turn, want to boast diversity diversity! It's a much different world.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It is a different world. Far more difficult to get into college or university than it was in late 70s/early 80s. Back then the highest you could go was a 4.0 and no AP classes and there was one valedictorian. Now you can have a GPA up to 6.0; carry 15 AP classes and public high schools have 60 valedictorians (don't ask me why - I have no idea - I can only assume its everyone over a 4.0 GPA). And your kids are competing against a huge international market wanting to send their kids to American schools and very happy to pay full freight. And the colleges, in turn, want to boast diversity diversity! It's a much different world.

A few corrections. Colleges look at unweighted GPAs, not weighted GPAs, so the GPA number that matters still maxes out at 4:00. Colleges don't expect more than 8-9 AP classes from public school kids, and maybe 4-5 AP classes from private school kids. And what public school, where, has 60 valedectorians?

For the rest, though, it is indeed harder to get into any school than it was 20-30 years ago.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is a different world. Far more difficult to get into college or university than it was in late 70s/early 80s. Back then the highest you could go was a 4.0 and no AP classes and there was one valedictorian. Now you can have a GPA up to 6.0; carry 15 AP classes and public high schools have 60 valedictorians (don't ask me why - I have no idea - I can only assume its everyone over a 4.0 GPA). And your kids are competing against a huge international market wanting to send their kids to American schools and very happy to pay full freight. And the colleges, in turn, want to boast diversity diversity! It's a much different world.

A few corrections. Colleges look at unweighted GPAs, not weighted GPAs, so the GPA number that matters still maxes out at 4:00. Colleges don't expect more than 8-9 AP classes from public school kids, and maybe 4-5 AP classes from private school kids. And what public school, where, has 60 valedectorians?

For the rest, though, it is indeed harder to get into any school than it was 20-30 years ago.

Actually I know for a fact the weighting policies vary University to University. All the Ivies and most independent schools weight STA, NCS, Sidwells grades. Not always the case with huge State schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is a different world. Far more difficult to get into college or university than it was in late 70s/early 80s. Back then the highest you could go was a 4.0 and no AP classes and there was one valedictorian. Now you can have a GPA up to 6.0; carry 15 AP classes and public high schools have 60 valedictorians (don't ask me why - I have no idea - I can only assume its everyone over a 4.0 GPA). And your kids are competing against a huge international market wanting to send their kids to American schools and very happy to pay full freight. And the colleges, in turn, want to boast diversity diversity! It's a much different world.

A few corrections. Colleges look at unweighted GPAs, not weighted GPAs, so the GPA number that matters still maxes out at 4:00. Colleges don't expect more than 8-9 AP classes from public school kids, and maybe 4-5 AP classes from private school kids. And what public school, where, has 60 valedectorians?

For the rest, though, it is indeed harder to get into any school than it was 20-30 years ago.

Actually I know for a fact the weighting policies vary University to University. All the Ivies and most independent schools weight STA, NCS, Sidwells grades. Not always the case with huge State schools.

That was my post. The Ivy my kid got into said it didn't weight grades, and the other Ivies said the same thing when DC was touring schools. The Common App asks for the unweighted, not the weighted, GPA, I believe. It's true, however, that when the high school sends in the transcript, some colleges have their own weighting formulas that they apply to the kids' grades, but the colleges' own weighting formulas are proprietary so I don't think there's any bigger picture here other than "take the hardest classes you can." I'm not aware of any weighting system, AP included, that would give a score of 6. I'm also not aware of any school with 60 valedectorians, although you could prove me wrong here.

I think your general message is correct, though. There are lots more qualified kids applying for about the same number of slots. This has led to an arms race in terms of how you distinguish yourself and get in.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:A few corrections. Colleges look at unweighted GPAs, not weighted GPAs, so the GPA number that matters still maxes out at 4:00. Colleges don't expect more than 8-9 AP classes from public school kids, and maybe 4-5 AP classes from private school kids. And what public school, where, has 60 valedectorians?

I'm not so sure you're correct about many of these items. But since we seem to be off-topic here, I created a new topic in the College forum -- http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/0/277881.page#3043460

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is a different world. Far more difficult to get into college or university than it was in late 70s/early 80s. Back then the highest you could go was a 4.0 and no AP classes and there was one valedictorian. Now you can have a GPA up to 6.0; carry 15 AP classes and public high schools have 60 valedictorians (don't ask me why - I have no idea - I can only assume its everyone over a 4.0 GPA). And your kids are competing against a huge international market wanting to send their kids to American schools and very happy to pay full freight. And the colleges, in turn, want to boast diversity diversity! It's a much different world.

A few corrections. Colleges look at unweighted GPAs, not weighted GPAs, so the GPA number that matters still maxes out at 4:00. Colleges don't expect more than 8-9 AP classes from public school kids, and maybe 4-5 AP classes from private school kids. And what public school, where, has 60 valedectorians?

For the rest, though, it is indeed harder to get into any school than it was 20-30 years ago.

Actually I know for a fact the weighting policies vary University to University. All the Ivies and most independent schools weight STA, NCS, Sidwells grades. Not always the case with huge State schools.

They do not weight grades. You do not know that for a fact. They look at the on a 4.0 scale.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It is a different world. Far more difficult to get into college or university than it was in late 70s/early 80s. Back then the highest you could go was a 4.0 and no AP classes and there was one valedictorian. Now you can have a GPA up to 6.0; carry 15 AP classes and public high schools have 60 valedictorians (don't ask me why - I have no idea - I can only assume its everyone over a 4.0 GPA). And your kids are competing against a huge international market wanting to send their kids to American schools and very happy to pay full freight. And the colleges, in turn, want to boast diversity diversity! It's a much different world.

I took two AP classes a year in HS in the late 70's and it was a public school. The AP classes had been there for years before me.

[Anonymous]

15:43 Communication problem here. When I am referring to "weighting grades," it is about weighting what a B (85) is from St. Alban's to a B at All American High (85). St. Alban's B (85) is then multiplied by a some magical number that the admissions department has determined (let's say 1.08 and the B is an equivalent to a 91/92.

Not all colleges do this but many do. They also don't share this with the public because it is their own private system. I know personally... don't want to "out" myself, so that's all I'm going to say.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is a different world. Far more difficult to get into college or university than it was in late 70s/early 80s. Back then the highest you could go was a 4.0 and no AP classes and there was one valedictorian. Now you can have a GPA up to 6.0; carry 15 AP classes and public high schools have 60 valedictorians (don't ask me why - I have no idea - I can only assume its everyone over a 4.0 GPA). And your kids are competing against a huge international market wanting to send their kids to American schools and very happy to pay full freight. And the colleges, in turn, want to boast diversity diversity! It's a much different world.

I took two AP classes a year in HS in the late 70's and it was a public school. The AP classes had been there for years before me.

Different poster here. Was this in a big city? We didn't have APs in the late 70's at my public school in a mid-sized town with several colleges.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:15:43 Communication problem here. When I am referring to "weighting grades," it is about weighting what a B (85) is from St. Alban's to a B at All American High (85). St. Alban's B (85) is then multiplied by a some magical number that the admissions department has determined (let's say 1.08 and the B is an equivalent to a 91/92.

Not all colleges do this but many do. They also don't share this with the public because it is their own private system. I know personally... don't want to "out" myself, so that's all I'm going to say.

That sounds like an awful lot of fussing, especially over thousands of applications. My gut tells me they look at the essay, the personal statement, the SAT scores, the interview comments and then while reviewing the grades say, " well, this is at Saint Albans" and then the " weighting" is a gut reaction to that, not a 10 min crunch adding numbers to a percentile on a calculator and then doing the same with anotehr application. That is insane. I do NOT think admissions decsions are made that way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is a different world. Far more difficult to get into college or university than it was in late 70s/early 80s. Back then the highest you could go was a 4.0 and no AP classes and there was one valedictorian. Now you can have a GPA up to 6.0; carry 15 AP classes and public high schools have 60 valedictorians (don't ask me why - I have no idea - I can only assume its everyone over a 4.0 GPA). And your kids are competing against a huge international market wanting to send their kids to American schools and very happy to pay full freight. And the colleges, in turn, want to boast diversity diversity! It's a much different world.

I took two AP classes a year in HS in the late 70's and it was a public school. The AP classes had been there for years before me.

Different poster here. Was this in a big city? We didn't have APs in the late 70's at my public school in a mid-sized town with several colleges.

No, Cheltenham High School, in a middle class suburb of Philadelphia. Not a magnet school ( THAT did not exist then).Average home price $30,000. Average parent: a professor at Temple, Drexel or Penn. 3 elementary schools feeding into two middle schools, feeding into one HS. Five former grads with Nobel Prize in Science or Math.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is a different world. Far more difficult to get into college or university than it was in late 70s/early 80s. Back then the highest you could go was a 4.0 and no AP classes and there was one valedictorian. Now you can have a GPA up to 6.0; carry 15 AP classes and public high schools have 60 valedictorians (don't ask me why - I have no idea - I can only assume its everyone over a 4.0 GPA). And your kids are competing against a huge international market wanting to send their kids to American schools and very happy to pay full freight. And the colleges, in turn, want to boast diversity diversity! It's a much different world.

I took two AP classes a year in HS in the late 70's and it was a public school. The AP classes had been there for years before me.

Different poster here. Was this in a big city? We didn't have APs in the late 70's at my public school in a mid-sized town with several colleges.

No, Cheltenham High School, in a middle class suburb of Philadelphia. Not a magnet school ( THAT did not exist then).Average home price $30,000. Average parent: a professor at Temple, Drexel or Penn. 3 elementary schools feeding into two middle schools, feeding into one HS. Five former grads with Nobel Prize in Science or Math.

[Anonymous]

15:25 back (now also posting on the new thread). No, there were no AP courses offered in my high school when I graduated in 1975; I had to walk to the local community college to take courses after I had exhausted the high school's curriculum.

GPAs as high as 6.0 in some schools do exist. See the research a NP did on the new thread. I was told this also by the head of a Fairfax public school.

Re: Weighted GPAs. My understanding is that the schools (or at least our Faifax public schools) send the unweighted transcript as is to the colleges or universities. The colleges then decide if they are going to weight the applications they deem worthy. Those go into the computer. They can screen out all grades for gym class. They can ask to see hard sciences only. They can screen out all electives. They can ask to see GPAs in AP courses only. In other words, the colleges can manipulate the figures in any way they feel is desirable to get the composite class they seek. If the local admissions officer deems GPAs at a private school to be too high due to grade inflation, they can adjust down. If they think grades on an app. should be adjusted up because the kid went to T.J. they can adjust up. It's all just one big huge set of data that can be manipulated however the college wants to get at the type of student they want.

But before the college even gets to that point - as a poster noted above - the applications are quickly screened fast, usually looking only at ACT/SAT score and then GPA but quickly evaluating for "depth" of coursework and AP courses. Only then "might" they get to the essay and "weighting" of GPAs. The average application gets only a six minute review.

Langley had over 60 valedictorians last year. I am presuming (don't know for a fact) that they all exceeded a 4.0. Graduating class was about 600. I don't know what the top GPA one can obtain there is.

And, yes, I did hear of a public student having 15 AP classes. I had asked if there was a record of any student from FCPS applying and getting into Oxford. The answer was "yes". GPA was something like 4.8 and the student had 15 AP courses under his or her belt. That's really astonishing if you consider that the Langley AP courses are truly taught on a college level. Some kids get into those classes and then beg to get out because they are really quite difficult.

Anyhow, my point was simply to say that this applications process is an entirely different world than when many of us parents applied.

[Anonymous]

Langley calls anyone graduating with a 4.0 an "honor grad" now because the valedictorian term didn't really make sense since they don't rank.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do most STA boys go ED?

Most, but not all, STA boys do apply ED. My sense is that this is the same at other independent schools in this area, as well as kids at the many excellent public schools in the DMV area. If you look at the numbers, ED gives a significant advantage, so if the student is ready to apply and feels he/she can feel good about a particular school, it makes a lot of sense to do it. The "ED edge," so to speak, is one reason that affluent kids (not just those at independent schools -- I'm sure Whitman/Churchill/BCC have tons of early applicants) get a hidden advantage in the college process. As observers might recall, a couple of years ago Harvard and Princeton tried doing away with ED, hoping to lead a trend, on the ground that it favors those with better access to advice on the process (thus, disproportionately affluent kids). When nobody followed their lead and they thought they were losing kids to the other Ivies, they restored ED.