How do student characteristics get evaluated in college admissions?

[Anonymous]

I'm starting this to respond to a comment posed in another thread.

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 just did a little research, and it looks like colleges are all over the map on what GPAs they count. Many articles say colleges look mostly at unweighted GPAs to compare students from different schools, but look at weighted GPAs to compare students from the same school or to truth-check a student's class rank. One outlier: one article says that Michigan ignores unweighted GPAs, and only looks at weighted GPAs, for any schools that weight.

Some high schools have many valedictorians ... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/education/27valedictorians.html?pagewanted=all

44 - http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2002336475_garfield15m.html
25 - http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/16/one-high-school-25-valedictorians/
41 - http://althouse.blogspot.com/2006/06/high-school-with-41-valedictorians.html

Sounds like clear grade inflation to me. I guess if teachers are going to inflate the grades of so many students, there's no reason to even have a formal weighting policy. I guess that's a good argument for using standardized SAT and AP scores to truth-check the grades.

[Anonymous]

Totally irrelevant. Or at least mostly irrelevant. College admissions offices are familiar with the schools in this area, they assign a specific admissions person for the area. So if one school weights GPA they will look at the GPAs for all the students there knowing that but not comparing them to an unweighted GPA at another school, where they will know that the other school doesn't weight. Many schools don't rank but they don't need to because the colleges are looking at the applicants in context, a context they know.

They would only be looking at a GPA blind if they had an applicant from a school they were unfamiliar with. I can't see that happening in this area.

[Anonymous]

From what we heard on college tours some of the colleges will do an unweighted GPA calculation that excludes non core academic classes (like art, music, etc.).

[Anonymous]

I was talking with you about this on the other thread. Thanks for starting this one.

I think the Common App asks for the unweighted GPA, but I'm not totally positive about this. However, when the high school sends your kid's transcript in, some colleges will apply their own, proprietary weighting systems to the various classes your kid took. We will never know what these proprietary college weighting systems are. So the advice to the kid would still be, "take the hardest classes available," whether this is an AP class or an honors class.

Yes, the AP tests could potentially be a good reality check for comparing students across different schools. Kids don't send the AP scores in with the college application, however - APs are used after acceptance to get out of required classes. That said, when kids get 5's on the AP tests, they usually send them in with their applications. You can simply write, "AP US History - 5" without paying the College Board to forward the scores, and it seems colleges trust this, or at least it worked for DC (who did in fact earn good scores). But colleges don't require AP scores as part of the application.

The SAT II subject test scores could conceivably be a good measure for comparing kids from different schools, except that they usually aren't for most kids, IMO. The more selective colleges usually require two SAT II tests as part of the application. Lots of kids take SAT II Math 2 and English, in which case the test results look a lot like the regular SATs, with maybe some differences. If your kid is doing science or physics, the SAT II subject tests might be more helpful to colleges.

[Anonymous]

Why do so many schools have a system for weighting GPAs if the colleges just ignore the weighting?

My guess is so that the students taking harder classes will do better in class ranks, and won't feel they are being penalized for taking challenging classes. However, if that's the case, then the weighted GPAs are still actually skewing the college admissions analysis, but just in a way that's more hidden.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Totally irrelevant. Or at least mostly irrelevant. College admissions offices are familiar with the schools in this area, they assign a specific admissions person for the area. So if one school weights GPA they will look at the GPAs for all the students there knowing that but not comparing them to an unweighted GPA at another school, where they will know that the other school doesn't weight. Many schools don't rank but they don't need to because the colleges are looking at the applicants in context, a context they know.

They would only be looking at a GPA blind if they had an applicant from a school they were unfamiliar with. I can't see that happening in this area.

Actually, most schools report both the unweighted and the weighted GPAs. At least, it's done this way across MCPS.

I agree the regional admissions person is familiar with area schools. But this makes it sound like the regional admissions person is making the final selection, drawing on knowledge of specific schools to interpret GPAs. But this isn't consistent with what we heard from colleges, which is that the regional person makes an initial cut, and then students from across the country, many different regions with thousands of schools the admissions committee can't be familiar with, are compared using their own GPA reweighting system.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
I agree the regional admissions person is familiar with area schools. But this makes it sound like the regional admissions person is making the final selection, drawing on knowledge of specific schools to interpret GPAs. But this isn't consistent with what we heard from colleges, which is that the regional person makes an initial cut, and then students from across the country, many different regions with thousands of schools the admissions committee can't be familiar with, are compared using their own GPA reweighting system.

And the idea that the regional admissions person is "familiar" with schools sounds like you think the regional admissions person wants to have kids admitted from "their" schools. So I don't really know that having a person who "knows" the school is that advantageous. Especially in this region, with a zillion kids applying, the regional admissions person is probably looking hard for kids to cut out, weighted GPAs or not. At least for those schools hardest to get into.

I'm guessing the rules of thumb change a lot if you're Harvard vs. Bates vs. Bucknell (and lower).

[Anonymous]

FWIW, when the William and Mary admissions rep announced at their fall fair this year that they use weighted GPAs, the crowd of HS juniors and seniors burst into raucous applause.

[Anonymous]

17:01 is correct. Each college and university can weigh the GPAs however they like. They can remove the gym classes. They can allocate more weight to hard sciences. They can remove drivers ed, etc. They can screen out all soft electives. They can take off points a private school that the local admissions rep knows has grade inflation and add for a GPA from a tough public school like T.J. Everything is computerized so the college admissions can seek out whatever it is they think is valuable and fits a particular desired class composite.

The highest GPAs run up to 6.0, which is absurd.

Langley High had over 60 valedictorians last year. I can only assume it is everyone with a 4.0 or more. I really don't know. They each get to wear a medal.

15 AP courses in public is not unheard of, although rare. I asked what Fairfax County's record for Oxford was. The one recorded student who applied from the county and was accepted had a 4.8 GPA and 15 AP courses.

[Anonymous]

P.S. Should have clarified - not to justify the practice of 60 valedictorians - but there were 600 kids in Langley's class last year, so you can't compare the nos. to a small private school. Still, I don't understand it. It used to be single valedictorian and salutatorian (2d highest ranking student), even when I graduated from an enormous public high school like Langley. And 4.0 was the top. It meant something then to be the valedictorian.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:17:01 is correct. Each college and university can weigh the GPAs however they like. They can remove the gym classes. They can allocate more weight to hard sciences. They can remove drivers ed, etc. They can screen out all soft electives. They can take off points a private school that the local admissions rep knows has grade inflation and add for a GPA from a tough public school like T.J. Everything is computerized so the college admissions can seek out whatever it is they think is valuable and fits a particular desired class composite.

The highest GPAs run up to 6.0, which is absurd.

Langley High had over 60 valedictorians last year. I can only assume it is everyone with a 4.0 or more. I really don't know. They each get to wear a medal.

15 AP courses in public is not unheard of, although rare. I asked what Fairfax County's record for Oxford was. The one recorded student who applied from the county and was accepted had a 4.8 GPA and 15 AP courses.

"Weighing" grades like you are using the term is not the same as "weighting" grades. What really matters is how well a student does vis--vis other students from their same high school. No college wants a school filled with just the kids from Langely. The grade inflation caused by AP and Honors weighting is ridiculous, but pretty meaningless. Colleges can figure it out. I don't even think there are 15 AP classes at DC's private. Many kids going to Ivies take far fewer. Once you get past 12 or so, you start getting into AP fluff like Art History and Psychology, anyway. Our private sent a student to Oxford last year and I can assure you she had fewer than 10 APs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:17:01 is correct. Each college and university can weigh the GPAs however they like. They can remove the gym classes. They can allocate more weight to hard sciences. They can remove drivers ed, etc. They can screen out all soft electives. They can take off points a private school that the local admissions rep knows has grade inflation and add for a GPA from a tough public school like T.J. Everything is computerized so the college admissions can seek out whatever it is they think is valuable and fits a particular desired class composite.

The highest GPAs run up to 6.0, which is absurd.

Langley High had over 60 valedictorians last year. I can only assume it is everyone with a 4.0 or more. I really don't know. They each get to wear a medal.

15 AP courses in public is not unheard of, although rare. I asked what Fairfax County's record for Oxford was. The one recorded student who applied from the county and was accepted had a 4.8 GPA and 15 AP courses.

Oh, and you point to a private school with "grade inflation," but in the same sentence mention a public school that has " 60 valedictorians." Where is the grade inflation again?

[Anonymous]

7:39, I'm not the poster you're addressing, but let's make this into a public vs private thing. I'm sure that there's grade inflation at some publics and also at some privates, and conversely some other publics and privates don't have grade inflation.

[Anonymous]

Let's NOT make this...! Sorry

[Anonymous]

I graduated around here and everyone with over a 4.0 was a valedictorian although there were two people with perfect 4.5 grades who gave speeches. I thought all of them deserved it. They would have all been valedictorians at the school we moved from.