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[quote=Anonymous]My kids are at a competitive private in California with grade deflation. For context, over 1/3rd of the class at the public school DC would have attended have over a 4.0, and they do not restrict access to AP classes so kids routinely take 8-12 AP classes, while honors courses are gatekept at the private. My kids GPAs are markedly lower than their friends at the public HS (they went to public elementary/middle so know a lot of kids). The highest GPA mathematically possible at my kids HS is 4.2 while at our local public it is 4.9.

From my not-scientific observation of what I’ve seen over the past couple of years, I have concluded is that it is a mixed bag. I think grade deflation hurts kids applying to big public schools that don’t consider test scores. If your child’s dream school is UCLA or Cal, grade deflating private high schools aren’t going to help. At the competitive private schools near us, I’ve heard that UC applications are sharply down because why write four new essays for a separate application if you only have a chance at admission to UC Riverside? However, the flip side of that is that grade deflation seems to actually help significantly at private universities, particularly Ivies, SLACs, and other competitive schools. Those AdComs seem to have a good understanding of what schools grade inflate, and it hurts the kids from those schools.

Last year, what I saw, very generally speaking, was that the local public school had better admissions for the UCs and other big state schools and the private with grade deflation had better admissions for the Ivies and other private universities, of course relative to size. I think it’s too early to tell what will happen this year because the UCs aren’t out. Also, the strike may have hurt interest in the UCs because kids know a bunch of kids who didn’t have classes after October. [/quote]

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