Reply to Too early to start thinking W&M/UVA?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Regarding GPAs, I worked in admissions for a short while (and a few years ago now) but I can still tell you that GPAs are not standardized in the sense SAT/ACT are.  The way they are calculated varies greatly from district to school to teacher.  They can be hyper inflated in many cases and less so in others.  (Look at the examples in the blog link below.)  The office I worked in looked at the context of the grades and the difficulty of the coursework to come up with their own index.   BTW, that appears to be similar to what UVA does based on this blog from Dean J http://uvaapplication.blogspot.com/2018/03/can-we-talk-about-your-gpa.html  [/quote][/b]

[QUOTE]Uh, everyone knows that.  Which is why UVA or W&M have profiles on every single high school - down to the percentage of the class which has a particular GPA, which is how they tell if your child is in the top ten percent of their class.  Some schools even go up to a 7.0 now.  Others stop at 4.0.  Some are now using a zero to 10 scale for grading, but all of that can be sized up in seconds by lining up an applicant's GPA and AP courses against the school profiile.  Usually the first readers do this.[/quote]
You are implying that the the college creates the profile, but that blog says the high school generates the profile and sends it to the college. Not a bit deal, but interesting.[/quote]

[b]The high school creates a profile and provides it to colleges.  The colleges use that information, but then have their own way of breaking down a transcript.

http://uvaapplication.blogspot.com/2015/03/i-dont-care-about-your-gpa.html[/quote][/b]

This is spot on and the graph I was referencing earlier  Look at the GPA distribution for a particular high school (bar graph).  That's exactly how UVA and W&M ascertain where your child sits in their particular high school. . that is also how they ascertain if you student is in the top tenpercent of the class.[/quote]

When schools cite the percentage in the top 10% in external sources (e.g. to USNews), they only do it when they are provided the ranking explicitly (e.g. Jimmy ranked 18th, which is top 9%).  This is becoming less common, and most selective schools now have less than half with rankings.  Yes, at least for Virginia high schools, colleges can figure out approximately where they rank based on the information they have.

The Dean J blog is really saying their admissions office is using these inputs but is doing their own assessment.  A student could have a lower rank, GPA, etc., but could be assessed higher due to the coursework and grades on the transcript.  So the GPA and rank, if available, are significant, but aren't the end product they are looking at.[/quote]

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