Reply to So many unweighted 4.0s.

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "So many unweighted 4.0s. "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics