Reply to Big College Admissions Year at St. Albans

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

AP at Langley is taught to the test.  FCPS GPA's are weighted and that is the number sent for applications.  If a college separates the applicants by GPA the public school students are better off than a private with no weighted courses determining the GPA.[/quote]

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