<p>which kids in the most competitive schools have to get figured out very early. It is a vicious sword game that cuts many. It is our top performing students who get sucked into this sword game and they are hurt by it, the losers AND many times the winners as well.</p>
<p>Kids who are passionate about art or music really can get damaged by the weighting sword.</p>
<p>The whole thing stinks. I think we should just go by unweighted grades and let the kids’ class schedules speak for themselves. The kids know who has taken easy courses or hard ones, and the colleges do, too.</p>
<p>Our approach was to not drive ourselves or our kids crazy calculating gpa’s to three figures past the decimal point. A related approach was never to choose a class because of its possible effect on the overall gpa. Choose courses and programs, not a gpa.</p>
<p>Son didn’t ever grub for grades, took pretty close to the most rigorous program but had other priorities for his time, and occasionally fell down in a course. Graduated with “top 10%,” went to a superb college and since then has done amazing things. He did the right thing for himself in h.s. and it’s paid off. I doubt he even knows what his h.s. gpa or his class rank was.</p>
<p>Daughter was interested in art, and basically her art training was extracurricular; college admission was determined more by portfolio than by academic program and grades in any case. Graduated probably in top 20% but got into terrific art school, which is what she was aiming for. And has had an interesting career and now is in grad school.</p>
<p>So both did “well enough” in their programs and grades – when coupled with SATs and EC’s – to move on to the next stage of their educations and into “life.” Higher h.s. gpa’s would have done nothing for their future and might well have driven them and us crazy in the effort to achieve them.</p>
<p>In sum, try to keep all of this in perspective. Help your kids find interesting and challenging things to learn and do, help keep them out of trouble and deal with any issues (LD’s, health, etc.), but don’t get hung up with hyperexact grade grubbing.</p>
<p>While all situations are different, you may want to resist the urge to use the essays to explain GPA any other high school activities. The danger is that the essays become a mere extension of the application itself. It’s much better to have third parties describing the activities. The essays should really be used to unveil a facet of the applicant that would be HARD for anyone else than the applicant to describe. </p>
<p>Essays written to justify or explain high school choices will be VERY common, and the last thing any applicant wants is to have an essay that could have been written by thousands of students in the same situation. It’s not that ECs should not be mentioned in an essay … but they should not be the BASIS of an essay. And this is why essays about athletic and art excellence are most typically the worst in a sea of lackluster essays.</p>
<p>@Xiggi: while I agree that using an essay to explain the GPA is probably not a good plan in general, I disagree with your point that essays shouldn’t talk about EC’s. I don’t think you should state such a dogmatic conclusion.</p>
<p>Both of my kids used their EC’s as a take off point for their essays (debate in first case, art in second) and they got into all but one college they applied to. To me the critical thing about essays is that they convey something that’s not obvious from numbers or easily countable EC’s – something about the authentic motivations, interests, and persona of the writer. If you’re a champion debater, don’t use the essay to list the obvious, but you can definitely talk about what that experience has taught you or motivated you to do in future. If you’re an award winning painter, you can definitely try to explain your perspective toward art and the world it depicts.</p>
<p>I concur with xiggi. While some college do claim to re-weight gpa, if you do the math, you’ll find that it a huge stretch of belief. Think about the xx thousands of apps that hit the mail room the first week in January. How is it humanely possible to recalculate each and every transcript – with a gazillion different grading scales – and have them ready for adcoms’ review?</p>
<p>xiggi: Her thinking right now is to use the essays to ‘flesh out’ her extracurricular activities- not so much to ‘make excuses’, nor even to boast about her accomplishments. Rather, she will use the essays to explain what she likes about these activities, how she has grown from them, and what she hopes she will do with them in the future. Elsewhere in the application there will be a list of her awards and accomplishments in these activities, but the essays will hopefully allow her to give the adcoms a more qualitative picture of who she is as a person and how she will contribute to college life if she ends up there. Isn’t that what essays are supposed to do?</p>
<p>I am a graduating senior, and I have to say that I agree that your daughter should take the classes that she enjoys and that will ultimately help her on her career path.</p>
<p>For the last 4 years, I have been playing this GPA game with the other top students in my class. I have had straight A’s, but for the first two years of high school, I took band (unweighted) while the val took study hall. The result is that I am ranked 2nd, even though I quit band after sophomore year to take more AP/honors classes to try to make up the difference. (Even though the val continued to take study halls while I took AP classes, it was too late, and this student will graduate ahead of me this May.)</p>
<p>All in all, I regret succumbing to the temptation to play this game. Although I have enjoyed some of the classes that I signed up for only because they were AP and honors classes, some of them were a waste of time for me because they have nothing to do with what I want to do in life. I’m sure I’m going to pay for it in college, too; I want to go into foreign language, and if it weren’t for the ranking system, I would have loved to have taken French in the schedule slot that opened up when I quit Band. Since French was unweighted, however, I opted instead to take AP/honors classes that I didn’t really care about, just in hopes of beating out the val by graduation. This is one of my only regrets from my time in high school, and it’s sure to make me struggle more in college when I try to learn French alongside people who have already had instruction in the language for years.</p>
<p>Good luck to your daughter, OP. I hope she continues to make the most of her high school experience, because in the end, that is what really counts.</p>
<p>I’m planning on taking jazz ensemble for four years. Unfortunately not weighted, but aside from two years of Latin (the third and fourth years are weighted) all my other classes are weighted.</p>
<p>In our county, student GPAs are enhancd by cumulative bonus points given for honors, AP, and dual enrollment courses. Student s have to get a least a C to earn the bonus. For example, a .04 bonus is added to the cumulative grade point average for each one-half credit completed in an honors or dual enrollment course, and .08 bonus is added for each one-half credit completed in an AP course. In this system I’ve seen students achieve weighted GPAs above 8.0. </p>
<p>Class rank is based on the weighted GPA. Thus, students with a 4.0 unweighted GPA are at a huge disadvantage in terms of class ranking if they don’t load up on AP level courses, whether they like em or not. Also, in addition to the AP classes offered in school, top students also enroll in AP courses online. Being at the top of the class means entering a contest to see who can take the most AP courses and accumulate the most bonus points. And yes, you have to start very early at this to be in the running. however, even some B+ students can be ranked reasonably high if they take enough AP courses. Transfer students often don’t have a chance at all though. </p>
<p>I really dislike our system, but it does ensure that the highest ranked students have taken the toughest classes, and lots of them, even if for the wrong reasons.</p>
<p>IMO interviews make more of a difference with a student who is on the edge so to speak. The transcript is very important and the degree of difficulty in classes is as well. But in a school that does not rank, top 10 percent is all they have to go by. You may be top 11 percent but they don’t know that. I have seen a number of games played in HS. None which I would participate in. But to protect your kid you have to be saavy.It is a fine line between being idealistic and a total manipulator. I keep in mind that my goal overall is to help my kids become good people and develop as individuals, but there is a college admissions playing field and we must all develop our strategies. This coming from a person who learned these things in hindsight, ultimately it turned out excellent but that could have been more luck than actual planning.</p>
<p>My D and several of her classmates found out that they were out of the running for valedictorian at the start of sophomore year. The reason? They were given unweighted PE credit for band camp over the previous 2 summers. They were all IB diploma students with straight A’s who did not need to take PE. We did not even realize she was getting credit for band camp. She also had to take an extra unweighted colorguard class each fall in order to be in the marching band (county rule). This class shows up on her transcript, but was not held during the school day and was really not a class at all, just a way to satisfy the county rule.</p>
<p>Thankfully, they stopped giving PE credit for band camp after that…</p>
<p>13 out of a class of about 500 give or take. My daughter’s situation was very unusual in that, at the time, her school was on a year-round, multi-track calendar. So she was the top kid on her track or magnet (I forget which) but ranked with kids on other tracks who actually had some AP courses (such as physics) available to them that were not offered on her track and she had that unweighted requirement. It made for an inequitable ranking system. She called the colleges she applied to and asked if she could include a note as to the specific circumstances of her school. Some said no they didn’t want one, some said yes. For the ones that said yes, she wrote a very brief note explaining the situation.</p>
<p>The posts in this thread show how very different it is not only from state to state, county to county, but district to district! It is radiculous that kids are forced to engage in a game like that.
I am only beginning the HS journey with my kids, but I am already cringing. I have heard about a kid in our HS who takes fine art online! How is that possible?</p>
<p>Not true in many cases. As explained in detail in A Is For Admission, many colleges, particularly highly selective ones, figure out a rank for each applicant when the school doesn’t rank. As the OP noted in her first post, they start by asking the counselor details. Then they use the school profile and historical data on past applicants from the high school. They have it down to a science.</p>
<p>In our state they offer options for Virtual School. Kids can take tons of classes online. Even if a school doen’t offer many AP classes, students can still take any one one they want online. D is currently taking language classes online that her school does not offer. She is also taking PE and Health online over the summer because she did not want to waste a class period on those in her regular classes. </p>
<p>I thought this was going to be pretty bogus at first, but I find that I have much more contact with her online teachers, they provide a lot of feedback, and they have all been very dedicated.</p>
<p>The GPA calculations just get ridiculous among the top handful of students with numbers carried out to the 4th decimal place, etc. As a mother, I encouraged my son to take rigorous core courses and supplement them with fine arts and areas of interest. I may have made a mistake. Although he had a 4.6something from taking honors and AP everything available, the unweighted courses hurt him.</p>
<p>He was in the top few students of a 500+ class. He was the highest position student who took courses such as band, music technology, independent studies and computer programming. Although he enjoyed and benefited from these classes, there was a financial cost in that it prevented him from being the val or sal. Students ranked above him took study halls instead of enriching courses, and it cost us. </p>
<p>I am really torn because I know what is best for my kids. However, not being val or sal eliminated certain college scholarship offers and ultimately limited college choices based on finances. I think I might have done it differently if I had it to do over.</p>
<p>With regard to DD experience; it will be better for OP’s DD to stick to her schedule. The top schools seem to be doing the following except Harvard.
Recalculate GPA giving weight according to the school profile. DD school profile lists all electives as such even if these are not weighted higher.
Rigor of curriculum and passion seems to supersede the GPA.
After a point at each High School GPA the EC’s take precedence over GPA. So at DD School GPA ~ A- weighted or better seems to put students in same category and ECs seems to be the deciding factor.</p>
<p>Harvard seems to be different. It takes every year two distinct sets of students from DD School.
Academic super star, i.e. very high GPA (Valedictorian, Salutatorian or close) and strong academic ECs (Intel STS, US Olympiad etc)
Naturally talented star in conservatory or sports: Music, Theater, Writers, Sports etc along with moderately high GPA (Weighted A- or more). That means if your GPA is low then you need non academic ECs to get into Harvard.</p>
<p>I don’t know what to think anymore. As a graduating Senior that just went through all of this, I am more confused about it than I was 6 months ago. My best friend is a Vali and was turned down by her top two choices. She felt extremely lucky to get into her third (no slouch though…Stanford BUT only got in because of a hook). She worked extremely hard through high school and had no time for anything but academics and her one EC (which got her into Stanford). Then, I see another friend who was accepted to her college as a Salut but with NO Merit while a student from our class who is not an AP Scholar, no honors, no EC’s (but had a weekend job at a coffee shop) gets a Deans Scholarship from the same school. We figure there must be something there that none of us know about but my point is that this is all so random! In this last case (and even in the first case) GPA/AP’s didn’t account for much at all. My advice for your D…follow your heart when it comes to class choices - they make you who you are - and look at colleges for the programs they offer, NOT their rank.</p>