Calculating the GPA (again!)

kluge
Fri, 06 Jul 2007 04:31:55 +0000

because that is what the college will be doing.

ah, but there’s the rub. What will they be doing with it? While past performance doesn’t guarantee (blah, blah, blah) a prospective applicant can look at a college’s overall treatment of prior year students with different levels of test performance, and determine the scores at the 25th and 75th percentiles, and have a clue as to whether that school is a reach, or match, or safety on that basis. But with grades - a more significant part of the decision making process - an applicant has very little clue where he or she stands in comparison to last year’s admitted students. Obviously, there are no guarantees - but is it too much to ask for a clue?

(Actually, UC is easy - you can readily calculate the student’s exact “UC GPA” and see where it stands in relation to each UC campus’s prior year’s admissions by looking at their freshman profiles. It’s all those other schools that have me baffled.)