<p>I can grant that an excellent grade-point average is often the attribute of an excellent student. At the same time, however, I feel that it can also have the power to be a tremendous burden to students who are possibly just as capable. The period between the ages of fourteen and seventeen can contain a great amount of personal change for many individuals, change that can include a person’s maturity and ambition in life. If you were to take a random sectioning of high school freshman and compare it to one made up of high school seniors, the differences would be obvious. So, to me, it seems ludicrous that every one of the world’s leaders are to be expected to have a clear picture of what they want to achieve in life coming out of the eighth grade.</p>
<p>As such, I don’t think that a grade average is truly the right approach to determining someone’s academic talent, as it virtually gives the same amount of credence to an individual’s first-semester freshman grades as it does their second-semester junior grades. This kind of calculation can be a tremendous roadblock for people who, for a variety of reasons, didn’t perform in school to their potential until later in their educational career. It’s unfair to punish students for making mistakes as freshman four years down the road. </p>
<p>I think that a possible solution would be for admissions offices to recognize an upward trend in GPA with a greater value than current norms dictate. Any other thoughts?</p>
<p>I actually would like to know the correlation between college grades and:</p>
<ol>
<li>someone who gets great high school grades the entire time</li>
<li>someone who has an upward trend towards great high school grades</li>
</ol>
<p>My guess is that there is something to be said for consistency</p>
<p>High school classes are usually pretty boring, because it’s basic material and most of the work is pointless busywork. I think most smart people have an upwards trend in their grades because they didn’t really care about some work as a freshman or sophomore, but started working harder once college was on the horizon.</p>
<p>At my school, the only possible way I could have a 4.0 UW GPA would be if I had absolutely no personal life and had literally done nothing but work, sleep, and participate in a couple of resume-padding EC’s since I entered high school. Are these really the kind of people that colleges think are going to be America’s leaders?</p>
<p>Most American colleges do not value academic talent to the same extent that they value ambition and determination. Consequently, extra-curricular activities and highly subjective indicators such as GPA have a far greater impact on admission decisions than do objective measures of knowledge such as standardized test scores. While it would be nice for colleges to take your suggestions into account, their primary purpose is to turn a profit – they can do this most effectively by actively recruiting cut-throat and ruthless people who are likely to succeed in the business world as opposed to talented individuals who don’t apply themselves for whatever reason.</p>
<p>Yeah, well it’s even more unfair to punish (or fail to reward) students who never made those mistakes, who got good grades all the way through.</p>
<p>And in any case, while GPA is the single most important factor in admissions, for most schools it is not the only one. That’s why it’s called holistic admissions.</p>
<p>“Yeah, well it’s even more unfair to punish (or fail to reward) students who never made those mistakes, who got good grades all the way through.”</p>
<p>Why is this true? If two students are dedicated to their studies and are demonstratably able to achieve at the same level, why isn’t fair for those students to have access to the same resources?</p>
<p>“Most American colleges do not value academic talent to the same extent that they value ambition and determination. Consequently, extra-curricular activities and highly subjective indicators such as GPA have a far greater impact on admission decisions than do objective measures of knowledge such as standardized test scores. While it would be nice for colleges to take your suggestions into account, their primary purpose is to turn a profit – they can do this most effectively by actively recruiting cut-throat and ruthless people who are likely to succeed in the business world as opposed to talented individuals who don’t apply themselves for whatever reason.”</p>
<p>This is probably very true, thanks for bringing it up. I’m curious though, what do you mean by “turning a profit”; are you speaking of a literal financial profit, as suggested by your example of future business leaders?</p>
<p>“If two students are dedicated to their studies and are demonstratably able to achieve at the same level, why isn’t fair for those students to have access to the same resources?”</p>
<p>1) you have not demonstrated that you are able to achieve at the same level if you have lower grades. this is coming from a senior with about a 3.7 UW GPA, which is pretty low in my opinion. sure, it isn’t fair–teachers differ in ability, circumstances arise that are wholly out of one’s control, etc. rank is supposed to be a better indicator, although i dislike that as well. there is no perfect qualifier for college readiness–the SAT/ACT can be construed as biased towards those who can afford test prep, ECs towards those who have more time and/or have an earlier grasp on their aspirations/passions, interviews towards those who have outgoing personalities, essays towards Americans and those with exceptional writing skills, etc. The holistic process is meant to redistribute weight so that one thing is not so important as to dominate the field completely. of course, the weighting tends to differ by college, and there is an element of randomization for the process. but those with higher GPAs *tend *to have better ECs, better SATs, etc. so the lack of a high GPA with the presence of other things raises suspicion/inquiry.
2) the private college admissions process is not meant to be fair. it is competitive and unpredictable. public college admissions are more formulaic, but still have an element of unreliability. no one here has a right to an education from a specific college (excepting community colleges, of course)–it is a privilege extended from the colleges themselves unto us, at a price.</p>
<p>Yes, but I’m not referring to the revenue generated by tuition costs (as financial aid is typically generous) as much as to alumni donations. After all, Harvard’s endowment is roughly 10 times that of Oxford, despite the fact that both are academically equivalent.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I agree with you that treating college like a “reward” for hard workers is inane.</p></li>
<li><p>Profit as in prestige profit. Top schools let puny undergrads reap the rewards of being associated with them, with the hopes that it will pay dividends when they are associated with the future Nobel Prize winner or whatever. Also literal profit when successful business alumni make more donations.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>It’s true that colleges consider other things rather than GPA, but let’s not kid ourselves: GPA is, in most cases, what they use as a ‘base’ for evaluating students before they even look at any other aspect. Even though I agree that grades are very important, they shouldn’t stand out as much as it does - not everyone is school smart, and can be intelligent in an infinite amount of other ways.</p>
<p>Besides that, I think that the 9th and 10th grade GPA’s shouldn’t weigh as much as the 11th and 12th grade ones. I don’t think that it’s fair to compare the academic behaviors of 14 year olds and 18 year olds and regard them at equal levels. These four years can be essential to most teens in their process of maturity, and their lives can change drastically during so little time.
For example, at Freshman year, I couldn’t give a rat’s @$$ about working my hardest to prepare for college (I was naiive and it seemed so far away before I could start taking anything seriously), when, 1 and half years later, my habits changed completely. From then on, my grades started to improve gradually, until I was able to achieve the highest quarter GPA in my life (well that sounded exaggerated). Anyway, I was very upset, while planning my college apps, when I found out that my cumulative GPA wasn’t as high as I expected it to be due to my weak Freshman grades.</p>
<p>And for those that consistently maintained high grades throughout these four years, I think that they grew up earlier than other people like me. Long story short, I find it ridiculous that some students should get screwed for maturing at different time periods (by ‘maturing’ I’m implying that the student gets serious with school and starts studying harder).</p>
<p>Sorry for the long post Just had to get my thoughts on here.</p>
<p>“1) you have not demonstrated that you are able to achieve at the same level if you have lower grades. this is coming from a senior with about a 3.7 UW GPA, which is pretty low in my opinion.
2) the private college admissions process is not meant to be fair. it is competitive and unpredictable. public college admissions are more formulaic, but still have an element of unreliability. no one here has a right to a college education–it is a privilege extended from the colleges themselves unto us, at a price.”</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Student A and Student B receive an A in AP Calculus BC in classwork their senior year, and both earn a 5 on the AP exam in May. Student A, as a freshman, had received an A in Algebra I, whereas Student B had received a D. Why should the second clause matter in determining academic skill, when at the end of the day, they are identically matched? In other words, what’s the distinction between two years of a 4.0 unweighted GPA, and three years, and why is that distinction important?</p></li>
<li><p>The first part of your argument is false. The second is not responsive; simply because college admissions do tend to be arbitrary doesn’t invalidate attempts to make it less so.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>EDIT: Alright, since you switched up your post a bit, my own may not be entirely responsive. I’ll respond later.</p>
<p>“Most American colleges do not value academic talent to the same extent that they value ambition and determination. Consequently, extra-curricular activities and highly subjective indicators such as GPA have a far greater impact on admission decisions than do objective measures of knowledge such as standardized test scores. While it would be nice for colleges to take your suggestions into account, their primary purpose is to turn a profit – they can do this most effectively by actively recruiting cut-throat and ruthless people who are likely to succeed in the business world as opposed to talented individuals who don’t apply themselves for whatever reason.”</p>
<p>This is far from the truth, only the very top colleges take in ECs as a big admission aspect and even then it’s to separate those that have the best academic stats.</p>
<p>hexagon, maybe I was not as direct in my first post, but I think consistency does matter. Employers do background checks - essentially, they care about a person’s history and realize that JUST evaluating someone’s status right then and there, in the present, is not the smartest course of action. Of course if someone is on an “upward trajectory” then he should be given some leniency, but the employer would justifiably choose the similar candidate who didn’t have a criminal background to begin with.</p>
<p>hexagonsun, in your scenario, the students are [presumably] equally capable intellectually. However, that scenario is not altogether common. Most kids who get D’s in algebra I don’t get A’s and 5’s in AP Calc BC. However, those who do either improve their intellectual ability or just start working harder. If they’re just upping their ambition, the other student deserves the seat at the hypothetical school they’re applying to, unless the D student has significantly better essays, recs, and EC’s. Otherwise, they’re likely just better at calc than they are at algebra. Thus, it’s sort of hard to project that they’d do will in college linear alg. classes, no?</p>
<p>Because they are not identically matched. Colleges and employers are interested in attracting people who will perform at a high level <em>all</em> the time, not just part of the time or only at the finish. </p>
<p>They are looking for excellence, and the student with good grades all the way through demonstrated more of it and more consistently than the student who slacked off early but then managed to peform at the end. There is nothing unfair whatsoever about choosing more excellence over less or choosing consistency over spottiness.</p>
Just had to get my thoughts on here.</p>