What’s the reason for not maintaining a homogenous weighted GPA for whole country? GPA varies so much from district to district, some are using 5.0 some 6.0 and some 10.0, then some count fine arts towards GPA but others don’t. Some count perfect grade at 97 some at 95. Some places kids can take choir or theater without any penalty , other places they mess up their GPA. Some do block scheduling, others do single period. Some let freshman take AP sciences but other won’t allow it until junior year. Some have French 5 as AP, others as honors. This skews things and reflects favorably on some and bad on others. Which admission officer is going to bother with the reason for Jim’s lower GPA was due to 4 years of GPA hit on choir while Jill on paper looks like some one who managed higher GPA while taking choir. GPA system needs reform.
Some HS’s count band and choir as academic subjects- other consider them EC’s. Some HS’s allow kids to take AP’s even if they don’t take the exam and others don’t. Some HS’s teach math up to Differential Equations and others struggle to find a teacher who can teach college prep algebra.
What’s your point? This is a big country with a lot of variation among school policies, populations, funding etc.
Point is that admission counselors don’t get the whole picture. It’s unfair.
People want local control. Why should it have to be one size fits all? Kids are judged by the context of their schools; adcoms know the difference.
Schools don’t look at GPA without context. They look at the transcript, too, and can see whether or not choir was used.
Some schools recalculate.
I think the only place where it’s a big issue is in automatic scholarships which have a cutoff at a certain GPA. But even some of those are softer cutoffs if you contact the uni and explain your GPA.
Other than that, IMO, the GPA differences probably aren’t all that problematic.
I’m at Starbucks and this came to my attention as there is a group of kids from two diffrent districts and they are comparing their GPA. One just said 4.9 and all looked so impressed, without knowing that his district’s GPA scale is 6.0.
Honestly, who cares what a group of kids think of the 4.9? The SCHOOL will know it’s a 6.0 scale because the transcript will indicate as such.
At the college level, MIT uses a five point scale. There isn’t an employer of MIT grads out there who doesn’t know how to recalculate the MIT GPA to the more standard 4 point GPA. Every grad school admissions person knows.
This is a non-issue. Who cares what the kids at Starbucks think?
As a general rule, life is not fair.
The Car Talk guy always liked to joke about his 3.0 GPA. (at MIT)
Even if you standardized GPAs across the country a research paper that gets an A at one school might not get one from another school.
Even within schools, grading policies are not uniform. One teacher gives extra credit. One does not. One curves. One does not. They don’t give the same exams either. One is going to be harder.
I agree with you, OP, but this is not going to change because of what blossom pointed out about funding and other issues that vary by locale.
However, I do think that academic programs that are national in scope should be standardized. For example, AP classes. I wrote in another thread that our AP sciences meet 7.5 hours per week, yet at other schools an AP class with the exact same title and which is supposed to cover the same curriculum might meet anywhere from 3.75 hours per week up to 8 hours per week. Obviously, the 8 hour per week course can perform more labs than the course that meets half the number of hours, can cover more material in greater depth, and will likely require more lab reports and other work. Do college admissions officers differentiate? I doubt it.
Secondly,National Honor Society and national subject area honor societies should be standardized. Why should kid A in town B get to have a lower GPA and do fewer community service hours than Kid Y in town Z to gain admission to the exact same national organization? At least for National Merit recognition, where the cutoff is much lower in West Virginia than in NJ, the standards are published. I am well aware that NHS is not that important for top students, but the fact remains that a supposedly national designation means something different for one kid than it does for another.
Third, I think the school profile or the student’s application should indicate what participation in say marching band, or varsity athletics, or ABC club entails at their school as far as hours and obligations. For example, our public high school track team may travel on weeknights to 5 hour long meets in a different state, which means the students miss half of their last class and don’t get home until 10:30 PM. At a different school, the team never does that, but instead just takes a 10 min. bus ride to the next town for a 2 hour meet. Big difference. Being on varsity on our team may entail competing in 10 such meets, whereas at another school they run in only 5. It’s fine that there’s local and school variation, but there should be a way for college adcoms to know what “varsity” means at each school.
And then there is the issue of school calendars. The schools that start in early August have many more weeks of class before the AP exam than the schools that start after Labor Day.
<schools don’t="" look="" at="" gpa="" without="" context.="" they="" the="" transcript,="" too,="" and="" can="" see="" whether="" or="" not="" choir="" was="" used.="">
I worked as a reader of college applications this year. Given the fact that 1) readers spent approximately 5-10 minutes per application and 2) reader goes through approximately 50 applications per day - atypical cases may hurt students. IMHO, only.
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I think it is really, really important what kids think. If they start their lives thinking that “life is not fair, admissions are rigged, merit doesn’t matter” - you have a lost generation. IMHO.
I think the context was that college admission officers will not consider typical teenagers’ opinions while they evaluate applicants’ transcripts.
Why are NM cutoffs different per state? Seriously, I have no idea and have always wondered. It’s not like schools are all the same in a state, how do they generalize or what is the justification for the differences, does anyone know?
Because NM Corp wants to distribute 16,000 slots among the states by population proportional representation (i.e. if Arkansas has X% of the US population, then they want Arkansas to have X% of the NMSF).
If NM Corp awarded NMSF on the same cutoff nationally, then most of the NMSFs would cluster in a handful of states and the rest of the country would lose interest.