Andover’s school profile now requests college admissions officers to consider a 5.0 GPA equal to a 4.0 GPA in their conversions. This means that roughly 70% of Andover students will graduate with a converted 4.0+ GPA.
Likewise, far more students are graduating with GPAs above 5.5 than before.
Has Andover finally acknowledged that their deflated grading hurt their students in college admissions and they’re now changing their practices to help more students get into the most prestigious colleges? It has long been said that a student at the median of Andover would be a top student at a public school. Now, it seems Andover sees it the same way.
I can’t speak for Andover in particular, but historically students from schools like Exeter and Andover were not really competing for spots at the Ivies with kids with weighted GPAs from regular schools nationwide. Now they kind of are.
Exeter modified its grading starting 25 years ago, and also at some point changed the levels of its courses to better reflect their academic rigor in comparison to other schools.
Statistically, today, over 50% of HS graduates have an A average. The waters have gotten murkier…
Do you have any reason to believe that “deflated grading” hurt Andover graduates when applying to college?
In general, students are ranked against their classmates when applying to college. Andover students are not in the same pile as kids to go to the kind of public school where everyone takes lots of APs and college classes and has, like, an 8.5 GPA.
i read something a while ago that said boarding schools usually send something about the way their grading is structured, how rigorous the courses are, etc. i can’t remember where but it was either an article or somewhere on this forum.
it is logical to assume that an average gpa at a rigorous prep school like andover would not be considered at the same level as that same gpa at a school with classes that are easy to pass, since rigour is a part of a holistic application process.
it’s the general consensus from everyone participating in college admissions that students with a low gpa/test scores are filtered out by an algorithm of some sort. i’m wondering how andover’s specialized grading scale would be considered in that section of the application process. maybe having a specialized grading system is andover’s way of setting their applicants apart even more than they already are under the andover name, because it isn’t the same as the usual grading system that an algorithm deals with. that’s just a theory.
i doubt an andover graduate could ever be that disadvantaged in the application process. at the very most, they would be considered at the same level as an applicant who goes to a preparatory school. connections and prestige is something that kind of comes with the boarding school process, which is something that attracts a lot of families who don’t have those kind of connections already.
so, i don’t think that andover students could be hurt much in the applications process, by the grades or otherwise. unless they have done something very wrong or unless their application just is bad overall (which is unlikely as an andover grad).
This is anecdotal, but I spoke with a private admissions consultant to try and help my kid get into their top choice Ivy. I was told that admissions officers want to see mostly straight-A’s even at fancy, grade-deflating prep schools like Andover, Choate, Exeter, Harvard-Westlake, etc.
My nephew has a 3.76 at Lawrenceville in rigorous classes, and we were told that he has “no chance” at Ivies, even though we know he would’ve easily gotten a 4.3+ GPA at a random public school in Texas or wherever.
The grade deflation hurts the kids at these prep schools. Everyone knows it. Admissions officers have shifted away from the SAT/ACT in recent years and are leaning more heavily on GPA. Since Andover students can’t rely on stellar test scores to help counteract their lower GPAs, they are basically disadvantaged in the entire process. Andover seems to have responded by just artificially reweighing their GPAs to be comparable to public school students.
Furthermore, colleges have taken other tools elite prep schools leaned on in the past. College counselors can no longer call the admissions officers to vouch for students because it’s a sign of “privilege.”
Since elite admissions is obsessed with equity, it seems like colleges are now treating elite prep schools with the exact same rubric and expectations they do random public schools where half the class graduates with a 4.4 GPA even though the median SAT is only 1150.
Blame Andover all you want, but they’re responding to the new reality of college admissions. The “A ‘B+’ average is fine because it’s [insert fancy prep school here]” line no longer works in college admissions.
I can’t comment on Andover, but I heard 20 years ago from Exeter (where I’m an alum) that their hand was forced by colleges to show that their grads were competitive with other applicants. So yes, applicants are judged against their classmates but not in a vacuum.
This is spot on. I do think there is still an advantage in that the course work at elite schools gets weighted because of academic rigor. Maybe not in the GPA (elite schools don’t seem to have weighted GPAs) but in the assessment in the college admissions offices. (The “recalculated” GPA)
The problem is not that the 3.76 prep school kid would have been better off with a 4.3 at his local school, but that there are too many kids at the prep school with higher than 3.76 GPAs. And many many kids at their local school who have 4.3 GPAs are also not getting into Ivies.
“The problem is not that the 3.76 prep school kid would have been better off with a 4.3 at his local school, but that there are too many kids at the prep school with higher than 3.76 GPAs.”
This is absolutely true. I know someone who graduated from a GLADCHEMMS a few years ago. He is a very bright, amazing person, got into several good BSs. While he had been at the top of his middle school, once he got to BS, he was in the middle of the class. Still an amazing student with great grades, but a lot of kids at his school with higher GPAs. The college counselors did not recommend he apply to any Ivies, and he found this disappointing. They really discouraged him from applying to certain schools, and while he could have still applied, he didn’t since the college counselors are the ones writing the school recommendations. He ended up still at a very prestigious “little ivy” but he definitely did not like how the whole college process was handled. There is definitely something to be said for being a big fish in a smaller pond vs. being a medium or small fish in a big pond.
The number of students accepted to the top colleges seems to be fairly stable over the last few years. Some years a little more, some years a little less. But overall roughly the same.
I’d say students from the grade deflation schools are clearly disadvantaged at big public universities. They seem to rely more on the numbers, and a lower gpa is certainly a bad thing.
The Ivies all talk about how many valedictorians they reject every year. It’s just an extremely competitive landscape, no matter how high one’s GPA is.
It’s easy to think “oh if only I’d been at a school where I was the top of the class” but you really don’t know that you would have been at the top somewhere else OR that it would have made a difference.
But I agree w poster above that absolutely GPA does make a difference at large public universities. I believe they have to screen on that basis given the number of applicants.
IIRC, back in the day, the UC schools had a formula that was really tough to navigate if you were coming from a boarding school where grades were significantly lower AND didn’t offer AP or honors classes.
How does PEAs grade distribution and rigor compare with that of PA. I hear that there is significant grade deflation at Groton, Deerfield and SPS also which seems counterintuitive for this current generation. I don’t know how these students fare at State public flagships compared to the T10. Groton seems to send more to the T10 than others inspite of the relative grade deflation
It’s not grade deflation for why prep school kids aren’t getting into Ivy League schools. The reason is these schools don’t really want tremendously advantaged and privileged kids. These are kids that already have some of the best connections and best education in the world. The Ivies (and similar) would like to admit stellar kids who haven’t already had every advantage. It is not the GPA that’s the issue.
Maybe it should be rephrased as “these schools don’t want too many tremendously advantaged and privileged kids”, because it certainly appears that having some such students is part of their business model (and legacy and development admission preferences exist for that reason).
But they still want to leave at least a little space for the strivers from poor to upper middle class families and the true academic superstars in order to prevent themselves from being seen as merely finishing schools for the scions of the upper class.
And another way to phrase it is that some of these prep school kids are so impressive that even though the Ivy would prefer not to have prep school kids, they overcame the bias against them.
Of course there are competing institutional needs. Some of these schools also want to admit future leaders, and for example that need may take precedence over deemphasizing prep school kids.
Andover grad here. Does PA still grade on a scale of 1-6 rather than letter grades? I assumed that was what the OP was asking about, and that the 5.0 conversion to 4.0 refers to the PA’s unique grading rubric.
When I attended, it was almost unheard of to get a 6 in more than 1 or 2 classes - 6’s were reserved for exceptional, superstar aptitude. Nobody and I mean nobody got straight 6’s. 5’s and 6’s were both considered an A. When converting our grades to the standard letter grading scale, 5’s and 6’s were both converted to A’s. Anyone know if they still use that grading scale? (which I believe they adopted a long time ago to discourage students from overly obsessing about their grades lol)
I wouldn’t feel bad about how they grade at Andover. My nephew who is a freshman at Stanford (and was rejected by Andover when he applied) tells me there are 3 from Andover in his freshman dorm and that’s just at one dorm.
I can’t think of many schools that send 3+ to Stanford year in and year out especially from the East coast.
Yes, according to https://www.andover.edu/files/Profile20222023.pdf . That page also lists a conversion chart to a 4.0 scale. Basically they say that PA6 = 4.3 implying A+, PA5 to PA1 = 4 to 0 implying A to F, PA0 = 0 implying F-.
Thanks - so nothing has changed! PA’s grading scale already baked in its rigor by having the top two grades both covert to A’s. I guess the acceleration of the whole AP point accumulation strategy nationwide throws that off. Still, I would never consider a PA student disadvantaged in college admissions. Students may be disadvantaged at certain schools because they are essentially competing against other PA students, but as a whole they are wildly advantaged in so many ways.
ETA: the biggest advantage, of course, being the quality of education which sometimes gets lost in these discussions about college placement and Ivy quotas. If more parents approached these schools not as a stepping stone but as a destination in and of themselves, they would save themselves and their children a lot of anguish. The reality is that Ivy acceptance has become an absurd crapshoot for almost everyone, and if there’s any tiny slice of high schools that have an undeniable advantage, it’s the top handful of BS’s including PA (along with a handful of selective publics in major metros). A 4.3 student from a good public school in Texas has very little shot at an Ivy, something that this website will confirm!
Part of the problem is that a student at Lville, who has a 3.76 gpa, falls in the 50th percentile (or around there, I cant remember all the details, but know that a 3.8 at Lville is only in the top 40% of the class) for gpa. So yes, its harder to get at 4.0 at a school like Lville, but there are still a lot of kids accomplishing it.