<p>Marite, I was referring to the study – they reported that the GPA had no discernable SES bias – that is, the State of California is full of poor kids coming from lower SES schools with high GPA’s. It’s not what I “think” - it’s the premise of the report that was done (and some poster, perhaps Kluge, linked to earlier in this thread).</p>
<p>But if you think about it, then it stands to reason that the applicant pool for the UC’s is going to have a good balance of lower SES kids – GPA is class “neutral” because schools are class neutral. There are far more public schools than private – if you just assembled the one top-ranked student from every high school in the state, the demographics would lean toward the middle/lower middle class.</p>
<p>Of course on an individual basis some kids from disadvantaged schools are at a competitive disadvantage within their school – but on a GROUP basis if the goal of the UC regents is to avoid socio-economic bias in their admissions system, then reliance on GPA is not a biasing factor that undermines that goal. Reliance on the SAT is known to be – the correlation between high scores and high SES is very clear and long established.</p>
<p>Hmmm. Kluge had some reservations about the GPA. SAT was corrected for SES but not GPA, if I read his post correctly.</p>
<p>Schools are not homogeneous. There can be huge ethnic and class discrepancy within a single school. Last year, a retiring social studies teacher made a plea to the community. He observed that in the AP-US history class he taught, every single kid had access to a computer at home. In the CP class, 1/3 did not have access to a computer. The students in the CP class had a very different demographic profile from those in the AP class.</p>
<p>Another tidbit: Our district initiated a controlled choice system back in 1981 to avoid compulsory desegregation. A few years back taking into account recent court decisions, it decided to use SES instead of race as the key factor in school assignment. Just last month, the district reported that the schools are becoming more racially imbalanced. We have a large proportion of families who are recent immigrants, and moreover, probably more diverse in their origins than many CA communities. With something like 27 languages spoken in the high school, it is not possible to make provisions for all students. </p>
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<p>I don’t understand this statement. What group would that be? In our chools (48% minorities) the AP students have been shown to be overwhelmingly whites and Asians and mostly middle class, with college-educated parents (including the recent immigrants with wobbly English).</p>
<p>Marite, please go read the study. I don’t have the time right now to pull it up and quote from it. Keep in mind that the UC system calculates GPA by its own standards and it limits the number of AP/weighted grades – so you can’t have a situation where some kid has 11 APs boosting their GPA. So we really aren’t talking about an applicant pool where there is a high degree of gaming the GPA calculation.</p>
<p>But whether it’s 1 or 11 AP, the population of students in AP classes is different from that in CP classes. In fact, the same students can be found in multiple AP classes, since many are linked (AP-USH and AP-American Lit; AP-Euro and AP-English; AP-Calc and AP-Physics). The same students can be found in AP classes that are not linked as well. Our school does not weight at all, so if there is any gaming, it is by students taking easier courses for easy As. </p>
<p>What I got from Kluge is that the UC study seems to have been done with a view to de-emphasizing the importance of SAT scores; hence the application of SES to SAT but not to GPA. It wanted a certain result and it got it. That does not seem to me to be a very good way to go about research.</p>
<p>This is the statement that, in my opinion, needs better supporting evidence than what is provided in this quote. Why should variations in grading standards across high school diminish the impact of SES on High school GPAs?
Maybe the reasoning applies only to CA and the UC system? </p>
<p>The SATII is more closely aligned with the high school curriculum than the SAT1 (low predictive value, susceptible to SES impact). But if CA students are similar to students in other states, SAT-II takers are a self-selected group, better qualified on the whole than those who only take the SAT, generally more likely to be from a higher SES background, and more likely to apply to top schools which make up the majority of the 60 or so schools requiring SATIIs.</p>
<p>i think it’s also related to economic background and extra curriculars
i mean, if the kid came from a stable family and didn’t participate in a lot of extra curriculars, he/she would have more time to study/cram/rote learn for these tests</p>
<p>marite, I’m going to weigh in here because I have knowledge of the CA public school system, as I teach in it & been a consultant as well in many districts. Now, I believe you with regard to one or more East coast public schools, but the kind of economic variation you describe in your area would be far less true – in fact virtually nonexistent – in public schools in CA. Increasingly, they have become economically & even racially de facto segregated over the last about 10 years. There are precious few high-rent school districts, and they enroll well-heeled families, nearly homogeneously. A few of those will allow inter-district transfers IF the district of residence will also permit that (& the poorest districts tend not to – as strapped as they are for funds, which are tied to attendance); this obviously limits the kind of discrepancies between AP classes & CP classes in any given school, such as you describe. The discrepancies in these classes in almost all schools which offer both, are differences in ability and/or motivation, but not SES, as the student bodies are quite homogeneous.</p>
<p>The vast majority of publics are attended by under-represented minorities, of low SES: Latino mostly, secondarily African-American, thirdly Southeast Asian (or, in the more central urban areas, East Asian). There are precious few true Magnet schools in the sense that they attract a diverse student body (economically & racially). There are some arts magnets: some but very few have diverse student bodies; the rest are 85%+ low-SES. I can think immediately of one arts school and one arts+technology school consisting overwhelmingly of low-SES populations. For one of them at least, the hope had been to become an integrated magnet, but this has not happened. The white+Asian flight to expensive districts & to privates has been enormous.</p>
<p>That’s another point where the authors try very hard to paper over inconvenient findings that support SAT over GPA.</p>
<p>They found, consistently, that the effect of math subject tests was negative, and that the math II had strong negative effects that tended to exceed the positive weights of all other factors (including socioeconomics and high school quality) except GPA and SAT Writing score. What this reveals, of course, is not that math hurts your college performance (all the SAT math scores were good predictors of college results) but a rather strong negative effect on 4-year GPA of majoring in quantitative subjects.</p>
<p>This is seen also in the table of separate regressions by major. The math score is a strong positive predictor of GPA for the science majors, but becomes a strong negative predictor for social science specialists; economics is harder than anthropology.</p>
<p>It is notable that when broken down by major, even after taking account of the SES factors (a way of artificially disfavoring SAT), the overall SAT contribution appears to exceed that of GPA, and certainly rivals it. The same is true without control for major, but it is more visible when choice of major is taken into account.</p>
<p>Overall, the tests are confirmed as exceeding GPA in predictivity, but the self-selection into harder majors (and harder courses) by students with higher test results wipes out a substantial part of the visible test-score correlation. If college GPA were weighted for difficulty of material, the predictivity of SATs and APs would increase further.</p>
<p>Marite, epiphany’s experience is the same as my own - rich kids are a scarce commodity in most California public schools. I’d also like to point out that since the UC system requires SAT II’s and always has, all UC-bound students take the test – it is not connected to a group any more “select” thanks the UC applicants. It is true that the vast majority of lower income high school grads will head off to the community colleges or CSUs, for financial reasons as well as academic – but the UC system wasn’t concerned about CSU students when they did that study - they were looking at their own applicant pool.</p>
<p>And the one thing that California high school counselors do know and tend to get right are the UC admission requirements – so kids usually are advised in a timely fashion as to what tests they need to take.</p>
<p>Thanks, calmom and epiphany for the explanation. Some years ago, I was told that Berkeley High was very much like our school, bi-modal. The gap between SES groups and racial groups is not limited to MA; CA may be an exception.</p>
<p>One other thing that puzzled me about the handling of GPA. If schools themselves have homogeneous student bodies, the schools themselves are not identical. So the GPA at one school may mean a different level of achievement from the GPA at another. This indeed is what has made the TX 10% solution so problematic. How does the UC admission system handle such discrepancy?</p>
<p>I thought I’d post a reply in this thread to FAQify some of the good ideas that parents have for students preparing to apply for college. Yes, test scores are important, but a lot of other issues are important too, so the issues mentioned in the quotations here are issues students should keep in mind as they prepare for their college applications. </p>
<p>Marite, my kids and your kids went to public high schools that were economically diverse. But I suspect that, even in the Northeast, outside of a handful of schools in places like Cambridge, Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, most schools are not economically diverse at all.</p>
<p>JHS, you are probably right, but although the schools themselves may be fairly homogeneous, what about different schools, whole districts or even states? Isn’t this a problem for the TX approach of admitting the top 10% of graduating classes without regard to the actual level of rigor of each school’s curriculum?
Is a 4.00 GPA the same whether it’s earned at a school in an affluent suburb or in a poor neighborhood in LA? Both would probably have homogeneous student bodies, and within their internal context, a 4.00 would be better than a 3.7. But would a 4.00 in one school be better than a 3.7 at the other?
We know that some adcoms informally take into account where GPAs are earned (hence the angst over grading practices at powerhouses such as TJHS, Stuy, or Exeter).</p>
<p>"So the GPA at one school may mean a different level of achievement from the GPA at another. "</p>
<p>^^My point exactly. (What have I been kvetching about elsewhere, at times, on CC, LOL?) Exactly that. You can erase that “may,” marite. Worse, you have the example of the small number of very rigorous independent privates in CA, some of which are patterned after, and produce students like, those who graduate from E.Coast prep schools. Those seniors are royally you-know-what when it comes to “comparable grade comparisons.” </p>
<p>The CA public school standards, both literally and practically, are not, for example, what they are in Northern Virginia. Not what they are in Indiana or Colorado or Minnesota. </p>
<p>Now, I can understand, from an “equality” standpoint, the 15.5% broad state “eligibility index” for U.C., and the 10% factor for TX. But the reality is that the differences among schools in my own state are indeed vast, both among publics, and even more so between independent privates and most publics.</p>
<p>“We know that some adcoms informally take into account where GPAs are earned (hence the angst over grading practices at powerhouses such as TJHS, Stuy, or Exeter).”</p>
<p>…^^ admissions committees of private colleges, yes, not of U.C. Now, it will become evident upon closer reading of a h.s.transcript that a particular student has taken & excelled at classes that may not be available at most publics, but even there, the content & demands of an AP class at an independent private can be vastly different than at even a high-rent public. The reason that I know this is the number of the latter whose students routinely take double-digit #'s of AP classes while maintaining high levels of e.c. involvement & managing A’s. In most of those cases the students are merely studying for the exams. Such a load would be impossible for even the geniuses at my D’s school, and has been. Even the demands of the non-AP classes would never permit such loads.</p>
<p>(And a student is evaluated by U.C. for “challenging course load” – as one is so evaluated by private colleges, but for the former, without regard to the content of those courses. It looks as if a student from a public, with “more” such courses ON PAPER than those from a private, has been challenged more, when that can be far from accurate. For private colleges, this is corrected by reviewing recommendations, but U.C. does not permit recommendations.)</p>
<p>Thanks. This is why I am so mystified by the claim that GPA is a better predictor of college success, that there is no need to correct of SES as there is for the SAT.</p>
<p>Calmom - You’re absolutely right about the social policy issues which support UC’s use of GPA over test scores in admissions - and I agree with that policy. Particularly in light of the fact that UC is a taxpayer-funded school, using a selection method which is SES-neutral and reasonably predictive is, in my opinion, the correct decision. </p>
<p>My concerns with the study are analytical, not policy-based. I think the results have been misrepresented in a way which misled you (and me as well, I’d add) to believe something which apparently is not true: that test scores have little or no correlation with collegiate success. In fact, they do have such a correlation, and the correlation is roughly equal to or greater than the correlation between high school grades and collegiate success. That doesn’t mean I support changing UC’s policies. I just like to understand what the data actually shows.</p>
<p>Marite: Your description of Berkeley High is accurate, but Berkeley is a very unusual situation. Most of California’s high schools are located in fairly homogeneous (SES-wise) communities; either high, low, or middling. It’s pretty unusual to have a school with a mixture of radically different SES level students.</p>
<p>Regarding GPA from different high schools: I can’t speak to privates, but the CSU system has a system which tracks the collegiate success of students at each CSU campus by high school. (CSU’s are California’s second-tier colleges, generally designed to take students who don’t qualify for UC) The average high school GPA of all students at the CSU campus is noted, the average freshman GPA of all students is noted, and the high school and freshman GPA of students from each high school is also noted. From that data it’s possible to note which high schools give out lower GPA’s for the same level of student ability. The high-SES public schools in my vicinity all are tougher graders (by this standard) than the state average. UC definitely does not take this into account in admissions. I don’t know if private colleges do or not.</p>
<p>“This is why I am so mystified by the claim that GPA is a better predictor of college success.”</p>
<p>Without knowledge of content of that GPA, I think it is a weak predictor. However, as a model, as a tool, it more closely resembles the task of college than an SAT score does – the task being long, sustained absorption and application of classroom learning as revealed in a variety of assessments (participation, non-scantron testing, research papers, projects, laboratory work, etc.)
WITH knowledge of content, I view it as a strong predictor.</p>
<p>Well, if nothing else, the two UC studies do show one thing: neither grades nor test scores are a “strong predictor.” Three quarters of the variation in collegiate success appears to be unrelated to either one. (Understanding that the study was limited to students who actually met UC’s minimum standards and were admitted to and enrolled in one of the UC campuses.)</p>
<p>Epiphany:
I have absolutely no quarrel with your description. My question relates to 1. grading practices and 2. the relationship between SES and GPA. As Kluge notes in post #158, there is one. </p>
<p>Kluge: Since it is possible to note which hs give out lower GPAs, is this taken into account? It is possible, but has research been done?</p>
<p>SATII scores are better predictors than SAT scores because they align with specific curricula better and are less vulnerable to grading vagaries than GPAs.</p>