“80% of the colleges in the U.S. accept 80% or more of the students who apply. So this question is ONLY relevant to the small number of colleges that have selective and national/international admissions pools.”
I should have considered that, @northwesty I don’t know if your numbers are right, but the concept certainly is true.
“Nobody gets into Stanford or MIT on the basis of whether their HS has grade inflation or not.”
This may be true. I don’t know, which is one reason I even started to read this thread. But, please consider the other important aspect of admissions for many of us on CC – merit aid. In the competitive world of merit aid (and I know the Ivies don’t generally offer merit aid, so this doesn’t apply to them), GPA and grade inflation comes into play quite a bit. Yep, an adcom can tell my kid didn’t take AP Chemistry. Will that adcom be able to tell that he signed up for it but the school moved him to general chemistry because only two students signed up? I haven’t seen the profile schools send with transcripts, but I’m guessing ours would show AP Chemistry in the class offerings – it’s listed in the course catalog as one of the few AP classes available.
Perhaps more unusually, will the adcom know that the school had one grading policy through his freshman year and another his sophomore and junior years, and a third his senior year, all of which resulted in different grade points for the same percentage score? This is actually my biggest concern – not grade inflation per se, but a weird grading history that needs some explanation when it comes down to a fluctuating GPA that may make a difference in scholarship awards.
Sorry if that’s too off topic.