No, dadoftwingirls, that’s simply not true. Some schools use A+, A, A- and weight accordingly. Some weight for honors courses, some don’t. Some schools still use an actual number grade - 91, 92, 93, whatever. Everyone here is talking about how their school did it, as though that’s universal.
What HS grade inflation does lead to is lots of rude awakenings freshman year of college.
I wish I went to a school with grade inflation. Most of my teachers teach to the AP tests (which is another issue in and of itself), so they’d rather you get a B in the class and a 5 on the AP test than an A and a 3 or 4. That’s what happened to me in Calc. I think it’s super unfair looking at all the people who seem to do well in school classes but don’t do well on the AP tests.
The top 10%, unweighted, at my school is like 3.95. Pretty much everyone has all A’s. The only way to differentiate yourself is to get 5s on the AP exams, the SAT, and extracurriculars.
@cobrat, @Pizzagirl, Geez, I apologize for not annotating the 3000 possible methods of grading and methods to select the #1 student.
Typical at our local high school (a public school in a high achieving area, where the majority of parents are highly educated, and students expect to go on to college. Many students will go on to "top"colleges.
Teacher hands out class syllabus the first day of school, one copy of which which must be signed by a parent and returned.
Item one on the class syllabus rules is “I do not give extra credit.”
Teacher reviews class syllabus with students the first day of school and with parents at parent night.
The day the first test results are recieved, immediately after class 10 students approach the teacher and say, “What can I do for extra credit?”
“I dont’t give extra credit in this class.”
“That’s not faaaiiiiirrrr!”
Later that evening the tracher receives several phone calls and emails from parents about their child’s grade, requesting a way for the child to earn extra credit.
“What HS grade inflation does lead to is lots of rude awakenings freshman year of college.”
I completely agree, @4gulls. But to some extent that has always been true. I remember an excellent high school teacher of mine, almost 40 years ago, giving out two grades on every essay in our senior year English class–the high school grade (which is the one he recorded for the course) and the college grade (just to let us know what the standards were going to be when we got to college). I remember watching anxiously over the course of the year as my grades went from B/D to A/C to A/B and finally to A/A. When I actually got to college I was pleasantly surprised to find his judgment confirmed and extremely grateful that he had prepared me for higher standards.
Excellent ^^, @profparent.
Weighted grade systems do push many weighted GPAs over 4.0. But from what I saw of the IB program at the local IB magnet hs,my kids attended, the IB students work A LOT harder for their grades than I did 30 years ago. The AP courses were often challenging too, but they were not as consistently tough.
While my HS teachers didn’t provide 2 sets of grades as yours did, a few…particularly one with whom I had a serious personality conflict in 9th grade emphasized how much harder college was compared to HS.
Oddly enough, once I actually attended college despite my abysmal HS GPA, I found my experience was nearly the complete opposite. I found my undergrad Profs at a top 25 LAC and a couple of elite Us and a few grad Profs at an elite U graded much more leniently than my HS teachers.
If I had to choose between HS and college Profs for leniency in grading…the college/grad school Profs win by a landslide IME.
When I worked in college admissions, we had regional responsibilities. We were responsible for knowing the schools in our area and for feeding that information into the evaluation process. While we always “de-weighted” grades as a matter of practice, we also knew which schools graded more easily etc. That’s why there is such a variation in GPAs.
Not an issue at all.
The colleges are very adept at reading and assessing HS transcripts. End of the day, they are looking for the highest ranked students from the school. While fewer HSs are ranking their students these days, the colleges are easily able to back into the data they want – who are the best students.
The driver is that the admissions market for top colleges used to be quite local and regional. Now it is national and increasingly international. Standardized tests, IT advances, cheap plane travel, the Common App and the USNWR rankings have all played a huge part in broadening the pool.
In the old days, a kid in the northeast with a top 5% SAT score would apply and get into Harvard. Today, a NE kid with a top 1% SAT score still applies to Harvard, but also applies to Stanford and Duke and Vanderbilt and Penn. And may not get into any of them.
In fact, that was the original purpose of the SAT. It was specifically adopted by Harvard President Conant as the tool that Harvard could use to identify talented students outside their regional pool of applicants dominated by New England boarding school students. It definitely did the trick.
This is very interesting to me. I constantly marvel at all the high GPAs parents and students quote on CC, even considering that those on here are likely to reflect top students, often at top high schools in parts of the country that offer a lot more advanced options and treat college prep much differently than my kids’ schools. I can’t figure out how some of those UW GPAs are even possible for a student that studies all the time, much less has time to compete in various out-of-state competitions, volunteer a ton of hours and take on several leadership roles. I’m not saying that anyone has not earned it – many kudos to those students and their parents – I’m just saying it’s beyond my experience.
Our children went to two separate Iowa high schools, and I didn’t see a lot of grade inflation, although some teachers made it very hard to do poorly. But, when my daughter went to an out of state flagship, we did not believe her when she said that a 90% was the same as a 99% as far as GPA was concerned. We’d never even considered such a thing. If I mention it to other parents, they argue with me thinking I must not understand. When our HS son toured the same college and we visited with an adcom, who was responsible for recruiting from our (nearby) state, I asked about the grading policy. His comment: “I’ve never heard of another way to do that.”
So, while maybe certain elite schools have admissions folks that are carefully weighing HS GPA and determining how accurate it is due to different grading systems, I don’t believe the majority of colleges are doing that. I know my anecdote is limited to one university, but how can a limited admissions staff know how all high schools, even in a particular region of the country, are grading? I’m pretty sure an application to an elite from either of my kids’ high schools is pretty rare. Like maybe 1 every 5 or 10 years rare. I doubt anyone at Yale or Harvard has a clue about my son’s school’s grading system and they would have to rely on class rank and standardized testing scores.
“So, while maybe certain elite schools have admissions folks that are carefully weighing HS GPA and determining how accurate it is due to different grading systems, I don’t believe the majority of colleges are doing that.”
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. And those colleges absolutely know how to make judgments between different HS grading systems.
At those few schools, the adcoms literally do this thousands and thousands of times each admissions cycle. It really is pretty easy to do.
“but how can a limited admissions staff know how all high schools, even in a particular region of the country, are grading?”
Because it is their job to know how to do that at the HSs within their region. And the high schools provide copious data to the colleges to help them with that job. Every HS transcript today is accompanied by a detailed HS “profile” that enables this process.
The admissions office wants you to believe they truly know the high schools. However, I directly questioned a seasoned adcom at one of D’s schools for which the majority of students come from our state. She had absolutely no clue about certain realities at our large high school and we do send kids there. She also admitted that if a high school is unusual in some way that affects a kid’s transcript or EC record, that is never a good thing because they likely won’t be aware the school is any different from the norm. I also talked with a coach at that same college who said his wife is a GC at the local public high school and has personally experienced that adcoms often have no idea about the context of her school.
“However, I directly questioned a seasoned adcom at one of D’s schools for which the majority of students come from our state.”
So what college are we talking about? Most schools don’t need to do this and don’t do this. But the highly selective ones absolutely do this.
For example, it is very easy to determine what math classes a particular HS offers. So it is therefore easy to discriminate between a kid who only took regular math classes and got an A. Versus a kid that got an A in AP Calc BC.
Who then also got a 5 on the Calc BC AP test. Who then also got an 800 on the Math 2 SAT subject test. Who then also had a rec letter from the math teacher saying the kid is the best math student he has ever seen in 20 years of teaching.
Nobody gets into Stanford or MIT on the basis of whether their HS has grade inflation or not.
“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.
“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.”
The profile that my kid’s HS sends specifically covered all those points. That HS had a harsher grading scale which they changed mid-stream into an easier/inflated one. The profile and the transcript went into detail about what the change was and when it took effect so the transcripts could be viewed apples-to-apples.
Bottom line, the very selective schools are basically looking for the kids in the top 10% or higher in their class. All the GPA and other info is just a workaround for HSs that don’t rank students.
On your merit aid point. Merit aid awards are significantly driven by the metrics that the colleges report (in their Common Data Sets) and that USNWR and others rank on. That means SAT scores, ACT scores, and the % of kids in the top 10% of their class. So again, GPA is just a proxy for class rank.
My children attended a HS that had never had a student graduate with a 4.0 (unweighted)GPA. Even the kid that had perfect scores on the ACT, SAT, and a dozen APs did not have a 4.0 at this school. This was not clearly explained in the profile. The senior class averages about 50 students, and usually has 5-9 NMFs. It is not uncommon for NMFs with ACT scores above 32 to not be in the top 10% of their graduating class, since the top 10% is generally just 5 students. And as mentioned by @IABooks, the school began very small weighting of some courses part of the way through my kids’ attendance, but this was not explained in the profile.
Dusing – so do those NMFs at that HS ever get admitted to selective colleges? Or are they doomed to non-selective colleges due to the unexplained grade deflation at their school?
I’m guessing the kids do just fine. The colleges likely can figure out who the smart kids are based on their class rank, AP scores, NMF status etc.
Adcoms are in the business of reading college applications. So they probably can figure out how a 3.8 U/W and top 15% at Awesome STEM Charter High School compares to a 4.0 (with few or no AP classes) and a top 10% from Not Very Academic High School.