However, could it be that many students with grade-inflated 3.9-4.0 GPAs think that they have enough of a chance of admission to super-selective schools so that they think it is worth applying there?
@ucbalumnus Having served on an Adcom, I believe these students do come to this conclusion. Alas, the highly competitive universities have regional admissions counsellors. One of my jobs was to identify these schools so we could take such things into consideration. We did this in the same way as we “de-weighted” all GPAs. Our Admissions techs recalculated GPAs removing some courses (phys ed) and adding back in others as a matter of policy (music, art, independent study). I’m sure the same happens elsewhere.
For the record, this school is a top 40 school–not super elite, but not chopped liver either. I believe I received an honest answer since this adcom is someone I was friends with in high school and coincidentally saw again at an admissions event. The GC/coach’s wife feels her kids get a raw deal compared to the area private school kids due to less flexible policies and far greater competition for leadership roles and spots on teams, etc.
IMO opinion, even if an adcom knows intellectually that high school A has a graduating class of 60, while B has a graduating class of 600, I think it’s hard to not be swayed by award and titles. Frankly, an exceptional student at A is going to have a much greater chance of being Val, Class President, first chair saxophone, and Captain of the soccer team. Not that those alone will earn him a spot at Harvard, but a kid can be far less stellar and still achieve such honors at average private A more easily than at average public B (obviously there are exceptions, eg. the private school’s lacrosse team might be better than any of the local publics). Our high school’s val and sals are always NMF’s, for example, whereas D had teammates who were vals at their private schools with SAT scores of 1800–1900. Kids with those scores aren’t even going to be top 5% at our school. My pet peeve is that clubs at our high school only meet after school. So an athlete can’t participate unless he regularly skips practice–something varsity athletes don’t typically do and nor do most coaches permit them to as the only legal excuse is illness or a medical appointment. At the local privates, Wednesday afternoons are an activity period when club meetings are held. So everyone can and does participate in several clubs, and the athletes don’t miss out and thus don’t look as one-dimensional as they do at the large public.
Kids applying to a whole gamut of schools . At our school , the top 10 students vying for HYPSM also applied to schools like U Mich , G Tech , U DUB etc. that made it impossible for the 2nd and 3rd tier kids to get into these schools which would otherwise have been an target for them