I am curious how pervasive grade inflation (or a lack thereof) is at your child’s high school.
I keep hearing that there is a lot of grade inflation. But my perspective is limited to what I can see at my D’s high school.
At my daughter’s Catholic high school…we don’t have grade inflation.
A review of our Scoir data shows that there are many kids walking around with lower than a 3.0 GPA and almost no one has a perfect 4.0 GPA. My daughter’s sports teams always have kids who are academically ineligible or on probation.
But that is our experience. What is your experience?
There was a lot at my high school. 3.85 average GPA when our average SAT was <1000. Not a perfect indicator, but it proves something was going on. No one should come out with an A in Algebra 2 and score that low on the SAT.
Definitely not at our high school. It’s a very academically challenging school and my kids have had to work their butts off for their grades. However, other people’s mileage may vary elsewhere.
D is ranked 15/322 (top 4%) with a 4.3/3.79. Based on that I’m guessing only a handful of kids have an unweighted 4.0. So I think the answer is ‘no’ for her school.
Not at my son’s school and we have a bit of a complex seeing all the 4.0+ here on CC. My son is in the top 10% of his school with a 3.7 weighted and high rigor. His principal wrote him a college rec saying he was one of the top students during his tenure. But he’s NEVER cracked 4.0, and I think the valedictorian has a 3.9.
When he posted a Chance/Match he was originally told that all of the schools on his list were hopeless, but we are hopeful that he will be judged in the context of his school and district. He already has one target school acceptance so we’ll see how it plays out.
Good point. In our case, Scoir does give us 5 years worth of admissions results.
A quick, non-scientific look tells me that the grades that people receive has not changed in 5 years. But the grades people need to get into selective colleges has increased a little. Perhaps not surprising.
Our school has no A+ grade. So the first A- that you get…you can kiss 4.0 goodbye.
Looking at our Scoir data…no one has an unweighted 4.0 in the last 5 years.
Grade inflation, I think, can get out of hand when schools just use A, B, C, D, grading with no + or - grades. All those A minuses get rounded up to As.
If you are in the top 10% of your high school class in the state of Texas, you are automatically admitted to Texas A&M (not necessarily for all majors). I think it was in last year’s Texas A&M thread where someone asked for opinions about their chance for admission. They weren’t an auto-admit (meaning they weren’t in the top 10% of their class) but they had a 4.0 UW GPA. If more than 1 out of 10 students have a perfect UW GPA, how is that not a red flag to the school district?
It’s funny, we were just talking about this on another thread…many schools, especially those that don’t rank, aren’t sharing GPA info on their school profiles.
I don’t think you should be concerned. Most schools don’t rank anymore…last I saw it’s about 1/3 of them, and many of those are in Texas. Your student’s transcript will be evaluated in the context of the school’s offerings…core courses, rigor, GPA.
Some HS counselors will share some additional rank/relative performance info with AOs if they call and ask. Other HS counselors might put something in their LoR like “if we did rank this kid would be in the top 5%” or “if you are going to take just one kid from this class, take this one”. You might ask your kid’s counselor if they share any rank/relative performance info in their counselor report or LoR.
Grade inflation, I think, can get out of hand when schools just use A, B, C, D, grading with no + or - grades. All those A minuses get rounded up to As.
Easy fix that would probably solve the problem.
I have to admit…when I was in college I had “whole letter grading.” This benefited me tremendously. Most of my As were probably actually A-'s.
Only 1/3? Very interesting. Thank you. My understanding is also that AO’s for selective colleges often look at all of the applicants from a given high school at the same time OR (if EA/ED) may refer to the previous year’s applicants.
That’s from our school profile: the median weighted GPA is 3.7, so I would think some inflation but not hyper inflation. The highest weighted GPA is “only” 4.35 which doesn’t seem very high compared to some I’ve seen on CC.
