<p>A Ct. school uses an intriguing “new way to think about grades” in the college admissions process which its inventor, R. Hartranft thinks of as a "G.P.S. navigation system, as opposed to scraps of maps … If all you have are scraps of maps, which is all that admissions offices get in the existing protocol, then this gives you an overall orientation.” According to this article, interest goes beyond local school administrators since some college admissions deans like Mr. Hartranft’s attempt to create a new analytical methodology.</p>
<p>A parent in Connecticut was concerned that students at the “Hard Grading” high school his son had attended were “losing ground in college admissions”. </p>
<p>To combat this, he applied the analytical skills he acquired as a nuclear engineer to develop a way to compare GPA’s from different high schools.</p>
<p>Whew. It is a huge amount of research and I couldn’t even pretend to be able to evaluate its validity. but I actually think it has promise (and I’m always in the camp that bemoans overreliance on SAT scores). But his use of them as a basis for trying to determine “what it takes to get an A” across various schools is intriguing. </p>
<p>My prediction: those of us from states he shows to have A’s you really have to work for will like his system a lot better than those from states on the lower half of the graph (the “easy A” states). ;)</p>
<p>I skimmed the newspaper article but balked at his website. This does not address all the ways grades can be calculated- for example, lower grades for not doing homework, the percentiles used to decide letter grades, the material covered, etc., etc. There aren’t enough spots at any one elite college to admit all the good candidates; I’m sure if he lived where the rest of us do (outside the richest school districts) he would have found a way to justify a way to get more of the many talented but less advantaged students an edge in the admissions process… </p>
<p>Caught jmmom’s reply just now-Won’t rewrite the above (spent too long composing…). I don’t think you can go as large as state by state, perhaps more like district by district. I’m sure the east coast states would love to go back to the old days when they didn’t have to worry about the competition from the rest of the country, and the elite high schools that don’t care about the rest of their area look for ways to maintain the status quo. The “haves” and “have nots”. Can I be an egalitarian elitist???</p>
<p>Warning- don’t try to watch TV and respond to a subject you have a passion for; I’m going to quit here. Good luck understanding my post, I can’t waste any more time on it. So I get a C or D on it…</p>
<p>Question? Doesn’t the SAT lean a little toward being an aptitude test and not just a reflection on what the student knows? If so, and I may be wrong on that, why would you factor an aptitude test into a GPA which should reflect learning?</p>
<p>Perhaps the SAT lls or the ACT would be a better choice.</p>
<p>I have posted on quite a few CC threads on the subject of the SAT and grades. No surprise then that my interest is piqued when it comes to any effort to try to determine when an “A” is an “A” and a “B” is a B. Whether because of grade inflation, tough academic standards, or teachers that come and go, each one using large doses of subjective discretion when it comes to grading policy, it would be useful to have a robust analytical tool to turn to - and I suppose this is precisely what the inventor of this gpa plot hopes it will become. In any case, at a time when the SAT is coming under intense fire as an admission tool, this gpa plotting method centers entirely on the SAT as the anayltical centerpiece and as such sends the message that the SAT does do what it is supposed to do and extremely well - provide a viable standardized means to judge high school performance.</p>
<p>Attempts to study the relationship between GPA and SAT scores don’t seem to be anything new: "The purpose of Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient is to indicate a linear relationship between two measurement variables. This means that if you have two sets of scores, you want to know: Does one score predict another? For example:</p>
<p>As I understood it, he’s comparing students grades to the average SAT at their school, not their own.</p>
<p>So, I guess the fact that my kids went to a school with an average SAT of just over 900 means nothing they do can matter or make a difference–they’re already indicted. Their A’s would mean nothing–despite their own high SATs.</p>
<p>Is he also going to factor in the higher family incomes, tutoring, etc, that lead to higher average SATs in wealthy districts?</p>
<p>Nice way to slap down the poorer school districts.</p>
<p>College admissions has always been one part science and one part art, where the “deciders” consider gpa, standardized test scores, ranking and hs profile to evaluate the academic potential of an individual student. Each measure validates or places into question the other criteria.</p>
<p>While I applaud the model developed by this parent, I doubt that it dramatically improves the nuanced subjectivity that an experienced adcom can exhibit when faced with the “mountain” of data and information in a typical college application.</p>
<p>It’s an intriguing idea, but I think it might be even more valuable to see the grade distribution at a school as well. Honestly - though if we are only interested in performance rather than how a kid did with the evironment they were stuck in we ought to go to a system of national exams like the A and O levels in Britain or the Bac in Europe. (I think APs and SAT2 are acting this role unofficially now.)</p>
<p>I have merged two threads on this topic that were started about the same time yesterday:
NYT: Grading a School’s Grades
and
Standardized Academic Scoring System - A Way to Compare GPAs</p>