No volunteer hours required (I hope!). She does volunteer at VEX competitions at the local middle schools here, so she’s getting her volunteer hours in in a way that uses her skills pretty well. Plus she’s remarkably patient with middle school boys, and always looks for girls teams to see if they have any questions. She does need to get better about getting her volunteer hours signed off on in case anyone needs proof. I think those papers live at the bottom of her bookbag permanently.
GPA is weighted, on a 5.0 scale (AP, and IB are 5.0. Honors and regular classes are 4.0 scale).
Discovered that the class rank is also weighted. There is some serious gaming of the rank going on in that case-D with a 4.3 is 200 out of 800. You shouldn’t be able to take any AP or IB classes until junior year, and there are kids with a perfect 5.0 going into their senior year, and I don’t know how that’s possible! However, I’m not going to worry about stuff I can’t change.
Her GPA on her transcript is only shown as weighted.
@STEM2017 — Do you like the Style Council also or only the Jam? I played one Style Council disc to excess in the car for a couple of years…long after the group disbanded.
I’ve played around with a few for fun and sadly they really aren’t all that great. What they show can be widely different than what I see in Naviance, both good and bad. That said, they are data based so a bit more helpful than the what are my chances threads and certainly easier than posting there lol.
The best data does come from the common data sets and most of those pull from them so it is all info you can find on your own, none of them calculate in intangibles like rigor and EC’s (which I guess the chance me threads try to do but really, only ad adcom can!). College Data does have the data easily available to toggle back and forth and there was a good table based one someone posted a while ago but I can’t recall what it was…
College Data and Cappex seem to show similar results and line up with the common data sets, Prep Scholar is another one and it give VERY different results in some cases than the others do. I’ll be interested to see what our end results are and compare.
Naviance: son’s school is known for putting out a lot of athletes so his Naviance gives false hope if taken as gospel. Plenty of 26 ACTs and 3.3 GPAs getting into top 25 colleges. Not a great predictor for him.
@STEM2017 — I am returning after another four days away and would much prefer to think about Paul Weller songs than all the college work that has not happened in my absence!
@stem2017 Well, a lot of the counselor chatter is from me. I have uploaded all of my dd’s counselor information and filled out all of the questions. I will wait to find out if she makes NMSF and if she does, I will edit her transcript to include that information. Other than that, I am supposed to be ready to hit submit. I just always feel like I could one more proofread and edit. But I have been over them enough times that at this point I worry that I am introducing mistakes vs. correcting them.
@VickiSoCal, I think that they assume you only take single non-weighted class, World History, the two Accelerated (+1/2 weighted) English and use the rest of hours as +1 weighted. I’m not really sure though. S '14 got through with all A’s but didn’t make it because he took an extra non-weighted and an extra accelerated course. We didn’t know the game as much back then. D '17 got a couple B+s, so she will be a bit short and won’t have 4.0 UW either.
I don’t think it really matters, the grades are good enough to be in the mix…
@MotherOfDragons … If I had a kid who was in the NMF race I would have a file and a spreadsheet and a “to do” list so big we would need a new home office lol. I also would not trust the school and the GCs for one “second” to get all the proper paperwork done. Ours are wayyyyy too busy with the masses of kids in and out the door.
@carachel2 yeah my motto is “trust, but verify.” And then potentially “roost in their office like an angry dragon until they do it right.” I’m hoping no roosting is required. I’m an optimist!
They had 4 NMF’s last year at the school, so they’re doing enough right to get some through…
I don’t remember nmf being that complicated. Is it worse now?
At d’s school there was only one weighted classes she could take freshman year! Spanish isn’t weighted until Spanish 4, health/careers is a full year unweighted, fr/soph English are unweighted, math wasn’t weighted until AP or IB, honors bio was unweighted and so on.
From what I have seen, schools that regularly have NMSFs are pretty good at getting process done for finalist status. I am sure there are exceptions. Also if your school rarely has any, you may need to guide/push the school in the process.
**QOTD1: Are volunteer hours required at school: ** No but there is a notation that can go on the transcript if you get a form in on time. D17 did it one year and it never appeared. The school is actually discouraging filling out the form & chasing volunteer hours. What they say is 1) Just put your volunteer info on your college apps b) Quality matters more than quantity.
@VickiSoCal Similar types of GPA here. For common app (we haven’t gotten there) I’d go with Academic 9-11 Weighted. Or maybe unweighted. I wouldn’t go with ALL. We have a similar designation… The differences between the two are ALL includes PE, Health, Marching Band, Theater Performance where Academic doesn’t. I’m curious because I’m interested to get into the Common App, just to see if Colorado State Fort Collins has any explanation how they want their GPA recorded. If we could write down Weighted ALL 9-11 it would give DS a much better looking GPA.
It’s doable to calculate a max GPA. At our school only so many courses “count” towards Honors. Only so many can be taken until you are a junior. (Except for really rare exceptions.) There are only so many courses in the day, and classes taken outside don’t count. And the way the math works, the more classes you take the more watered down your GPA is. I figured it out GPA maxes out around 4.4 at my H.S. I have no reason for knowing this except it’s the type of things I find fascinating.
@VickiSoCal Most schools want unweighted GPA’s on a 4.0 scale is what we’ve always been told. Most then do their own recalculation. It’s the only way to semi level the playing field. I am surprised it doesn’t tell you which they want.
@Stem2017 Yes… you have to keep in mind those athletic outliers in Naviance. When I see a really “low” acceptance I almost always assume it’s an athlete.
Plus Naviance is really unhelpful for schools who do admittance like Cal Poly. The acceptances/rejections are ALL over the map because what major you apply in is critical. A good GPA for English wouldn’t even get you considered for Mechanical Engineering where you have to max out the scores. I also find it frustrating for the other Cal State schools since they depend on UC GPA which Naviance doesn’t track.
Today a nice looking brochure came from UCLA. It doesn’t even have D’s name, but a dear prospective student kinda letter accompanied the book. Such a turn off. Off it went to the recycle bin. Also came are Columbia’s blue book and engineering book, D already have these from her tour, and her name was spelled wrong. . The positive thing is that she received application fee waiver from Fordham. Also an invitation to apply as Exclusive Scholar from College of Saint Rose via email, not sure what this status really mean though.
. The positive thing is that she received application fee waiver from Fordham. Also an invitation to apply as Exclusive Scholar from College of Saint Rose via email, not sure what this status really mean though.