Ok, so I know the answer is both—admissions officers want to see kids get As in AP classes!
Setting that aside, if an admissions officer has two candidates in front of them—one has a slightly higher gpa in honors and AP classes and another has just about all AP classes junior year and all AP classes senior year, which do you think would be viewed more favorably? Or would they be viewed about the same? Thanks!
The question is unanswerable since grades and rigor are just part of holistic review.
There are never 2 applicants who are otherwise “all else being equal.”
Fair point.
I’m trying to gauge the influence of gpa vs rigor in a holistic review process. Any insight would be appreciated.
Which college? Some don’t care about rigor. A GPA of X plus scores of Y- you’re in. Some care more about GPA; they like to brag about how many vals and sals they enroll.
Some care more about rigor. There are plenty of “not the top student at my HS” kids in their college, but they have all challenged themselves aggressively in HS.
How about Catholic schools like Holy Cross, Villanova, Georgetown, Fordham and BC?
I’d have to double check but I think all list gpa and rigor as “most important” in the common data set.
I would expect that Harvard wants to see A’s and A+'s in rigorous classes. MIT wants to see the same in your math and science classes. However if you belong at these schools or similar schools then “rigorous classes” is just what you would want to take (otherwise why would you want to attend either of these schools?).
There are however hundreds of colleges and universities that are very good and that can provide a very good education.
Generally speaking I think that you should take the classes that make sense for you, and then attend a college or university that appreciates what you have done. I think that this is part (but only part) of the process of finding a school that is a good fit for you.
The only thing that I have done specifically for the purpose of university admissions is to take the SAT and later the GRE, and fill out applications. Otherwise, just take classes that are right for you, participate in ECs that make sense for you, be reasonable, and it should work out.
It might depend on the college. CU Boulder as one example specifically says: “ Please note: a challenging schedule will not outweigh a non-competitive GPA, as your grades ultimately remain the single most important factor in your admission decision.” …. while also saying rigor is important. More selective schools might place more emphasis on rigor.
And in one’s non-STEM classes. Not to go more off-topic since the OP hasn’t specified universities, but despite having Technology in the name, MIT has fairly extensive HASS requirements.
Just to make things even more complicated, when Yale and Dartmouth AOs were having a conversation about admissions recently, they suggested that they were now doing a two-phase review where first your academics had to be good enough to get you past the initial review phase, and then in committee discussions and such they may actually dive deeper into your transcript to see what story it was telling about you as a student.
This implies to me there could be different answers to your questions at different phases, like you would not want your GPA to be seen as not good enough at the initial phase, but then you would not want the story told by your course selection to be not good enough at the committee phase.
Which is unfortunately a variation on “both”, but I think adding some details like this helps emphasize a fundamental point. Ultimately there are human beings looking at transcripts as part of holistic review. And although the desire for formulaic answers predicting what all of those different human beings are going to think about each transcript is strong, that is simply not a realistic goal.
For colleges with formulaic admission, then if the formula is known, you can answer the question for each such college.
For colleges with subjective review, the answer is less findable.
But A grades in hard courses would be preferred.
If you are thinking of “elite” schools, there is no way to answer that question - they don’t rack and stack. Once kids pass a certain academic threshold they look for other things. Case in point, S24’s good friend was accepted to Dartmouth while S24 was rejected - S24 had a higher gpa, more (and more rigorous) APs and a much higher test score. S24’s friend (a wonderful, and worthy student) was a fantastic fit for Dartmouth with interesting/unique ECs that tied well into his academic interests. In my view, it is just as important to have a strong narrative as it is to max out your APs - obviously, your student needs a rigorous schedule and to get top grades, but if they take 1 or 2 fewer APs I don’t think that is a disqualifying thing.
And to add to Thorsmom’s excellent point- taking one or two fewer AP’s but replacing them with classes that show their actual (i.e. not manufactured) academic interests-- is a fine path.
I really think that is a critical insight.
Start with the concept of needing “good enough” academics, where what counts as good enough will depend on the college (or school or major) you are applying to, possibly your residency and/or need status, and so on. Even though the focus here is on academics, it is still usually impossible to be precise (absent a published formula), because there are so many different high schools with different curriculums, different grading standards, and so on, and then many colleges are now test optional, and many evaluate all that in context, and so on.
But usually, at least from the college’s internal perspective, some cases will clearly not be good enough (in which case barring exceptional circumstances you will not be admitted), and some cases clearly will be good enough. And if you are clearly good enough, you are on to the other stuff.
OK, then with some colleges (or schools/majors), if you are good enough academically, they don’t have a very high bar to get admitted. Like just be a normal, active kid without any serious disciplinary issues or truly bad teacher recommendations.
With others, though, the pool of “good enough” is still way too big. As in they may still be planning to reject 9 out of 10, or even more, of the academically good enough applicants. And to get into the 1 out of 10 (or less) at that point is often not at all formulaic. That is really the core meaning of “holistic review”.
And indeed, in most cases there is going to be nothing “wrong” with the kids who do not get admitted. Most will have been seen as having lots of positives, but the college can only admit so many. So as described above it becomes a matter of matching positives to institutional priorities in a way that just quickly runs out of space for more.
Yeah, if the practical question is whether you should take less challenging classes than you could reasonably take in an effort to raise your GPA a bit–that is probably not going to work with the more selective colleges. Really the only time I think that would make any sense at all is if you were gunning for an automatic admissions slot and you were borderline and this could get you over the line. But with holistic review, non-formulaic admissions, it is probably not going to help, and might hurt.
But if the question is whether it is OK not to max out your APs or whatever if you are doing that because you would really just prefer the content of some non-AP classes–that is a very different situation. And I still don’t think you should rationalize that in terms of GPA, I think you can recognize instead that lots of colleges are going to be OK with you doing that for that reason.
So rather than thinking about GPAs in cases like that, I instead would suggest you should be thinking about how to make it clear to colleges why you are doing what you are doing, and maybe even thinking about what colleges are going to be most in alignment with what you are doing.
But if what you are doing is ultimately about getting the best possible HS education for yourself given your abilities and interests, then you can figure out a way of making that work for you in college admissions too.
You shouldn’t set it aside.
For highly selective schools (let’s say the Ivy+ and similar) or schools with highly selective programs (let’s say undergrad business at NYU, CS at UT Austin or EE at Purdue), you already know you need grades and rigor.
For schools and programs that aren’t particularly selective, it really doesn’t matter.
Most people who ask this question (which may not be you) don’t want to accept the truth that their own child, who they FEEL should be at a highly selective school (often for all the wrong reasons), really has no shot, so they are jumping through all kinds of intellectual hoops trying to keep hope alive.
I have mentioned on this board that our high school did a “mock admissions” night.
Parents and kids were given 4 hypothetical student applications. Grades, Classes, ECs, Test scores, Essays, etc… A FULL application.
We reviewed them and then went to a meeting where we listened to Admissions Officers from 8 or so colleges talk about the candidate applications that we just reviewed. The colleges ranked from elite to pretty average.
The big takeaway?
No two AOs look at things the same way. No two colleges look at things the same way. AOs are people who have both institutional and personal biases.
We voted for the best student candidates in our session. The AOs were all over the map in picking their favorite candidate. To be honest…it was slightly horrifying.
The PARENTS were far more consistent in terms of the candidates that they liked. To be honest, I thought that the parents made better decisions than the AOs.
This is why you apply to a number of schools. Because you don’t really know how you will be received.
Oh. And the AOs said that they review an application in just 3 minutes in most cases. Another surprise.
3 minutes, eh? So they use basic objective thresholds such as GPA, class rigor, test scores, and then move on to the more “holistic” things like “leadership”, essays, etc? Or were they all over the place precisely because they didn’t rely on the objective metrics?
For these schools in particular, here is my only slightly informed opinion on your somewhat narrow question, and acknowledging the valid points others have made …
For most of the selective schools you are asking about I think you really have to have at least a certain minimum level of rigor to be competitive. I would guess (and it’s a guess) that as long as you have taken at least precalculus, and ideally calculus, and at least a few honors/AP classes then I think a higher GPA is more important than maxing out all honors/AP.
This is a good question, I always wondering myself. As a parent of recently admitted UC student, I want to use UCs as study case.
There are 9 undergraduate UCs, all test blind, and no LOR require. Other than PIQ, UW, fully W, UC CAP GPA are the keys to get admit. So which GPA is most important? UW GPA is pure GPA vs fully W GPA is related to class rigor. S24 got waitlisted and later accepted to UCD ENG with 4.0 UW and 4.31 W and UC CAP GPA. But he got rejected by all other top UCs
It shows that even a perfect 4.0 UW student without rigor has no chance for top UCs. But what if he took more AP classes and start getting Bs and Cs? In this case, his W GPA would be higher, but UW GPA would be lower. How low can UW GPA be and still have a chance to top/mid tier UCs? is 3.8 the threshold?
I feel like this is like gambling, you can shoot for top UCs such CAL and UCLA by taking more rigor classes. But if you are not up to the challenge, you may hurt yourself more. Instead, you can play it safe and shoot for mid tier UCs such as UCI and UCD…I guess answer vary one student to another
To me, they seemed all over the map.
The parents were more consistent. 1) Grades. 2) Curriculum. 3) Test scores. 4)
Evidence of excellence in some EC endeavor.
To be fair…they might have been “posturing” for the crowd and their real life behavior might be very different from what they showed us.