I guess it will be a shock that my kid got in to a few “good CA publics” with a capped GAP of 4.18 like LA, Berkeley and SLO for engineering. Can’t just make these kind of statement when evidence points to the contrary.
Yes, weighting and capping doesn’t come into play as much (or at all) in UC applications but it has a huge impact on CSU apps which I should have clairified.
The evidence doesn’t at all point to the contrary. Rather, it points to other factors carrying the day for your kid, especially at SLO which is supposed to be primarily stats based. I do not know the totality of your child’s profile (including the year that they applied) but it is unlikely that a 4.18 capped GPA would have gotten them into most SLO engineering programs this year if they were from Paly, Lynbrook, Lowell or other similar schools in the bay area.
Capping the weighted HS GPA is likely due to older UC research indicating that weighted HS GPA was less predictive of college GPA than unweighted HS GPA. Fully weighted HS GPA also tended to reflect availability of honors courses in many cases where the student would choose honors whenever possible (so such a student in a high school with fewer honors courses would not have the opportunity to get as high a fully weighted GPA).
However, with grade inflation and increased offering of honors courses over the years (resulting in more students with 4.0 unweighted + more than 8 honors points), it may be time to revisit the weighted capped GPA or change it to avoid the probably-unwanted quirks such as taking additional honors courses with A grades lowering the weighted capped GPA of a student with all A grades and more honors courses than the cap.
I agree with what you are saying. That’s why planning did take a few years including picking out where we live, which school my kids go and what other stuff they can do. It is still a rat race. But the rules have changed, but at least they still tell you what the rules are.
BTW S24 applied this year.
They settled, they did not lose the case. The system was already in the process of phasing out testing. Given the decision to phase out testing despite their own studies and recommendations to continue with testing I do not believe that they had their heart in fighting the suit anyway. The settlement expires after 2025 so we’ll what happens in a couple of years.
If CPSLO’s current formula is like the old reverse engineered one, the only effect that one’s high school has is whether it is in the local area (San Luis Obispo county, southern Monterey county, and northern Santa Barbara county) and/or is a “Hayden Partner school” (whatever that is). The biggest bonus points in the old CPSLO formula is the number of math courses taken beyond the CSU minimum (and algebra 1 and higher math courses taken while in middle school must be listed on the CSU application to be counted for this purpose).
As mentioned before, CPSLO could be fully transparent about its formula and thresholds, but chooses not to. It is not obvious why they choose not to, but that means that many people, including posters on this thread, speculate nefarious motives in the admission office.
SLO actually doesn’t cap GPA. We asked.
This is literally the kind of thing I hear from parents in Texas, actually.
Worked out well for us fortuitously.
SLO states right on the website they use 8 semesters weighted Honors classes in the GPA calculation
GPA
For the purposes of your application, we’ll consider your 9th-11th grade weighted GPA. That number is calculated from college-prep coursework as designated on your application. Weight is granted for courses designated as “honors,” “college-level,” “advanced placement” or “international baccalaureate” for up to eight semesters
Yes, they say that. But when we emailed admission, the reply said they “recalculate” and to not worry about it.
I believed this because if they used straight capped GPA, S24 would not be competitive for engineering, yet he got in.
I think it’s quite possible that internally, SLO may use both in its decision.
I agree with you that, anecdotally, we’ve also seen students admitted to competitive SLO majors with relatively low capped GPA but with higher uncapped GPA.
What I find interesting is that on the SLO Freshman profile, the 75th percentile on the listed GPA over the last few years has been no higher than 4.25 so if they do not cap, I would expect you would see that 75th percentile to vary each year and get slightly higher especially for the College of Engineering.
Yes they have to recalculate the GPA since do not use the CSU GPA listed on the application which is only 10-11th grades not the 9-11th grades as stated that SLO uses.
Why state the 8 semester cap if it’s not part of the selection criteria?
I think SLO may have not bothered to separate themselves from the General CSU Application. Very scary, if you ask me. However, Admission was very quick to reply when I asked and reassured me the “low” GPA on the general app will not be a problem.
This goes with our other discussion thread about not trying to game the capped GPA calculation because it may backfire.
Digging into the entire data set and running numbers would be very interesting but I have not done it. I have used the UC tool as well as the Chron tools you provided. The Chron tools make it very easy to just grab a bunch of schools individually and start poking around. I tossed in a variety of public and private high schools (strong to typical) up and down the peninsula and as a rule they underperform admissions rates at the top UCs. Not always but typically.
Lynbrook is an outlier but it is always interesting as a public high school. 1425 SAT average and virtually the entire school test. 168 National Merit commended or above (64 NMSF) but only 7% success into UCLA and 8% into UCB, well below average.
This gets to the heart of the issue (at least for me). Private schools should be able to craft their classes as they see fit within the bounds of the law. They have their own missions and they should be able to follow them as they see fit.
Public schools also have missions but they are publicly funded which rightfully brings another level of scrutiny because they should be primarily be serving the needs of their state populations and the taxpayers which fund them. Since these schools and systems are funded by tax payers primarily for the benefit of the students of the state transparency and fairness are important to public trust.
One of the missions of the UC system is to provide access to students from all over the state and from all socioeconomic circumstances. I fully support that mission, it rings true to me having grown up in a rural under resourced community where the majority of kids did not go to college.
Where I see the UC/CSU system falling down is in meeting that trust bar for the public, especially for people from wealthier more successful areas of the state.
Test blind or even test optional policies are poor substitutes for ‘evaluating testing within the context of a students circumstances’.
Capping GPA and limiting credit for rigor is a poor substitute for measuring rigor in the context of what is available to a student at their school.
Whether these things were done with the best of intentions or not they are perceived as being used to bring top performers back to the pack and mask excellence. This is perceived as biased against some communities creating a lack of trust. When you combine these ‘leveling’ policies with grade inflation it just gets worse since their is a huge pile of near perfect 3.9-4.0 kids who have lost other paths to standing out.
I personally do not think that the UC/CSU admissions system is working. The lack of transparency is eroding trust in the system and that isn’t good. I appreciate the system publishing the application and acceptance by HS, that is a real positive. But when those results show a high achieving school like Lynbrook gaining acceptances to UCB at a rate of 8% while a school like Mission in SF is at 43% transparency in the process is necessary. Because in the absence of real transparency people start to believe rightly or wrongly that the system is rigged and that isn’t a good look for something that is ostensibly a ‘public good’.
I have wondered if the GPA on the Freshman profile isn’t the one they are actually using internally.
UCLA and UCB also list capped GPA on their freshman profiles here, even though we know that it isn’t the primary GPA that these campuses are actually using when they admit students. It is just the standard way they report. Freshman admit data | UC Admissions
The GPA scale used for reporting is NOT the same as the GPA scale used for evaluating applicants. COE absolutely uses fully weighted uncapped GPA but Berkeley in general reports weighted capped and unweighted in the admit profiles.
Sorry, when you have 300 -400 students from the same school apply and over 25 to 40 get in to UCB or UCLA, just giving a percentage is misleading. You don’t expect an entire UC campus to be filled from kids from one HS or one city, do you?
I was referring to Cal Poly SLO’s GPA range which has always been their SLO GPA recalculated with 9-11th grades.