<p>Of course it does, it just isn’t the ONLY thing that is considered in an application - ask all the valedictorian high school kids who were rejected from Harvard ;)</p>
<p>You are also assuming that the “kid” in the example can maintain a 4.0 GPA in a pre-med track at a difficult university. 4 years of science for science majors can be a bear (especially in the weed out freshman year)</p>
<p>All I can say is I have an older son at a college with a +/- grading system and he’s been happy with it considering he has gotten plenty of B+'s, and the extra boost is good. (We thought he’d be a straight A student in college too, but the distractions are much greater than when he was at home with me calling the shots LOL :)) We’re happy with his 3.7 now as a senior, and many of those fractions of points came from getting a 3.3 for a 87 (or whatever it is).</p>