Gaming the system: our school ranks by weighted GPA, so gaming can be done as follows to avoid taking certain unweighted classes:
– waiting to take health until you are 17 so that you are eligible to take the community college health class
– taking a language other than the 3 at the HS, so that you can take it at the community college
@Ynotgo People “game” the system in everything they do. My son said a senior last year was a National Merit Finalist who did not take a single AP class. He just cruised and had a perfect 4.0 unweighted g.p.a. So in a way he was “gaming” the system, because some schools only look at unweighted g.p.a.'s. Some of the AP teachers grade really hard on the theory that the kids are getting an extra point, and so a “B” really doesn’t matter, and in those cases one can do better by making an unweighted A than a weighted AP “A.”
My son decided (at my urging) to take Mississippi History at the college level rather than in 9th grade. He had to transfer over all his AP credits to get the 24 hours he needed to sign up for the 300-level course. I’ve seen the syllabus, and it’s a very rigorous course and very deserving of a half-point g.p.a. bonus. My daughter took the ninth-grade version a couple of summers ago and it included two days of watching Gone With the Wind, which for the record was set in Georgia, not Mississippi. I’ve told my son to be sure to ask his professor when they were going to get to watch GWTW.
I would think a community college health class would be more difficult than a ninth-grade health class, and as such it is probably worth the half-point bonus. So it’s “gaming,” but also seeking extra rigor.
“Gaming the system: our school ranks by weighted GPA” - Do posters here realize that there are plenty of HSs that do NOT weigh the GPA and DO NOT rank their graduates? It is redundant information anyway, the colleges trip the weigh and recalculate the GPA anyway and they have no problem determining the applicant rank based on the applicant GPA and the HS class profile which all HS have to provide.
You really believe that the top caliber HS student will be engaged in these stupidity, listed in post #61:
– waiting to take health until you are 17 so that you are eligible to take the community college health class
– taking a language other than the 3 at the HS, so that you can take it at the community college
The smart kids are so very busy with everything that they want to do, the real things, not the “club” participation, they do not care about all of these. However, taking the DE class that will be transferable to any UG, the class that they do not want to spend their precious college time on while they can be helped by their parents at home with the difficult concepts in this class, it is a smart strategy that is pursued by all top students. Get it out of the way, focus on what is important to your goal!This type of game is a winner in my eyes!
Obviously, they won’t do it at such highschools.
The goal would be to have a higher rank and possible valedictorian-ship within the high school
Unlikely. Colleges would need to recalculate GPA of the entire class of the high school to re-rank the student.
Yes, some do.
For example, there was a recent post here from a very upset parent; her child took uninteresting and unhelpful courses to game for the higher GPA to get the valedictorian. The school made a small policy change in the child’s senior year and the child was going to loose the prize after all the sacrifices. They played the game and lost the bet. Personally I think it was very unwise as the cost was too great and couldn’t be justified even if the child won the valedictorian-ship.
Personally I agree.
“The goal would be to have a higher rank and possible valedictorian-ship within the high school” - the HSs that do not rank, obviously do not use val’s, sal’s labeling. The top of the class, #1 ranked is determined by college. It may be obvious without any labeling. If you are one of those with GPA=4.0uw, which is the highest possible GPA at the school that does not weigh and there is not way under sky that you take only easy classes as even Regular classes at such school are taught at the higher level than most other schools teach their AP classes, then you are a val., but only in your own head and only by the college determination.
I am NOT talking about some kind of hypothetical HS that exists only in my brain, I am talking about actual HS that also happen to offer college classes in collaboration with one of the top 4 year college in the same state. Here is the description of this particular college straight from the internet: “A highly selective liberal arts college offering students an academically challenging curriculum”. The college credits received in these classes have this top college name attached to them. While they are taught to classes full of HS students (full may mean 10 - 15 kids), they are also taught by instructors who have been teaching at colleges.
Isn’t it an awfully attractive and rewarding game to play?
Taking the health class at the Community College is NOT attractive or rewarding by any stretch of imagination and I feel sorry for the kids who are engaged in such an unrewarding activity. In my eyes, they are losing the focus what is HS should be about.
Not always. For instance, my public magnet does choose the val and sal(one each) based on who has the #1 and #2 highest GPAs…but doesn’t officially rank students beyond those two.
Cobrat,
Well, as somebody pointed out very wisely, the general idea of DE classes and general opinion of them, does not exist. It depends on the HS, college, instructor, specifics of the class itself and other details in each case under scrutiny.
D’s HS did not label val’s / sal’s even back in days when they actually rank graduates. Believe me, no college cares about any labeling, they determine the applicant rank and it is plenty enough for them.
My daughter is a B student. She is taking a dual enrollment class to see if moving to a four-year college directly out of graduation is right for her. She also has some disabilities, and she can use this single course to help her understand what her accommodation needs will be, and learn how to advocate for them with the college, while she is still in daily contact with her parents and special education teachers at the high school.
Also, she wasn’t interested in any of her high school’s electives that would fit into her current schedule and, doesn’t want to waste the time she could be allocating to learning something interesting.
The junior college atmosphere is something new and grown up and could motivate a reluctant h.s. student who might be sick of K-12 routine
The fact that our community college offers courses at 50% off for dual enrollment students, is certainly an incentive.
I doubt very much that an elite college’s admission counselors are naive enough to be impressed by a few electives done at the community college. But, it could help an applicant, like my child, by proving to an admissions committee that an average student can do college work.
Again, people obviously will not play the ranking game at such high schools. They will only do it at high schools that students are still ranked based on weighted gpa.
It may matter when you are not one of the GPA = 4.0uw. If a college is going to auto-admit up to certain rank, how can it find out that an applicant’s 9.99% ranking is in fact 15% based on its recalculation, without access to detailed transcript of all students, including those who did not apply to the college, from the high school?
It also may matter at a possibly less selective college where weighted gpa, high school reported rank and/or valedictorian title are considered.
And I am talking about actual HS with ranking system that allows the ranking game. Existence of your example does not negate existence of my example because there are many high schools with different systems in the U.S.
And you know that taking the health class at the community college is less rewarding than taking the high schools’ own health class because?
That is a great use of DE. I wish I would have though of that for my oldest.
FWIW, there are plenty of students who take DE and don’t care a whit about weighting. My son’s former HS weighted his DE courses, but that had zero impact on his decision-making. He took Japanese at the CC because he’s a manga / anime fan, and because French 1 at the HS was painfully slow and deadly boring for him.
At the new HS, not only are grades for DE courses not weighted, they don’t factor into his GPA at all. He doesn’t care. He’s still taking several courses a year through the CC.
You may have heard of the “top 9%” Eligibility in Local Context at UCs in California.
What they actually do here is that high schools that want to participate submit the courses and grades of their top 12.5% students to UC. UC then recalculates the GPAs of those students. UC then records the top 9% threshold GPA for the high school from these GPAs, so that GPAs of applicants in the next cycle are compared to that threshold GPA to determine Eligibility in Local Context.
Note that this means that (a) the high school’s notion of GPA and class rank is irrelevant, and (b) the applicant is compared to a baseline set by a recent previous class, not other students in the current class (so cutthroat behavior is not rewarded).
In a less formalized fashion, a college which gets a lot of applications from a non-ranking high school can infer a relative ranking of these applicants from their GPAs (whether or not recalculated by the college).
Looking for some advice here. My daughter is clearly a humanities kid, English and History are her favorite subjects. She does ok in math, but I’m pretty certain she won’t move beyond Calculus BC. She currently takes Bio in school (all freshmen are required, and there are no other options). Next year she could take chemistry or physics, but the idea scares her a bit - there will be other work-intensive classes, SAT prep, EC’s, etc. She’s considering taking chemistry during the summer after freshman year in local cc as dual-enrollment. The counselor at her school is trying to dissuade her - saying it’s best to take a class available in HS instead of CC, and that a summer semester is too short, it will be too difficult to cram a year’s worth of material in just a few weeks, there may not be enough space, etc. etc. My daughter thinks it might actually be easier since she’ll have no other commitments and could focus solely on chemistry for the entire summer, and also that it would be easier to take chemistry at a cc than at regular college when she’d probably have to take a science class to satisfy general requirement. What do you think?
Chem over the summer will be very intense. Think 2-4 hours of class each day when you combine lecture plus lab, and she may have class 3-5 days a week (check the schedule to see how the days / times play out). Homework and studying may take another 1-4 hours / day.
Chem at the HS is a 1-year class. DE Chem is a single semester, so all of the material in roughly half the time. DE Chem during the summer is roughly six weeks, so all of the material in less than a quarter of the time. Missing a single class due to travel or illness is like missing an entire week of HS. Missing 2-3 classes might get her dropped or failed for poor attendance.
Have her contact the professor to ask for a syllabus, then go to the bookstore and spend some time thumbing through a copy of the textbook. Use the syllabus to see how much of the book will be covered, including how much per week.
Be aware that her DE Chem class may or may not transfer to her ultimate selection of a 4-year college or university. It depends widely on the individual CC and the target 4-year school. Is she willing to take the class again if it doesn’t transfer?
Note that I’m not saying not to do it. I’m saying that there’s some additional investigating to be done.
Re: easier vs. harder - My S looks at it this way. Taking an unpleasant course at the HS level is like hitting your big toe with a hammer every day for nine months. Taking the unpleasant course DE during the summer is like hitting your big toe with a 5 lb. sledge, but you only have to do it 6 times. For him, it’s not easier vs. harder; it’s which variety of pain he finds more palatable. 
(We refer to this as the PITA factor.)
The policy makes a lot of sense and it is commendable for UC to actually do that. Seems it can relieve motivation for many grade gaming tactics.
Alas, not completely so. Students may still game for the grade, with the UC GPA rule instead their own high school’s.
I cannot not think of how my d’s sophomore and junior course selection will affect her UC GPA - I reviewed her Algebra II curriculum and seems it covers a lot of advanced concepts that I only learned in my own calculus class. Perhaps it is really viable for her to skip normal calculus and take an AP Calculus instead, which will significantly raise her UC Uncapped Weighted gpa.
Or take that fully online Summer General Psychology course at a CC, since she has already learned the materials many times over from other college psychology and The Great Courses psychology courses and will need minimal review to ace it.
@typiCAmom,
I would not recommend taking a cc chemistry course over the summer just to avoid hs chemistry. If you expect her to complete BC calc in hs then clearly she has no particular difficulty with STEM and she will likely find hs chemistry to be no problem. A lot of the early material is just basic algebra, so many unit conversion problems.
She does not have to do SAT prep during her sophomore year. I wouldn’t recommend that unless she really has the time and expects to be very busy over the summer. I’d suggest to focus on school and ECs. She can do SAT prep over the summer–if she isn’t taking a chemistry course she doesn’t want to be taking at the cc.
If taking a yearlong chemistry sounds like a burden, taking it as a semester long course at a CC would be even harder. And a summer course, typically compacting the 16 weeks CC course into 6 weeks, would be even harder.
There are kids who can do this easily. My daughter with more strength in humanity cannot. In her pre-AP level CC general chemistry course, she had to submit a full lab report every week in addition to heavy load of homework and preparing for 3 midterms and 1 final, with a quiz every week without a formal test. The material wasn’t a joke! I took Chem 1A&1B in my time and aced both of them (it required to be in top ~10% for an A then), I couldn’t help her homework beyond the first 2~3 weeks because I couldn’t figure out them well enough myself.
Your d took bio this year. So ask her if she knows how new concepts are stored in a brain. Unless she has some previous chemistry classes (not including Physical Science because the puny chemistry concepts in there will be covered in the first hour or two.), 6 weeks is not enough time to grow enough neuron structure to accommodate and internalize all the new information and concept for a humanities kid, even though she doesn’t have any other commitment.
Here is a sample syllabus and tests of a pre-AP level general chemistry. It’s not from my d’s school, but it is very similar to what she had.
http://www.sinhainstitute.com/FH_Chem25.php
SculptorDad, thanks, it’s very helpful 
A high school course is more supportive, with less independent study/learning requirement, and, of course, it is slower paced. The summer course will not only be faster, but, will probably have seasoned adult learners who know how to do college work. Summer science courses pacing are a challenge even for regular college student. IMHO, I’d go with the high school science, and perhaps, take a summer course in humanities, which you say is her strength.