In fairness, at most schools, you can take the AP class for free and skip the paid AP test - so you can get the GPA boost without having to pay. (Although this is not true at all schools - as I’ve learned right here on CC!)
1 Like
Right! Which is why the “GPA” boost is nonsense.
In the high school our two kids went to there were three levels of classes available: standard, honors, and AP. If I recall correctly, Honors gave a .25 point bump in GPA ( an A=4.25) and AP gave .50 (an A=4.5). So, the academically inclined students took AP when they could and Honors for all else. There were requirements to take Honors classes, but not AP.
AP class sans AP exam would be interpreted as a bad thing IMHO…
1 Like
The irony is that the honors section is probably the better class—not teaching to a test!
My daughter took AP classes and no AP exams and is currently at UC Berkeley, so not universally true…But maybe by certain selective privates? Hard to say.
Actually, that was not the takeaway from our kids. They felt that the AP classes took more time and the the in-class tests were more difficult that the honors classes.
At private schools, honors history courses are often a MUCH richer intellectual experience…
Unfortunately our two kids could not benefit from that private school academic experience. In spite of that, they have and are doing pretty well - son BSCS and MSCS from Stanford, and daughter currently pursuing a BSBME in the pre-health track at Johns Hopkins 
2 Likes
They do that anyways, but in large part because these are also the schools that serve the wealthiest communities. But since SAT scores are a shortcut to the same information, they do not change that result.
The factors that “elite” private colleges use are all indicators of wealth, and, no matter what they do, you will notice that these 45%-55% of the student body of these colleges are always full pay, and that there are usually 15%-20% from the top 1% in these colleges. Everything else is replacing middle income students (40th-60th percentiles) with poorer students, and MAYBE replacing a small fraction of th eupper income kids with lower income kids.
Their funding model requires a large proportion of their students bring in money, either by their parents donating or by the graduates donating later. That is why MIT, which has funding that is not based on donation, has the lowest percent of students from the top 1% by income. The top 10% by income is where the actual academic opportunities that wealth provides peak. MIT evidently is not fooled by highly curated applications orchestrated by consultants costing $500,000, but a family which makes $250,000 can provide their kid with top level schooling and the opportunities to “show their mettle” academically, and can provide the support required to get their kids into top magnet schools, even though they cannot afford the most expensive consultants and expensive private high schools.
Personally, I don’t believe that colleges like UPenn or, say, WashU are particularly fooled by these applications either. But for these colleges, the ability of a family to pay for these “consultants” is a qualification in and of itself. It’s another indicator of the top levels of wealth, like a legacy who also plays lacrosse at an expensive private prep school, a “business” worth $500,000 for whom the main investor is a CEO of a top bank with the same surname as the applicant, an address in Greenwich, CT, or having a museum named after your grandfather.
No GPA reported at our school, so no boost. If anything, it hurts you because As are hard to come by. But colleges can put this in context too. The average score at the school is 4.3 and my kid reports that the BC exam yesterday was the easiest math test he has taken in four years of HS.
In the Quebec CEGEP system, they use an R-Score. This basically gives you a numeric mark (40 being the highest) based on your mark relative to your peer group. So if everyone gets 95 in Calculus, your RSCore might be 32. But, if your class average is an 80,that RSCore might be a 38. The Quebec Universities all have published ranges for RScore expectation for each program. So kids know which programs they stand a chance. It is a shame more provinces or states don’t use this system.
School systems that teach to a test (based on a standardised curriculum, which teachers are trained to deliver) do best overall.
(Note, I’m referring to systems - not individual schools. Any private school can make sure they only admit students that don’t need much teaching at all, and those with learning disabilities can be counselled out.)
Several posts up, there was a debate on whether can be said that some kids don’t have access to SAT prep if every kid that even contemplates college takes algebra and geometry at school, and the accepted result seemed to be that algebra and geometry provision at high schools varied so much that many kids may have to expect their math classes to not prepare them for anything much at all.
I’m sure there are a lot of teachers and principals at those high school who are very happy that their students will never think to take standardised tests so no one will ever uncover how useless their math classes are. After a year of algebra taught by a competent teacher, a couple weeks preparation on how to show the acquired knowledge on a standardised test at the end of the year (mandatory for all, administered at the school, paid for by the district) should do it. Students, parent, schools, districts and DoE need and should want that knowledge of what students have learned in those classes.
There’s a recent Reddit thread on the r/Caltech forum discussing the contention that there is “a sharp decline in quantitative skills of our undergraduate students” particularly on the lower end of the distribution. Here are a link to the Reddit thread and a link to an article in the student newspaper: Reddit - Dive into anything
1 Like
The student opinion seems very poorly reasoned. But it’s not surprising they wanted to be anonymous for fear of employers regarding this as an embarrassment.
It’s just a litany of complaints that you can’t expect us to succeed when our high school experience was impaired by COVID: “To expect them to master calculus and other math topics that are tested by the electrical engineering “basic math test” during such a tumultuous period is almost absurd”.
I heard the same from my S about his classmates during the pandemic complaining whenever professors tried to set challenging homework or exams that they were being unfair.
It’s incredible to me that someone who got into Caltech thinks the college couldn’t and more importantly shouldn’t even try to find 200 students in the world who were able to master calculus despite the pandemic.
And in response to the idea that “the SAT and ACT do not test calculus or physics topics and thus are not indicators of whether students have mastered these topics” maybe the faculty needs to call the bluff of the students and suggest they take a harder admissions test instead? How about the Cambridge STEP exams?
2 Likes
I saw this online:
If you’re studying full time, public CEGEPs are free. However, you still have to pay these fees: application fees. registration fees to cover the cost of course transcripts, placement tests and course cancellations.
It seems like the CEGEP system contains all kinds of additional fees that could serve as barriers, similar to costs associated with standardized tests in the US that you have complained about.
That is a head scratcher of a comparison. CEGEP is two years of study and roughly the equivalent of 1st year university. No one in Quebec has ever complained about the cost or accessibility to it. In Quebec, all high school students write ministerial exams BASED on what they learned in school and no one takes prep courses for those.
One of my kids is a grad student TA at an Ivy. She recently finished TA-ing and grading finals for a class, for which the math prerequisite was the equivalent of Calculus AB. At the start of the semester, they did a review of algebra concepts for anyone who needed a refresher. She said it became increasingly obvious that a significant number of students were very underprepared for the math required. She once said 20%, but that was obviously just her guess. But she also said the students who came in for help expected to be given sort of “plug and play” formulas to solve every problem, and didn’t want to be bothered to understand the underlying concepts. She reminisced about a TA at her LAC who once told her: “come back to me when you’ve thought about this problem for 5 hours.” She didn’t like it at the time but said the result was that it forced her to really understand. The upshot is that she thinks the problem is more fundamental than just the fact of schools being test optional.
4 Likes
I wonder whether pushing back so hard against testing is beginning to create a culture of “math optional”, “learning optional”, “struggling optional”.
5 Likes
Or the perhaps it’s the reverse: i.e. struggling academically has become somewhat “optional” in recent years (due to the pandemic, and other issues such as the recent protests against Israel/Gaza, where we saw some professors cancel final exams and give everyone an A). Now students will push back hard against any attempts to reintroduce unavoidable and rigorous academic challenges, including test requirements.
This reminds me of the Princeton article I posted last year:
1 Like