I wanted to bring up a topic that I hear in parents’ discussions, among high schoolers and all over the web in college prep forums. That is the topic of what GPA is good enough for Stanford or Harvard or UC Berkeley or Penn or any other number of top schools. You hear talk of 4.4 or higher and students with a 5.0 and then soul-crushing comments like “a 4.2 is too low for any Ivy League” and it just goes on. I sat on a systemwide UC admissions panel for several years and there were many discussions of the validity of the GPA “bump” for honors/AP classes, how to consider unweighted, weighted and capped or total weighted GPAs and finally ELC-eligibility in the local context or the UC version of class rank. This isn’t the rank your school gives you but the reranking you get when your UC score is compared to others from your high school. To normalize things, the GPA used for that is capped at 2 honors/AP classes per semester. This gets really confusing because of the following little facts.
UC uses its own GPA system with a bump given to classes they call honors classes. You actually have to go onto the UC website to double check whether the honors class offered by your school is really honors. Your student’s transcript may reflect a much higher weighted GPA than UC calculates.
UC caps the weight of honors/AP for the “UCGPA” at 2 per semester. CA students have to take PE in 10th grade. This means a max of 6 academic periods for 10th grade and 7 possible academic periods for 11th. The maximum weighted and capped GPA if you take 13 academic classes is 4.31. Anyone who says they have a higher UC GPA (weighted and capped) took fewer classes so as not to dilute their AP/honors. For example, if you take 5 academic classes both years, your max UCGPA is 4.4. If you took 6, it would be 4.33.
Some schools don’t offer honors and AP classes that match the appropriate progression, making it difficult to fit them in until junior and senior year, but colleges look at your 10-12 GPA. For example, one school may not require regular chem or physics before AP but others might. Some schools might get an honors approved chem or physics to prep kids for the AP, but others (especially highly ranked schools) may make their regular courses rigorous enough to prepare for the AP. This means you can’t take one of those AP science classes until junior or senior year (which is totally appropriate because they are college level but can wreak havoc with your GPA when you apply to college). To combat this, some students will double up on science and forgo arts. You only need one VAPA for UC eligibility. But if you want to do drama and choir or band every year, you won’t be able to cram in the extra science classes to get into the AP courses faster. A factor that I wished UC would consider in holistic review is the total possible GPA you could have received. Because one applicant’s 4.4 is no better than another applicant’s 4.2. Really. One person could have all AP/honors classes and have gotten B’s in 3 of them. Another student may not have been able to put together the courses they wanted, based on what honors classes the school offers, to get anything higher than a 4.2, even getting the highest marks in all classes.
Your “top 9% ranking” is based on the UC GPA and you may rank lower than students who took less classes, simply because you diluted your GPA with A’s in non-honors classes. Or you may get bumped because you took VAPA electives instead of science and math electives. You may still have taken AP Calc and AP Bio or AP Chem junior/senior year, but in 9th grade, while your STEM colleagues were taking AlgebraII/Trig and Biology AND Chemistry, you took Bio and Geometry. In 10th grade, you’re taking the AlgII/Trig and Chemistry and they are now in APChem and AP Calc. Maybe they cruise senior year and you’re taking AP BIO, APENglish, AP Calc and other advanced classes but your 10th grade GPA is one honors class short of putting you in the top 9% no matter what you do! Especially if you accidentally finished one semester of a class with 89% and got a B. This is ridiculous, by the way, but it’s the system.
If the academic world is worth the weight we are giving it, a 4.2 should NEVER be considered “not good enough” for any school, Ivy league or otherwise. It really depends on what’s behind the 4.2 and what else the applicant brings to the table.
It is also based on your UC-weighted-capped GPA hitting a threshold GPA set by a recent previous class at your high school. It is not based on competing with others in your class. So trying to cutthroat others in your class does not help you in this respect.
First, and most importantly, I was not and never would imply that anyone should cutthroat others in their class. Read again, please if you are so convinced that was the point, because that is very disturbing. The points were: 1) dispelling the myths out there, such as anyone having more than a 4.4UCGPA (which is impossible) or that a 4.2 isn’t good enough for top schools and 2) pointing to the flaws in heavily relying on ELC and making admissions decisions based on distinctions between GPAs above 4, as they can represent very different things. Second, it is not exactly a GPA threshold that is used to determine the top 9%. The GPA cut off of the top 9% in previous years will be set at…4 point something, by looking at the distribution of weighted and capped GPAs. The problem with this is—everything I said after the line you highlighted in your response. Imagine this scenario:Johnny gets waitlisted at UCSD and Sally in his English class got the top 9% ranking on her UC app and got accepted because the admissions office has determined that relying on ELC gets them good students and a diverse student body. Johnny is frustrated and had his heart set on UCSD. He has a higher GPA, according to their transcript, and higher SATs. But the transcript takes honors classes into account that UC doesn’t. Let’s say Sally doubled up on math and science in 9th grade and she wasn’t interested in the arts and so she continued to take science as electives after completing her one VAPA requirement. This allowed her to take three AP Classes sophomore year (AP Chem, AP Calculus and AP World History). Junior year she also took 3 AP class. Johnny took Honors Geometry and Honors Biology in 9th grade and then AP World History and honors AlgebraII/Precalculus and honors jazz band in 10th grade. He took regular Chem sophomore and regular Physics junior year and planned to take either AP CHEM or AP Physics senior year, depending on which he liked better. It turns out the honors math prepared him well for AP Calc, but it wasn’t a UC honors class. Neither was honors jazz band. So he gets no GPA bumps to his UC GPA for those. The only AP class available to him as a sophomore was AP World History. Junior year, two of his required courses are available as AP classes and so he takes both. The way his schedule was set up, he ends up taking 5 APs in his Senior year. Sally takes 2 senior year. Johnny gets only 1 B in high school-- in one of his AP classes, Sally gets a B in AP Calc and AP Chem but she has a higher UCGPA than Johnny because he only has 3 GPA bump classes to her 4. Johnny wasn’t under-challenging himself; he took the appropriate advanced classes at the appropriate times. So, my point is that the top 9% ranking doesn’t necessarily identify the top 9%. And Johnny’s possible GPA was not as high as Sally’s possible GPA, because the subjects the school decided to offer as AP courses and the honors classes they submitted to UC for approval for the GPA bump happened to align more with Sally’s planned curriculum than Johnny’s. Not encouraging Sally and Johnny to cut each others’ throats–but Johnny does have a right to wonder why he’s not in the top 9% and Sally is. My post was to explain why the system is flawed, point out the subtleties that can lead to a yes or no in college admissions, and address the rumor that a “4.2 isn’t good enough…” (taken from another blog) because I think it’s a harmful rumor for kids to hear.
The point is, neither Johnny nor Sally affect whether each other get ELC, because neither is involved in setting the benchmark for the other to meet.
Yes, if Johnny is right on the margin of the threshold GPA set by a previous class at his high school, then tactical considerations with respect to course selection may make a difference as to whether he passes the threshold GPA. But it does not matter what Sally does, since what Sally does has no effect on whether Johnny is ELC.
UC admissions readers do see three variants of GPA when reading applications: unweighted, weighted-capped, and weighted-uncapped.
You’re still really missing my point. You’re focusing on ELC–for some reason, this seems to be hitting a nerve? I am not sure why you are restating my words to suggest that no individual student’s ELC affects another’s. The scenario demonstrates that the system will allow Sally to have a higher GPA than Johnny, which isn’t necessarily reflective of anything…but could be the difference in their acceptances to choice campuses. My point is that many things, that are far too complex for any UC admissions reader to consider given the overwhelming number of applications, affect the GPA. If it affects GPA, it affects ELC. The readers have access to the three variants. Whether they actually “see” them is dependent upon what is really being used in holistic review and what they value in terms of scholastics. If ELC is the primary determinant, based on the hypothesis that if you take the top ranked students from every school, you’ll always get a good freshman class and by taking the top of ALL schools, you’ll get diversity, too…then the other GPAs (unweighted and weighted uncapped) may only be of minor importance. And in my scenario, Johnny could end up with a lower uncapped–once again just because of choosing electives that don’t give bumps over ones that do or waiting until senior year for most of his APs. My point is really outrage at the idea that anyone would say “a 4.2 isn’t good enough for…” (paraphrased statement taken from several blog postings commenting on GPAs in the 4.1-4.2 range) because, once again, it depends on what lies beneath that 4.2. It’s a tall task for a big system like UC to delve into that. So, the Johnny’s may get overlooked. But not because getting almost all As in a rigorous and varied curriculum isn’t good enough. But because we have to reduce things to numbers and that favors some people over others.
Having ELC means that if the applicant is shut out from all UC campuses that s/he applies to, s/he may be admitted to a campus that has space (which typically means UC Merced). It does not assure admission to any particular UC campus of the applicant’s choice.