<p>Whoops, I got my acronyms wrong. My friend was HEDS (private), not IPEDS, head. </p>
<p>(blue, your “Feds” triggered it; I knew he wasn’t Fed.)</p>
<p>vossron - You quoted the instruction to question C12, but question C11 right before that says: “Percentage of all enrolled, degree-seeking, first-time, first-year (freshman) students who had high school grade-point averages within each of the following ranges (using 4.0 scale). Report information only for those students from whom you collected high school GPA.” It really doesn’t take a genius to assume they mean for them to use the same scale in question C12, and these are college employees. Even in question C11, where the instructions are very clear that the scale should stop at 4.0(IMO), it is also clear that some schools are still using weighted GPA’s since they report ridiculous percentages in the 3.75+ category. And since other schools use unweighted, both questions C11 and C12 become almost useless, or least a lot less useful.</p>
<p>collegestudent - It depends on what it is you are wanting to know about the school. Multiple sources is always best to get an overall picture, for sure. But I took the original question to mean which source is most reliable for stats.</p>
<p>^^ Yes, I saw that after I posted. 
</p>
<p>I just don’t see it so narrowly that there is a conflict, and the solutions seem worse, dividing grades from schools that use “A+ 4.3” by 1.075, or those that use “AP A 5.0” by 1.25 in order to compress the scale, or, worse, changing “A+ 4.3” to 4.0 or “AP A 5.0” to 4.0; information is lost. I think it’s fine to retain the traditional A=4/B=3 system, and add the A+/AP developments to it. I think it’s good that the CDS reflects the system the school uses to evaluate students, and there should be an added note explaining what that system is.</p>
<p>I understand what you are saying, but how can the weighted average be remotely meaningful? If a college is simply averaging what high schools are reporting, and those high schools use different scales, the data is garbage. Put another way, it would be like recording data in an experiment and using degrees F for some data points, degrees C for others, and degrees K for yet others, and simply averaging them without doing any conversions. If data is averaged without having been measured on the same scale, it means nothing.</p>
<p>In the alternative, if you are suggesting that the college converts all applicants grades to a non-4.0 scale they use (which I highly doubt), it is still meaningless if different colleges use different scales. UCLA’s 4.2 is not able to be compared to some other school’s 4.05, and certainly not to a school that is using the true 4.0 scale. But the reality seems to be that these colleges are simply using the weighted GPA the high school is reporting, no matter the system.</p>
<p>I should add I would have no problem at all if they wanted to standardize on a 5.0 system where all grades for an AP course were +1 compared to the 4.0 system, and either the same for honors courses or +.5 for those. Since a lot of schools don’t give A+ at all, I don’t think you can do anything except A+ = 4.0 in a regular course. Just so long as it was the same for all students. Of course, that still doesn’t address all problems with comparing GPA’s, but it at least would eliminate one huge source of discrepancies.</p>
<p>“But the reality seems to be that these colleges are simply using the weighted GPA the high school is reporting, no matter the system.”</p>
<p>When colleges recompute an applicant’s GPA, they are throwing out the GPA reported by the high school and calculating it anew from the reported grades. Various colleges use various mixes of reported plusses, minuses, APs and honors, and choosing which courses to include in which ways, but each college does it the same way for each applicant’s high school. So yes, each college’s reported GPA average has a different meaning; that’s why I’d like to see the note in the CDS about how it was calculated.</p>
<p>“Since a lot of schools don’t give A+ at all, I don’t think you can do anything except A+ = 4.0 in a regular course.”</p>
<p>But we know more about the A+ student (she didn’t get A- or A) than about the A student. I say use the info if it’s there.</p>
<p>You cannot penalize a student whose school doesn’t even use the grade A+. If you are going to have a consistent system, you have to have A+ = A = 4.0, since getting all the high schools to change is clearly impossible. If you are going to be at least nominally scientific about this, all grades have to be measured on the same scale. Of course different high schools have different degrees of difficulty and competition, but putting that aside one has to at least be consistent in the assignment of potential grades.</p>
<p>Also, I am not sure it is true that all colleges recompute GPA. Maybe they do, but I would like to have that proved, or at least demonstrated to a sufficient extent that it is very likely true. Seems like an awful lot of work, with huge possibilities for error during the inputting of the data.</p>
<p>… might even be a “capped” weighted gpa. If caps are removed, it could possibly be even higher. This is because a lot of the higher-ranked hss in CA are doling out as high as 4.8-5.0 for the higher ranked students, and there are a lot of these API 10-ranked hss in CA.</p>
<p>Is collegeboard.com the one that does the scatter diagram of “stats” based on databased survey takers who document their applications, acceptances/denials, and eventual matriculation to (at) the various colleges?</p>
<p>If so, it’s not legitimate. Too few a sample size, and undoubtedly a lot of outliers who might be looking for affirmation by documenting their application process. I saw a lot of 3.5 uw’s being accepted to UCLA. That doesn’t happen very often.</p>
<p>If it’s some other website, I appologize to collegeboard.com.</p>
<p>^^ So purely theoretically, given two students, identical (yes, impossible) except for A+ and A, and only one spot, how do you choose?</p>
<p>If the student who got the A went to a high school that doesn’t give A+ grades, how could you say the A+ student is better? You would have to assume they are equal in that regard and look at the rest of their record. Because as you say, identical is truly impossible so there is no sense dwelling on that part of the hypothetical postulate to try and justify counting such a disparity.</p>
<p>Frankly, I could really see an argument for going completely to a 0-100 system, with bonus points for AP and honors. Maybe +10 for AP and +5 for honors. Same for universities, without the additional points for anything. My S goes to a college that doesn’t do + or - grades, and he has been on the unfortunate side of having 4 grades where he got a B+ and so it only shows up as a B, while only 1 that was an A- and so he got the benefit of the higher mark. Everything else has been a solid A or B. If the school had + and - that would have helped, but of course having the grades recorded as 88 or 89 would have been even more accurate. But that is a somewhat different topic, I guess. For this topic and the way things are currently, you cannot have a legitimate measuring system where you are comparing students if they are not being measured on the same scale. That is just a logical and scientific fact.</p>
<p>Several colleges I’ve been reading up on make it clear that they don’t recalculate GPAs. Even if there were a standard weighting system, there would also have to be a standardized approach to which courses were or were not included in the GPA. (Gym? Ceramics? Religion?) You could have a lot of arguments on these points.</p>
<p>Thus, one college has said it doesn’t recalculate your GPA, and I’m not even sure it pays much attention to the average. They scrutinize your transcript and see what you took and what grades you got and roll that into their gestalt impression about you. Hardworking kid with top grades in challenging courses at tough school, yes or no?</p>
<p>One school says it takes your school-reported GPA at face value. Some schools report weighted, some report unweighted, some weight differently. They make no attempt to correct for this. (Which floors me, seriously.)</p>
<p>So, indeed, the information reported on the common data set is, apparently, a mathematical average of data collected in different ways using different approaches and is probably fairly meaningless except in the broadest possible strokes. (After all, conversion of GPA on a 100-point scale to GPA on a 4-point scale without assigning a value to each individual course and re-calculating is silly. The same 88 GPA could work out to a GPA of 3.1 or 3.5 depending on how the grades were distributed.)</p>
<p>I’m sure that when the idea of the CDS was proposed, there were people raising the same objections. “Wait, you can’t just toss all the GPA’s in a bucket and take the average! It wouldn’t make sense! THAT’S WHY WE HAVE THE STANDARDIZED TESTS!”</p>
<p>But those people were clearly overruled.</p>
<p>^^I would suggest that MOST private colleges do not recalculate gpa’s - they don’t have the resources nor time to do so. Think about it: thousands of applications arriving in adcom mail boxes (or Common App) the first week of January with decisions to be rendered by mid-March. It is physically impossible to redo gpa’s…</p>
<p>vossron:</p>
<p>While your point about weighted for AP/IB and A+ grades is well taken, it should be a separate discussion about following the CDS instructions (or not); IMO, the instructions clearly ignores both weighted & A+'s. (Or clear enough that 90% of all colleges also read them the same way.) </p>
<p>I have no doubt that the CDS gurus considered reporting weighted/A+'s, but decided to not to for a bunch of obvious reasons (disadvantages low income schools w/o AP). Their document, their instructions. </p>
<p>Of course, as I posted earlier, colleges are free to ignore the (clear, at least to me) instructions (which is too bad). Instead of petitioning CDS to include weighted gpa’s by all, they change the rules of the game to make their own school look better. Rather self-serving, IMO, and worthy of being called out. (And yes, Donna Shalala, I expected much better from you.)</p>
<p>Hmmm. The clerks must enter the transcript data anyway to get it into a form the adcom can use. Recalculation doesn’t have be done with a calculator!</p>
<p>Entering the GPA as a single data point is a far cry from entering every grade they received and whether or not it was honors or AP. 3.76 is 4 keystrokes as compared to what, maybe 150-200 per transcript for grades alone? Plus with 3.76 your fingers are always on the number pad so it is fast. With B+ AP you have to use the shift key and it just takes longer, even for that one entry. Multiplied by 35-40 courses and thousands of apps, that is a lot of extra work and time, not to mention chances for input errors.</p>
<p>^^Think about the labor that would be required, in a few, short weeks. Do adcoms just sit around awaiting clerks to give them the recalculated gpa’s on a form? What about during ED/EA season which is ~6 weeks total, and the apps don’t arrive until the end of the first week. For example, one popular college received over 6,000 applications for EA. How is it humanely possible to recalculate gpa’s and render a decision in 5+ weeks?</p>
<p>Transcripts come in all shapes, sizes and formats. GPA’s on a 3, 4,5, & 6 point scale, not to mention 100 point scale. Count PE and basket-weaving? What about schools that give 2x PE credit for athletes? Include religion? Study hall? Non-college prep classes, such as personal finance or health? How about a repeat class for the third time? </p>
<p>There is absolutely no way most colleges can process that volume. And expecting “clerks” to make that the interpretations? Do colleges have ‘clerks’ just sitting around on payroll? Do they hire work study students? (Where are those jobs posted?)</p>
<p>And, don’t forget the international transcripts. Yes, they are translated into English, but that doesn’t mean the coursework is easily translatable.</p>
<p>Just google “most colleges recalculate” including " and see the hits.</p>
<p>Well, that was kind of worthless vossron. Most of the hits were links to how colleges calculate your GPA for the courses you are taking in college, at least on the first page. I saw nothing of value there. Here is one quote: <a href=“http://www.collegeadmissionspartners.com/international-students/definitions/[/url]”>http://www.collegeadmissionspartners.com/international-students/definitions/</a></p>
<p>
Hardly authoritative, might just be an opinion still, but even it says some do and some don’t. Another link I looked at said they talked with William and Mary and was told they absolutely DO NOT recalculate GPA, they just take what the high school gives them. All in all, you have pretty much supported everything I have been saying.</p>