<p>Ok, here’s a thought experiment to illustrate why GPA is a bad indicator to compare students. Note; All that stuff about honors/AP/unweighted stuff will be left out, as thats irrelevant.</p>
<p>Now, when a school ranks based on GPA, not average, Student A is ranked higher than student B, even though Student B is a far superior academic achiever than Student A. In terms of this on a large scale, if enough people are student A’s, the academic overachiever Student B could be ranked out of the top 10% of his class by people who do less well in school than him. And that concludes this thought experiment in why GPA is a crappy indicator of school preformance.</p>
<p>GPA when calculated first translates the individual grades to the 4.0 scale, where the 94 would be translated to a 3.9. Numerically it’s impossible to get a 4.0 average when a 3.9 exists, even though the amount it drops is miniscule but it still creates a differentiation. Now the average of the 4,4,4,4,3.9 for Student B’s courses would value out to a 3.98, which is lower than student A’s 4.0</p>
<p>I believe the 4.0 scale should be completley thrown away and replaced with just an average out of 100. </p>
<p>I just thought of this randomly after going to dunkin donuts to get a coolata ^_^</p>
<p>HisGraceFillsMe, I thought the same thing, but using the OPs example, since Student B had a 3.9 in one of the five courses then it is mathematically impossible to get a 4.0 unless you round up.</p>
<p>Nice to hear you still have dunkin donuts. Ours is now a cutrate hair place (pardon the pun).</p>
<p>My kids thought their friend was an absolute genius when he told them he had a 4.2 gpa. Since my kids’ school doesn’t weight, there are no AP, Honors, CP classes (just dual enrollment at local u’s for jrs and srs), they really had their eyes opened when I showed them how gpa’s were measured in other schools. They were pretty shocked. </p>
<p>Adcoms aren’t stupid. They know how to interpret GPA’s given the school profile. And that’s why we have very important tests called SATs, SAT IIs, and AP exams.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, colleges don’t really have another option. They care more about the results and grades of a student rather than their actual ability. </p>
<p>If you were a extremely bright student but didn’t do as well as you hoped in high school (say, a B average) then colleges might prefer someone else who’s less capable but had an A average.</p>
<p>It may or may not be a flaw, depending on your perspective.</p>
<p>Well in this case the person with better grades academically would be artificially pushed lower than the other person even though he/she has better grades than the person who gets an artificial boost from the faulty GPA System. Adcoms can simply throw the GPA system away and simply base their high school average comparisons on the average out of 100, instead of this crazy stuff with A=4.0, A-=3.6, B+ = 3.3 etc. =P</p>
<p>I hate how if you have one bad semester, even if there are decent excuses for it, but if you didn’t have a death in the family, weren’t paralyzed or didn’t have a near-death expierence it seems unexcused. </p>
<p>Like I should have like a 3.7, but because of one bad semester (3.0, I had the flu for two weeks and couldn’t balance makeup work, APs, SATs, ECs and my grades, especially finals) I now how like a 3.4 (and even lower for UCs, which won’t see my Senior year grades). That’s what I hate most about the GPA. </p>
<p>I mean you could do great for all of High School and then have one bad semester, and then your GPA is thrown way off. True, colleges see each semester, but that lower GPA is an immediate turnoff. Plus if it happens during 2nd semester Junior (like it did for me) or 1st semester Senior year it makes you look like a total slacker.</p>
<p>Many college consider rigor of curriculum more important than actual grades in the class. First and foremost, they want to see if you challenged yourself in the toughest courses possible. Then they look at your grades. I wouldn’t worry if I were you. But then again my school doesn’t rank and weights honors and AP classes. So I guess I can’t really relate lol.</p>
<p>if he was extremely bright, then why didn’t he do well? You can give tons of examples of people like Einstein that did horrible in school yet turned out to be one of the most influential people in recent times… but those types come only once every so often…</p>
<p>and if the person was less capable, how did he/she have an A average? class rigor also comes into play, ect</p>
<p>to the OP … I can just as easily rig an example where using a avg% let’s a student cover a relatively bad grade with lots of superior grades. Each system has pros and cons … a GPA system rewards consistancy across all courses while allowing a student to just get by in a grade range … while a % average creates an incentive to do as well as you can in each class but allows a poor grade to be covered by excellent grades. </p>
<p>I’ve certainly read of tons of GPA schemes from high schools on CC … but there seems to be much less variation in college and it seem center on A, B, C, D, E grades for each class with some schools throwing in "+"s and "-"s. For what it is worth this system seems to be much closer to how the real world grades work performance, in my opinion, than a %average type system.</p>