is it true that uni adcoms review datas of currents students on campus, their grades and activities to judge how credible their schools’ GPA system and reflection of students?
They review the high school’s School Profile document and they compare apps from the same high school.
@wolves0987 , I don’t know if that’s true but I’ll be following this to see if anyone can answer that. Truth be told, they should do that b/c it’s potentially extremely informative given all of the grade inflation that goes on in certain High Schools.
I can name a few High Schools in our area where it’s simple to get straight A’s and it bothers me sometimes that colleges unknowingly put those schools in the same category as others (where kids actually have to make a lot of time sacrifices to get those same grades). Bottom line, you aren’t going to get the same student out of School A as you are out of School B, even if those students have the exact same GPA.
@evergreen5 @Kayak24 Thanks for your input guys but I was asking about whether admissions officers review GPA of current students at university when evaluating HS applicants who go to the same school as those students who already got in.
I do know that, institutionally, admissions offices can develop a general sense of how students from ABC HS have done over the years and that does color their view of future applicants from ABC HS.
But I don’t think that’s limited to college grades. Could also be interactions with professors, leadership in campus organizations, etc.
@wolves0987 , Yes - that’s what I mean. Admissions Officers should be aware of how currently enrolled university students from X High School are doing or have done in their college when evaluating the current kids applying from X High School.
Edited to add: they also can’t judge on just a few students but hopefully over time get to see trends in outcomes.
That would seem to be very difficult if there are only 5 students from the high school in the freshman class at the college. Even if it is a very big high school, how many kids are going to go to Dartmouth from a high school in Utah or to UF from a small school in California?
If a college is used to taking a critical mass of students from a particular high school, I think they’d rely more on the 10 year history rather than looking at the 10 kids they took last year. Is Columbia going to stop taking kids from Styv or Brooklyn Science because 2-3 from last year didn’t work out? No.
– I never heard of admissions doing any such thing. In general once students are admitted the admissions office’s work is done for that class. IMO your suggestion is just not practical for many reasons (ex. you would need a critical mass of students from every HS, some college majors (ex. engineering) may have lower average GPAs than other majors which could skew the sample etc.)
–However, each HS sends a school profile which has things like average GPA, average standardized test scores etc. so the transcript will be reviewed in the proper context.