Are GPAs of 4.0 becoming commonplace?

I think AOs can figure out if grades are inflated. For S19’s class, the top ten percent have a 3.82-4.0 unweighted GPA. I honestly think about ten kids have a 4.0 out of the 750 kids in the class. As for weighted, it’s hard to compare school to school, but we’re pretty sure that there are two kids (two kids!) who took all honors or AP and ended up with all As.

These stats are on the school profile. The AOs will know grades are not inflated at our school. I can’t imagine what they even do when a high school has a large percentage of kids with a 4.0.

And I agree that AOs look at unweighted and then gauge the rigor by looking at the transcript.

@Muad_dib And no one at our school gets a 98-100 percent in an honors or AP class. That just does not happen. The tests are hard and there’s no extra credit. Kids with a 93 percent and up get As and, in most AP classes, there is an equal distribution of As and Bs with a few Cs mixed in.

Unweighted is the only thing that matters. School weighting is all over the map. My son took 7 APs and got zero bump. His school doesn’t weight GPAs.

AO’s know perfectly each and every school. That is called reputation. They know the meaning of a 4.0 or a 5.15 GPA. There is no such thing as an inflated GPA that could trick an officer of admissions. That is why you see HSs with 20% acceptance rates in Ivies and similar universities, and many others that have not seen one single admission into those.

They don’t know every high school. But they know how to gather enough perspective, they know the different data points that tell much and how to compare this high school’s profile against others. They know areas within their territories, those local demographics and struggles.

The first issue is that a applicant needs to do his or her best on the actual application. Just as we hope adcoms are informed about various hs, students need to be informed about their targets. For a top selective, even a 4.0 and top scores aren’t enough.

I don’t worry so much about grade inflation in a particular high school. In theory, sure. But on your app, there are lots of ways to show you have what it takes/what they want- or not. The higher the tier, the more it all matters.

@washugrad you get the prize! Seriously a 4.0 means nothing without context. This is why the SAT is so important.

This does seem to vary between high schools.

One daughter had two 89’s in four years, otherwise all A’s with quite a few AP classes. I don’t think that she was in the top 10% of her high school. I don’t know how many of the students in the top 10% had all A’s over four years, but I would guess it was probably about half. My other daughter went to a different high school which did not have any student with nothing but A’s in her graduating class.

Looking at the work that both daughter’s did in high school, these were not cheap or easy A’s. I am suspecting that today’s students may actually be learning more compared to when I was in high school. They certainly are under a lot more stress.

Our school has about 550 students in class. Last year there were 13 4.0’s, this year over 30, somewhat unusual. But A is anything over 90%.

In our school system, any graduating senior with a 4.0 UW is a valedictorian. Each high school has about a dozen each year. Some are top students and some just took easy classes. Among the graduates who head to super-elite colleges there are as many who aren’t vals as who are.

Grades mean different things at different high schools. In the area where I grew up, most high schools graded on an unweighted 0-100 scale, rather than a 4.0 scale. I’m not aware of anyone from my high school who has ever had a perfect 100 GPA. However, there is one area school that converts to a 4.0 by counting every grade above 90% as an 4.0, so a good portion of the class has an UW 4.0. In addition to different grading scales, there are also different degrees of grade inflation, different pools of attending students, and different degrees of course rigor. There are some high schools where more than 10% of the class has an UW 4.0. And there are other high schools, where nobody ever gets a UW 4.0.

Different colleges also treat grades differently in admissions decisions. Awhile back, a journalist from the WSJ contacted many selective colleges and asked how they recalculate GPA to standardize. There were a wide variety of different answers. Some colleges said they applied a consistent weighting system for AP/honors classes. Some colleges removed non-academic electives and calculated core academic alone. Some removed +/-, which prevents kids in A+ = 4.3 grading systems from having an advantage. Some removed freshman year. Some used a psuedo-ranking system. Some didn’t recalculate at all. The more holistic colleges also manually reviewed the transcript and considered it in the context of the high school, as well as the individual student, including things like which classes had the less than A grades.

Consistent with this, different selective colleges report widely varying percentages of applicants having 4.0 grades. For example, Stanford’s 2016 applicant profile page indicates 58% of applicants had a 4.0 or above. In an announcement earlier this year, Princeton mentioned that 40% of applicants had a 4.0 GPA. The Harvard lawsuit docs mention that 22% of applicants had the maximum possible converted GPA score, in the last available year. Regardless of the specific number, all say that a good portion of applicants to highly selective colleges have a 4.0 GPA.

However, if a large portion of applicants have a 4.0 and you have 3.9x, it generally doesn’t mean you’re out. Instead, there are a variety of other factors in admission decisions beyond having the pinnacle of highest GPA, particularly at more holistic colleges. For example, the Harvard lawsuit docs indicate that academic rating alone; which includes grades, rigor, scores, and other factors indicating degree of academic achievement; together only explained 9% of variance in admissions decisions. The other 91% of variance in admissions decisions related to other factors. Instead the relationship was more that a little under half of applicants receive a 2 rating in academics, and other portions of the application help distinguish between this large group… particularly things like ECs, personal (including essay), LORs, and hooks/tips.

Our school gives out a numerical weighted GPA so I am not very familiar with the 4.0 scale. What number out of a 100 is a 4.0?

@massmom2018 – typically either on a 7 point or 10 point scale. If it’s 7, then 93 or above is A; if it’s 10 then 90 or above is A.

@aquapt - we have exact same Valedictorian policy in our district.

At my daughter’s college prep high school, I would say probably 15% of students had an unweighted 4.0 and over the 98th percentile on standardized tests. (Average ACT at her school was a 28 for her graduating class of 205 students). All but a small handful of those kids took the most rigorous courses offered.

Honestly the problem is that there is a ton of grade inflation nowadays. 4.0s aren’t as hard to get, but they are decently rare.

At our local public school, a 4.0 puts one slightly above the average in the class. So a class rank of 450/1000.

The question is are the kids actually smarter than they were before, or is all of this grade inflation undeserved?

the grade inflation is undeserved: high schools want college acceptances for PR–if you goose one group -they all get goosed. Many public high schools have no minimum GPA requirement as they did in the past

A 4.0 average means different things at different high schools. My kids’ HS grades on a 100 point scale and according to the school profile conversion chart, a 4.0 equates to a 97-100 average. There can’t be more than a couple of kids per grade with an uw average that high, maybe not even that. If you are taking classes like BC Calc, AP Physics, and AP Chem, it’s almost impossible to maintain a 97% uw average at my kids’ school. At other high schools, the entire top 10% of the class might have 4.0 GPAs. That’s one of the reasons I think all the “chance me” threads you see on CC are a waste of time. The poster can tell you his/her GPA, but nobody knows what it really means in the context of the HS they attend.

It depends on the HS – that is why each HS submits a school profile with the transcript.