<p>It’s called Socio-economic discrepancy, and its a problem with no solution. </p>
<hr>
<p>Oh, but I did suggest a solution… Well I guess I implied a solution.</p>
<p>In cases where the student has presented a compelling case that they will redeem themselves, the colleges should, out of fairness, ignore the bad grades in high school. (Just as colleges ignore the fact that some students’ high schools don’t offer AP courses.)</p>
<p>Colleges don’t do this. They should. Hence this thread.</p>
<p>The SAT is a joke. It measure fails to intelligence, mastery, or understanding. </p>
<p>Colleges could get more insight on an applicant from an online IQ test.</p>
<p>Addition: Ignore bad grades in high school? Under what basis?</p>
<p>Exagerating lol, more like lying. Top 2% of test takers (which is a 2140 according to the CB) not even the whole population isnt halfway smart its damn smart. Your points are rediculous and are easily refuted by numerous studies of which I am too lazy to post.</p>
<hr>
<p>My points are refuted by studies? Surely you’re joking…</p>
<p>As the above poster mentioned, it’s a socio-economic issue. There is clear evidence that those of lower classes (and in this case, more specifically, unmotivational parents) are disadvantaged in many regards.</p>
<p>…and I was exaggerating. Your point? Does the fact that I exaggerated make my points any less valid?</p>
<p>The SAT is a joke. It measure fails to intelligence, mastery, or understanding.</p>
<p>Colleges could get more insight on an applicant from an online IQ test.</p>
<hr>
<p>I agree that SAT scores fail to accurately measure intelligence, but they are far superior to IQ tests.</p>
<p>“Addition: Ignore bad grades in high school? Under what basis?”</p>
<p>Did you not read my original post? The entire post is a justification. (Be sure to understand that I am only talking about cases where it is clear the applicant has turned it around recently and will do so in the future.)</p>
<p>“and the best students wouldn’t need parents to push them to higher standards.”</p>
<p>This is debatable, but even so, I’m not talking about the best students. I’m only talking about good students.</p>
<p>I think you miss the point of college admissions.</p>
<p>The point of college admissions is <em>not</em> to get the smartest students. It is to get students who will actually: a) complete college and b) bring something to the campus.</p>
<p>Sure, there are many socioeconomic reasons why people don’t try. This is sad, but true.</p>
<p>However, there is absolutely no evidence that this lack of effort would change once a student reaches college. If you didn’t try in high school, why would you try in college?</p>
<p>The truth is, colleges don’t care how smart you are. They want students who won’t flunk out.</p>
<p>However, there is absolutely no evidence that this lack of effort would change once a student reaches college. </p>
<hr>
<p>I can tell you skimmed my post, which is understandable considering the current time and the length of the post.</p>
<p>I made it clear that I was only talking about cases where it appears likely the student has turned it around and will continue to stay motivated in the future.</p>
<p>quick example:</p>
<p>9-10th GPA: 2.00
11th GPA: 4.00</p>
<p>The college should ignore the bad grades out of fairness. You can’t blame a student for not recognizing the importance of school. The student was just a kid after all. If a kid is found guilty of a serious offense will they go to jail? Of course not. Colleges shouldn’t blame a kid for a bad GPA early on for the same reason we don’t send kids to prison for crimes.</p>
<p>A very high SES (say parents who earn 1 mil+) cannot make an average person score a 2150 on the SAT, I gaurentee you this. SES makes things like the SAT malleable to a degree but its not as extreme as you think. Hopefully someone has the numbers to prove this as it was done in a rather famous study.</p>
<p>Oh, my apologies then.</p>
<p>But how would colleges know this? An uptick in first quarter grades?</p>
<p>Coupled with a strong essay/interview, I would think this should be something colleges recognize.</p>
<p>I certainly believe colleges need to look at the trend: freshman year shouldn’t really count at all, and the majority of emphasis should be put on the most recent grades (end of junior, beginning of senior).</p>
<p>A very high SES (say parents who earn 1 mil+) cannot make an average person score a 2150 on the SAT, I gaurentee you this. SES makes things like the SAT malleable to a degree but its not as extreme as you think. Hopefully someone has the numbers to prove this as it was done in a rather famous study.</p>
<hr>
<p>I shouldn’t have boosted the numbers up so high. I was exaggerating. My badness.</p>
<p>My point still remains. It’s not like you’re arguing against my post by claiming my numbers are wrong…please argue against my actual reasoning…</p>
<p>But how would colleges know this? An uptick in first quarter grades?</p>
<hr>
<p>look at my edit</p>
<p>That seems fair to me.</p>
<p>In fact, many colleges <em>do</em> ignore freshman grades. Hopefully they’d also be willing to be lenient on sophomore grades as well, if junior year showed strong effort.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I was almost joking. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I did… but it fails to support your argument in any real logical way. Your entire argument is based on false assumptions of the impact of nurturing, and that parental attention/care would make students perform more optimally in school. </p>
<p>If we’re going to throw the bad GPA out because the student shows a possibility of “redeeming” (whatever that means… few kids change their nature because they go to college) </p>
<ul>
<li>why not throw the standardized scores out as well? Lack of parental concern/attention clearly would have impacted their focus on attaining a high score. </li>
<li>why not throw extracurricular achievements out too? Again, more attentive parents would have made sure they were involved in school and outside activities.</li>
<li>why not throw out the essays? Public school kids clearly would have had no motivation to write good essays, while those with caring parents would have got all the help they need.</li>
<li>why not throw out throw out the recommendations? The teachers/counselor would clearly know the student better if the parent took more interest and visited the educators more often. Recommendations would clearly be biased to those with doting parents. </li>
</ul>
<p>Yeah! Let’s throw everything out because “college admissions are so unfair” and let’s sit everyone down, and judge them all based on arbitrary “redeemable” factors and “potential” later in life. Woo!</p>
<p>I realized you were joking when I looked back and saw that you said ONLINE IQ tests as opposed to standard IQ tests…I didn’t care to edit though because I thought you had already seen my post.</p>
<p>I’ll reply to your post tomorrow. A lot of what you said is easy to counter…almost as if you were ‘almost joking’ again, lol. </p>
<p>I kinda sorta need to go to bed.</p>
<p>I get what you’re saying. But then again, the student should be motivated even without help from parents. My parents…actually my whole family (except for my sister) either never went to college or dropped out of high school. And I decided NOT to be like that and I worked really hard in school. Even now, my parents tell me it’s okay to relax and get a B but I would never consider that.</p>
<p>Openedskittles has some valid points- but let me point out that “watching MTV and litsening to rap” are mere products of nurture, not commands set in stone by an individuals genome. A child coming from a middle class income family will undoubtedly outperform a child living in utter squalor, generally speaking- and this has been proven with empirical evidence, which is why many colleges give clemency to relatively academically poor URM’s. </p>
<p>Okay, OP, you’re frustrated-and rightfully so ; the number of high school seniors applying to college have reached a all time high, and countless qualified students are being turned away for reasons that many of us would deem stupid and unfair- but to go on a mindless tirade about your shortcomings doesn’t speak well to your level of cognitive ability.</p>
<p>“I realize LIFE is not fair, but college admissions SHOULD be fair”</p>
<p>Is college not a part of life? If you see college admissions as a be all end all to your future aspirations, then you should probably seek therapy. </p>
<p>If you had decided to study instead of dawdling away your time on CC, you could have decreased the chance you of having to make another post in four years concerning College Graduation- But hopefully you will have learned to accept the simple, yet seldom understood, maxim that Life is unfair. </p>
<p>“Anyone halfway intelligent can get 2150+ on the SAT with prep, and anyone halfway intelligent can make excellent grades in difficult high school classes if they try.”</p>
<p>That’s quite a bold statement- I do believe that we’re all capable of achieving greatness, but we can’t all be winners. Hypothetically speaking, if every single one of those “Half way intelligent” students scored 2150+ on the SAT and garnered a 4.0 GPA, who do you think will gain acceptance to the top colleges? Certainly not everyone. The competition for gaining acceptance into top colleges will be virtually impossible for the average student, and the margins of error will be atomized to the point in which a single error would result in rejection. That type of logic is equivalent to the government printing out new cash to compensate for a economic downturn- it’s downright stupid. Sure, I am probably smart enough to invent something as simple as the Post-It note, but Spencer silver beat me to it- and I am certainly not going to go on a E-rampage to voice my dissatisfaction with capitalism and call for a communist revolution. </p>
<p>Utopian ideals fail miserably in practice- don’t blame the colleges for declining admissions, blame the thousands of students who are competing with you for the same undergraduate seat. In other words…</p>
<p>Don’t hate the player, hate the game.</p>
<p>Any student can go to college. Students with weak grades and test scores go to college everyday. Yes, they may start in community college, but if they are serious now about commtting themselves and doing well, they have every opportunity to do it. They can normally transfer quite easily for their junior year to a state university where they can continue to excel, and even go on to grad school if they so choose.</p>
<p>It’s absurd to say the degree of your parents’ investment in your high school years closes out the option of college. Does it may it less likely you’ll go to Yale? Yeah, probably. But a whole lot of kids who worked their asses off in high school won’t be going to Yale either.</p>
<p>Life may not be fair, but it is what you make of it.</p>
<p>I’m another that understands your point and acknowledge that college admissions may not be fair. But your argument and logic, though not backwards, is just not incorporating the entire picture. While it’s a valid viewpoint, in a way, your limiting yourself to a vision focused on the student that was not motivated by parents, causing him to earn bad grades early on, and then has a “likely” chance to do much better in last years of h.s. and also college. Sure, students who are unmotivated by parents have a greater tendency to take the same apathetic path regarding education, but there are many others in the same situation and yet still succeed (alithyiaiden, for example). On the other side, there’s PLENTY of students whose parents provide immense motivation and abundance of resources to do well in school, and these students, while recognizing the importance of school, still do as the unmotivated-by-parents students supposedly do. </p>
<p>I agree with most of Gryffon5147’s points. Socio-economic discrepancy plays a big part in this problem.</p>
<h2>OP said before:</h2>
<p>quick example:</p>
<p>9-10th GPA: 2.00
11th GPA: 4.00</p>
<h2>The college should ignore the bad grades out of fairness. You can’t blame a student for not recognizing the importance of school. The student was just a kid after all.</h2>
<p>So how about the kids who tried and worked hard in high school for all four years to get the A’s? For the nerdy all study no play kid, perhaps one can argue that colleges should ignore their lack of EC’s and their so-called “no life” way of living “out of fairness.”… You can’t blame a student for recognizing the importance of school either. And yes, that 4.0 GPA student was “just a kid after all” too. And no, not all of those 4.0 kids were motivated by parents. </p>
<p>I guess what I’m trying to say is, even with motivation and (anything else you want to add), the final decision is simply your own. You want to succeed? Then do it. You don’t need your parents’ motivation. (It may help, but not always–some might even consider it an unhealthy surplus of added stress.) You forgot about self-motivation. Coming from a low income family, I have some idea about the disadvantaged environment these students have to step over to get that opportunity of success. It’s not easy, but the toughest barrier to break is the one where YOU decide if you want to do well in school (and in life), regardless of all other factors (i.e. parents’ motivation, point of realization, etc.). </p>
<p>If that student can redeem himself and shows potential that he’ll do well in college, besides the fact that it’s called an “upward trend,” then it shouldn’t matter too much where he goes. In such a circumstance, he should be successful whichever college he ends up at (or at least make the best of the situation). </p>
<p>Oh, and colleges do not ignore a student’s lack of APs coming from a school that offers none – they take it into account. </p>
<p>And concerning an earlier set of posts, since we all agree life’s unfair, using maybe backwards logic, then why should college admissions be, in any way, fair to say the least?</p>
<p>I’m not saying your take on this is wrong, but you should try to expand your vision to all points on the spectrum.</p>
<p>if it means so much to you…set a new precedent by doing for your children what you wished your parents would have done for you…</p>
<p>thats all you can do at this point</p>
<p>my advice to all that think that it is unfair—</p>
<p>make the best of whatever situation you find yourself in</p>
<p>this post is actually starting to make me more angry-- here is way</p>
<p>My grandfather came from india in 1969 with nothing</p>
<p>He worked for 8 years and didn’t take a single week off (worked at a lumber mill) making minimum wage just so hed have enough money to send for his family back in India (my father)</p>
<p>My father grew up with nothing managed to work hard and pay his way through university</p>
<p>He then worked for 8 years and finally applied to medical school when he was 28—he applied to 20+ schools and only got accepted into one</p>
<p>He worked incredibly hard and sacrificed fun --he calls it “deferred pleasure” </p>
<p>Eventually became a radiologist</p>
<p>He is now 48 years old and has millions to his name and has given me every opportunity in the world</p>
<p>He—according to him—had no example to live by…</p>
<p>figure this **** out by yourself</p>
<p>Life isn’t fair—haha</p>
<p>from a mud house with no electricity and no running water in rural india at 16 years old to what he has today…</p>
<p>STOP complaining and make due with what you have…</p>