<p>But wouldn’t you say that most universities that get 30,000 applications are big state universities getting applications from mostly in-state applicants? Of the well known private schools, Stanford and USC get over 30,000 applications per year, while Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Brown do not. But seven of the nine UCs get over 30,000 applications per year, as does Penn State, University Park. University of Texas, Austin was a few hundred short of 30,000 applications, but they ignore GPA completely and use rank in class instead.</p>
<p>Anyway, a lot of fuzziness in terms of how exactly GPA is calculated can be concealed with holistic admissions.</p>
<p>Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Penn and Cornell all got over 30,000 applications this year. Yale and Princeton weren’t too far behind with about 27,000 each.</p>
<p>I was thinking precisely of those types of schools when I gave my 30,000 figure. I believe Northwestern got over 30,000 apps this year too but I’d have to look it up. So my point still stands. It’s one thing for a self contained state system where the schools in that state are already following guidelines as to how classes get classified, and quite another for a u that is pulling from all over.</p>
<p>Besides, some schools give A, B, C grades and others give A, A-, B+. How do you possibly combine those 2 in a way that’s “fair”? And don’t give me the “go back to the actual number, eg 92.” Where would they get that from? That’s not even in many school’s records.</p>
<p>Local school district uses + and -. Numerical equivalents are on the school profile sent with the transcript. It explains why some students in our district can have a GPA greater than 4.0 even without the AP/honors weighting. (An A+ is equal to 4.3).</p>
<p>Don’t know how closely the colleges look at this, but when D was applying we called the admissions departments of the schools she was interested in and asked about grade scales. They all assured me that they are used to seeing many different grade scales and they figure it out. At least one of these schools (the one she attends) receives well over 30,000 applications each year.</p>
<p>UCB - Times sure have changed with the numbers this year. Columbia went up 7-8k to 34k+ just by joining commonapp. </p>
<p>Brown 30,946
Columbia 34,929
Cornell 36,392
Duke 29,689
Harvard 35,000
Northwestern 30,925
Penn 31,659
Princeton 27,189
Stanford 34,350
Wash U 28,826
Yale 27,230</p>
<p>Texas went to the rank system to get around the affirmative action lawsuit that caused issues in Michigan. Their solution was to say we will take top 10% from any school and give them admission to a State school. Thus the only thing that matters these days is the class rank.</p>
<p>However, the individual school districts and sometimes the schools within design their own policies in terms of how the rank is defined. So some school districts say nothing you take in summer counts, some say there is no weight to honors or APs and thus end up with 20 valedictorians, some say nothing you took before high school is part of your GPA. Weightages are all over the place too. One school has all APs (including preap) and honors adding an extra point while another says PreAP is 1.15 vs AP at 1.25. So a kid who did nt finish an extra math class like Geometry in middle school is not a viable valedictorian the moment they enter high school. </p>
<p>If UCs follow the rule of ignoring 9th grade, it makes sense that Stanford has the same rule with 40% coming from California.</p>
<p>Fallgirl - every piece of communication from elite universities indicates that “they figure it out” means that they look at it with a practiced eye to see patterns, not that the grades are stripped down to core classes, manually entered into a spreadsheet, and recalculated. Because it’s simply not important at that level whether Johnny is a 3.82679 and Susie is a 3.81992.</p>
<p>Besides, stripping down to core courses makes no sense for specialty schools. Why would Northwestern’s theater or music programs not care about how well one did in drama or orchestra?</p>
<p>It would require a small army of workers to manually extract this information from report cards that come in all formats, strip down to core courses (which could be named anything, not just English II), manually enter in the student’s grades, and recalculate – as well as develop a heuristic to fairly weight the school that gives pluses and minuses vs the school that doesn’t. And of course check to make sure no one made a mistake. And yet we never hear of work study or other students doing this. It would be an incredible amount of work. Either it’s really done by an army of elves, or it’s done judgmentally by a practiced eye who looks at the transcript and says good enough or not good enough. The inside peeks at Tufts and Amherst never mention this in the reviews.</p>
<p>"Large public colleges may choose not to re-weight at all and just take whatever GPA as given. "</p>
<p>-Incorrect. We were told specifically by (I believe) the largest public in nation that they recalculate, stripping down weighted and looking at specifics of HS. I have asked becuase #1 kid at D’s HS could not make top 2% because there were only 33 kids in her class, so #1 kid was making only top 3%, while Honors college at school required top 2%. They said they understand situation and taking into account graduating class profile.</p>
<p>Btw, Northwestern guy did mention that the reps for the area are responsible for understanding the practices in the schools in their area. One of the jokes he made was about a kid in a school getting 11.5 and they were impressed until they realized the scale was out of 20 and the kid had a bunch of Cs.</p>
<p>He also was joking about a school that gives out stars for each class.</p>
<p>Some will bring up what they define as top schools. Others will offer up information on a large state school system. And then you may get Deep Springs College tossed in the mix. The large state school systems have so many applicants and students in attendance that, amongst other things, it’s probably doing a service to provide information about their policies, and there’s no reason why it should be considered more offensive to hear about them than a few specific privates, imo. </p>
<p>The state univeristy where I work recalculates the weighted GPA and class percentile for all applicants (~10,000). It takes the admission staff many hours to do this, but it is the only fair way to make admission and scholarship decisions (when combined with SAT & ACT scores). And freshman year is included.</p>
<p>Yes. “Understanding the practices” of the schools in a given rep’s area means understanding that Happy Valley High has a bunch of tough grading teachers, whereas Sweet Valley High gives out A’s like candy. Or that Happy Valley High gives pluses and minuses and Sweet Valley High doesn’t. That doesn’t translate to “we stripped everything down to just math, science, English, history, and foreign language and recalculated.”</p>
<p>Looking at weigted GPA and Class rank together gives a sense of overall difficulty. If a student has a (w)GPA of 4.0 but is ranked 40/200 you know the teachers at that school love to give out As or the student took lots of honors classes and got Bs in them. Another student with a (w)4.0 GPA and ranked 3/200 has worked hard (with tough teachers and/or the school doesn’t offer many honors/AP classes).</p>
<p>I don’t think stripping down to core courses is difficult. They are required for admissions. They need to verify them any way. I would guess they could easily eyeball to know if it’s 3.7 or 3.9. That doesn’t take much time. It also helps if many of 30K applications are frivolous and can be disregarded instantly.</p>
<p>It may not hold true anymore but California used to drive the entire nation when it came to education. We followed their lead. Bringing up what they do doesn’t seem out of place to me. I admit I could be outdated.</p>
<p>At elite universities, most of the 30,000 apps aren’t frivolous and can’t be disregarded instantly. And yes, that’s the whole point - they easily eyeball to know if it’s 3.7 or 3.9, which is different from “they put it all into a database and recalculate it, stripping out the minuses and the pluses, and pay careful attention to the exact number that results.”</p>
<p>pathways,
"The state univeristy where I work recalculates the weighted GPA and class percentile for all applicants (~10,000). It takes the admission staff many hours to do this, but it is the only fair way to make admission and scholarship decisions (when combined with SAT & ACT scores). And freshman year is included. "</p>
<p>-This is exactly my understanding from experience 4 years ago.</p>
The large state school systems have so many applicants and students in attendance that, amongst other things, it’s probably doing a service to provide information about their policies, and there’s no reason why it should be considered more offensive to hear about them than a few specific privates, imo. </p>