@northwesty We are thinking the same. DD should be looking at that middle-ish band which has the possibility of some merit based on her SAT scores. That’s where we are looking now. Looking at the Common Data Sets for some of these colleges, many don’t list GPAs so it’s difficult to gauge where she might fit in and how the colleges might look at her GPA. Her SAT scores tend to be at or a little better than the 75% percentile.
It kind of leads back to my original post as there seems to be a lot of ways in which GPAs are calculated by different high schools. I’ve been reading many other posts on CC where students write they have 4.5+ GPAs and were rejected by some of these schools. It is good to know that your child did well, both with acceptances and merit. Was a rank also provided that may have helped (e.g. top 10%). That is a missing piece for her as well.
@dadof1 DD is definitely open to LACs as well and is interested in exploring the possibility of going to college in a diffferent area of the US from where we live. She just submitted her Univ of Alabama application (which I realize isn’t a LAC!) and also forwarded to me the Furman website. I think she is looking at the south and I will give her list of colleges that you mentioned. Thanks!
@riverboat IMO, many of the LACs in the Midwest and South are highly underrated and more affordable than the northeastern/california LACs. I will PM you so we can continue this conversation in more detail.
@riverboat They have their own app online. We completed most of it but never put in the payment nor final Submit. It was an attractive option but they lacked some pieces - namely a strong spoken language program. We certainly weren’t looking to game anything. More hemming and hawing over the languages issue.S1 is a natural polyglot along with the STEM-y knack.
“It kind of leads back to my original post as there seems to be a lot of ways in which GPAs are calculated by different high schools. I’ve been reading many other posts on CC where students write they have 4.5+ GPAs and were rejected by some of these schools. It is good to know that your child did well, both with acceptances and merit. Was a rank also provided that may have helped (e.g. top 10%). That is a missing piece for her as well.”
The colleges that really care about transcripts do their own scoring analysis of the transcript. They don’t look at the calculated W or UW GPA coming from the high school. They calculate their own GPA using their own method.
If you can report top 10% of the class, that really works well. But most high schools don’t report rank, including my kid’s HS. Nice if you have top 10%, but not a problem if you don’t.
It is much easier to simply identify a bunch of schools that do merit money and then pick those where your kid’s SAT/ACT scores are near/at/above the 75th percentile rank. If your kid’s GPA is likely to be a little light, then you might want to have the list reflect a few more schools where the test scores are above 75% than near 75%.
@northwesty Just following up on your comment on colleges recalculating GPAs. My friend is looking for a job at a college and just saw an opening for a “GPA Calculator” which reads in part…
“seeks an individual for temporary seasonal Grade Point Calculator position, with approximate start and end dates of: November 1 and February 15. Primary duties include calculating the grade point averages of academic courses from applicants’ high school transcripts.”
I hope she gets the job and can explain how they do recalculate. It would be interesting to know!
I am looking at my kids’ Naviance (lots of data points) and I see what northwesty is saying. Schools outside the very elites really care about the SAT more than a stellar GPA. Kids with 3.5 and high SAT have acceptances to all of those schools you mention on your first post. American U as well. When rigor is there, a B+/A- student with high SAT has great chances to a lot of the schools in that band. Now merit money I hear is a hit or miss and hard to know the exact numbers as Naviance does not disclose that and people around here greatly confuse need with merit.
But acceptance wise is very common to our school that a kid with 4.0 Gpa and 1800 SAT not to get in and a student with 3.5 uw (high rigor) and 2100 SAT to get in. And parents get all grumpy about because at the info sessions all those schools emphasize how important the GPA is and not the score so much. Not always true.
Again those are observations at our high school and surrounding similar communities. Maybe not true in other school districts.
Also, with a very few exceptions and I believe those were questbridge students, we never had anyone not stellar everything get into an Ivy or very elite.
There’s too much variation in HS GPA’s and rigor, and at the same time the standardized tests, especially the SAT, are more about luck of the draw, preparation for the test, and may I say it again, luck of the draw.
The large public HS my kids went to is very competitive, with a large Asian student body (10%-12% including my half-Asian kids), college level science and techology labs, and full complement of IP, AB, and dual listed courses. Yet we send fewer kids to the Ivies than the mediocre public HS in the city I work 30 miles away because the handful of good students there pretty much mail it in and get a very easy max GPA, take a few AP/honors courses, and put all their effort on standardized tests and polishing their applications instead.
In our HS getting even a 3.5 UW is an accomplishment, in the other HS anyone with a pulse can get that. I can’t extrapolate but I don’t think our situation is unique.
@am9799 Thanks for sharing your school’s Naviance data. While I realize it doesn’t relate to my daughter’s school, it is good to know that others with lower GPA vs. SAT do have positive college acceptance results. @turbo93 I agree that your kids’ situation is not unique. It is difficult to compare GPAs across schools and that is the challenge when trying to compile a realistic potential college list.
I’ll post back in a couple of weeks when my DD’s EA results come out. At that point, I think she’ll have an idea where her 3.5 UW/2200+ SAT stats will land her in terms of college acceptances, at least in the early round.
More hemming and hawing over the languages issue.S1 is a natural polyglot along with the STEM-y knack.