<p>Here goes; I don’t mean to be controversial but I am curious about GPA criteria. In 1968 about 17% of graduating students had GPAs of 3.7 or higher. Today, about 40% of students have grades at this level. Either young people today are much smarter or; some serious grade inflation is taking place. Some questions for students recent college applicants:</p>
<li><p>Did you pad your GPA by getting out of P.E. classes?</p></li>
<li><p>Did you pad your GPA by taking a strategic pass?</p></li>
<li><p>Did you pad your GPA by going back to instructors and getting grades changed?</p></li>
<li><p>Did any of your instructors give you an A to help you maintain your 4.0
status?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Just wondering. I just don’t know what a 4.0 means.</p>
<p>At our high school PE is NOT included in the GPA calculations. No courses are allowed to be taken pass/fail. The instructors do NOT change grades. I never had a 4.0 so I didn't have to ask anyone to give me an "A" to maintain my average.</p>
<p>Now...if you are talking about college...My college had no PE requirement. We could only take one course pass/fail a term and that could not be in your major. I asked for one grade to be changed in college, and it was because the teacher actually made a mistake. He agreed that he had made an error and changed my grade. I graduated with a 3.8 GPA....I a grade lower than an A more than once...so no instructor gave me an A to maintain my GPA.</p>
<p>Just FYI...at DD's high school there is very little grade inflation. She is 12/195 in her class with an unweighted GPA of 3.5 and a weighted of 3. 69. This is very similar to my high school class back in 1969...almost no one had a 4.0. DS goes to Boston University where they are known for grade DEFLATION. He has a 3.65 GPA overall and he works for every single point he gets.</p>
<p>There may well be grade inflation. There certainly is in college. But I think the big reason the numbers have moved up is the advent of AP and honors classes where an A grade is worth more than 4.0 points.</p>
<p>Back when I was in high school (which includes 1968), I never heard of a school where it was possible to earn a GPA higher than 4.0. All the grades then were what today would be called "unweighted".</p>
<p>Yeah. I took several of those strategies.
1.) I never took PE at school, instead opting to take it at a local JC for the same credit (plus more fun classes to choose from)
2.) instead of taking the regular 6 classes at school I've been taking 5 plus a college class (which adds up to 6 as far as credits go at my school). The college classes i take count towards my graduation and over college requirements however do not get calculated into my GPA (come to think of it.. if they were i would have a much higher gpa right now lol)</p>
<ol>
<li>No, gym is required for graduation in our state (although apparently you can get out of it if it's the only requirement which you have yet to fulfill, not sure on that one though), and it is not factored in to our GPA. However, I have arranged to take classes opposite gym and go only two or three days a week depending on the semester, but that's more because I would like to participate in those classes and would not be otherwise able to do so.</li>
<li>I don't know what you mean by strategic pass, but we cannot take pass/fail classes as high school students. I've always taken the hardest courses offered to me, and like I mentioned above I've made arrangements so that I can take additional courses which are of interest to me.</li>
<li>No.</li>
<li>No, several have joked about giving me a B "just for fun," though.</li>
</ol>
<p>I go to a public high school, where we have unweighted grades only. We do our grades on a weird scale, but mine comes out to be about a 95%, with numerous AP and honors courses. That's recieving mostly A's with a few A-'s and even fewer A+'s, I don't know what it would be on a different scale.</p>
<p>At my school, only the top 10/260 have a 3.7 or higher. Only two have a 4.0. We're not underperforming- in fact, our scores are quite remarkable. How can so many kids have such a high GPA elsewhere....and what's wrong with my school?</p>
<p>1) PE counts towards our GPA. I took it and did well.
2) No
3) No
4) I don't have a 4.0, but in my Latin V AP class there are only two students, we're not tested regularly, and we were both given high As. I think it was just by virtue of the fact that we're both good at Latin and do the work. I didn't ask for it though.</p>
<p>I had a good chuckle at your list of questions. There are no pass-fail classes at my daughter's high school and students on the honors track do not take any PE classes.
Also, teachers do not give A's out of kindness at her school. In fact, only the top 5% or so of students (out of a class of 350) have a 4.0 or higher average (and that includes weighted honors class). Teachers are very stingy with A's --- in her Honors English class (11th grade) this year, for example, there are only 2 A's out of 50 students in the two sections of the class.</p>
<p>i got my AP European History teacher to promise m that if I got a 5 on the AP exam, she'd give me an A. I did, so she changed my grade. It was great. if only i could have convinced my AP English Lang. and Comp teacher to do the same.</p>
<p>I find the responses interesting especially concerning the P.E. allowances; not computed in GPA and so on. I suspect there has been less demands concerning PE which may have something to do with higher GPAs. Consider this reality check (sorry if I am boring you). My high school required 3 full years of PE; The PE instructor was ex-WWII Marine. Every year we had: football; soccer; wrestling; gymnastics; basketball; track and field. Every year my A crashed and burned on the rings and high bar. In spite of being a 3 sport athlete I never got an A in PE; nor did many others; not even the best athletes. A lot of GPAs took a hit.</p>
<p>It's my understanding that it is optional to take the AP exam, so the score has nothing to do with the class grade. At any rate, since AP grades don't come back until after school is out, there's not a snowball's chance of getting a grade changed here!</p>
<p>at my school, it is "strongly recommended" that you take the exam, meaning, essentially, that you have to if you take the class. Of the people in the class who got 5s, 5 were juniors and 2 were seniors. she changed the grades of the 5 juniors this year. Her opinion was that the purpose of the class is to prepare you for the exam, so if you get a 5, you obv. learned what you needed to. however, she changed her policy this year, since "too many" kids got 5s (this is 7/40, btw. every single person passed (3 or above) though, which was really cool).</p>
<p>I agree. IMO, the exam is difficult, so the exam grade should be reflected in the course grade. Of course, that could work the other way too. Some of the APs, especially the foreign language ones, are known to be borderline impossible to get a 5 on. (However, I have no doubt that many CCers would disagree.)</p>
<p>First, we need to compare weighted vs. unweighted GPA. When the statistics noted that 40 percent have a 3.7 or higher, I would bet that is weighted.
Also, many college don't weight the honors and AP courses enough. RISD for example, only gives an extra .2 push for a mostly honors curriculum. They would rather take a 3.6 kid with no honors courses over a 3.2 kid with all honors and AP. It's a crazy world.</p>
<p>My kids are in a public school (a very good one) where around 40% of the students are on the honor roll. (i.e., 3.0 or better). </p>
<p>Our town taxes are very high, so people do expect better results. And they do NOT mind a bit if they are being lied too, e.g., almost half of the class in H.S. is on the so-called honor roll. </p>
<p>It depends. I think a fair weight is, say, a 4.5 for AP classes. Perhaps until you would get a maximum of 4.0? Because saying "I got a 5.7 on a 4.0 scale" gets expontentially more ridiculous as time goes by...</p>
<p>If grades were weighted at my school, I would be Valedictorian by a long shot. As it is, I am 4th in the class. So I have some personal reasons to push for weighted grades, eh? Some bias. But kids who get straight A's even if they take "normal" classes should be commended as well. </p>
<p>So, in conclusion, weighted grades can give a numerical boost that correlates to taking harder classes, but 7 points on a 4.0 scale for an A in an AP class is just WAY TOO MUCH.</p>
<p>I don't know. As I said I find all of the reporting interesting. I guess I have this, perhaps out of date, notion that A means superior; B, above average and so on. And very vew are truly superior in all areas. I don't get the weighted stuff at all. You can't be more than superior. I also don't get not computing some classes, like PE in the GPA. The problem would be this: In computing the Admissions Index for admission to the UW (University of Washington) the GPA is valued 3 times higher than the SAT score. However, it seems to me it would be very difficult to get a sense of what a GPA means across a range of applicants. Therefore, the SAT results ought to have greater weight.</p>
<p>Probably. An A in one school's Biology might be a walk in the park to get compared to an A in another schools'. But an 800 on the December Biology SAT II test will remain at the same difficulty level.</p>