<p>We are in Fairfax County and I can assure you that our teachers are not teaching to the grade scale. I don't believe that the county would be nationally ranked as one of the best if we did.</p>
<p>We do however have a disproportionate amount of overachievers and that is why I was wondering about the B+,90-93.5, The B+ kids are considered average and would be considered above average elsewhere. Believe me my daugher feels inadquate with her B+'s and really tries her butt off.</p>
<p>OP, I wouldn't for a moment attempt to tell you that the process is fair to all kids in all situations. Your kid gets a high dollar suburban nationally ranked school with a ranking and GPA that don't match what you believe his rank and GPA would be across the stateline, somebody else's kid at a no name gets 1 AP course available and inadequate college counseling . Does it even out ? I doubt it. I think it will always be perceived by parents in the admission wars as "the grass is always browner on my kid's side". </p>
<p>To repeat what I said earlier: Explanatory note with no whining . Just facts. Stapled to the transcript. </p>
<p>That's the best advice I've got.</p>
<p>xiggi, Where can I find information about over 40% of students in the US reporting an A average? Thanks.</p>
<p>northeastmom, I'm sure he will be here shortly ;) but I'm betting he gets it from the self reporting kids do on the SAT. If so, it's on the College Board site. But let's think about that. Self reporting an A. I wonder what GPA the kids are selfreporting as A? LOL. 3.5? 3.7?</p>
<p>curmudgeon, you are right. I wasn't thinking in the terms you just described, and yes I should be thankful that we do have a good school system. There definately are more disadvantaged kids out there than my own. </p>
<p>Sometimes it's hard to see outside the box that we live in, and yes according to the statistics on our county website more than 90% of the graduating seniors attend college, I'm sure we (my daughter) will end up where she belongs, and I need to relax a bit. (that's what my husband would tell me)</p>
<p>mom2two, My kids are from a hs with a disproportianate number of high achievers too. I really sympathize with your viewpoint, but the IMO, it does not matter much for many colleges when merit aid is distributed. A helpful equalizer, only if your child is okay with standardized testing, is the SAT. The sat combined with ECs are where my S earned some merit aid dollars, but only from some schools.</p>
<p>mom2two, I hope you didn't take my post as critical. It wasn't, I promise. (As a pot I'd never "call out" the kettle. ;)) It was my attempt to say that I thought our GPA system was a POS and I was "concerned" how it would look, too. Be proactive. Help your kid present the most accurate portrayal of their abilities and working through the GC is best. Good luck.</p>
<p>Somewhere in papers at home is something that translates our 100 pt grade scale into letter grades. Weirdly it doesn't seem to be on the transcript or the school profile. Since they give the rank of the student (based on the weighted GPA) - I always figured that was enough information. I can't remember what the conversion was though it wasn't the 90-100 = A- through A+ that I grew up with. I figure if you don't tell the college you might get lucky and they'd use that formula!</p>
<p>My d's school uses a 100 point system. Both weighted & unweighted GPA appear on the final report card F,S, Jr year. I know it is calculated & reported more frequently in Sr. year.</p>
<p>Neither the GPA nor individual subject grades are converted into letter grades or a 4.0 scale. Honors are awarded based on unweighted average each quarter. 90 avg = honors. 95 or greater = principal's list. No ranking.</p>
<p>I liked this straightforward approach when we chose the school. (Our town h.s. has been fighting a very contentious battle to retain the A = 93 grading system even though parents have begged for numerical grades for years. This school often makes bad decisions, and I thought this was another case of stubborn refusal to get with the times.) Can any of you in the know comment on whether or not my d's system is a desirable one?</p>
<p>I like the 100 point system. I like it better without actually translating it into As or 4.0s. And while I don't think there's any 100% fair system for choosing valedictorians - a 100 point system doesn't usually result in more than one kid at the top.</p>
<p>I don't see a problem and agree that a hundred point system is more accurate in deciding between achievers at a high school BUT the colleges don't use it. As Xig said, it is the translation of that system to a 4.0 that creates the problem . As far as I have been made aware, they all translate it to a 4.0 scale.</p>
<p>Maybe they (the colleges) should. :-)</p>
<p>Along these lines when a book or web site like PR states that s chool's averaghe GPA is 3.5 is that W or UW? Also, is that GPA average based on academic subjects only? No PE or Health?</p>
<p>dogs, good question. I've wondered that myself.</p>
<p>
[quote]
a hundred point system is more accurate in deciding between achievers at a high school
[/quote]
just to play contraian for a minute ... I believe that a 100 point scale creates an illusion of precision. A 100 point scale would be more accurate if all courses had the same requirements for grading and were graded consistantly to those requirements. In reality there is a lot of noise in grades. Keeping 100 point grades maintains a precision way beyond the accuracy of the initial grades ... while using A, B, C grading dampens out some of the natural variability inherent in grades. Personally I believe an A, B, C system with pluses and minuses provides the best trade off.</p>
<p>Well, the big argument against letter grades in my town is the scale.</p>
<p>A+ 98-100
A 94-97
A- 92-93
B+ 90-91
B 86-89
B- 84-85
C+ 82-83
C 78-81
C- 76-77
D+ 74-75
D 70-73</p>
<p>All the minus ranges were recently added. Parents claim (I don't know if this is true) that only two public school districts in NJ award an A for 94. The others award an A for a 90. (94=A is the standard for all the Catholics I am familiar with.) Thus, the GPA of a 93 average student will be below 4.0 in our town, but 4.0 in most others. A big disadvantage in college admissions. The parents wanted a numerical system. At the very least, they wanted each numerical grade to appear side-by-side with the letter grades. </p>
<p>Ranking has always created a controversy. Out town just moved to a decile ranking system. Top students were not taking part in non-weighted (honors/AP) classes like concert choir because their GPAs would suffer. With no race for a val/sal, it is thought that kids can take a chill pill. It's not a great school system and top kids felt compelled to do everything to earn the attention of admissions counselors because the HS GCs stink. They are still taking zero period classes and skipping lunch period. I'm wondering how it will all shake out. The sad part was that top kids were missing out on an absolutely fabulous concert choir program to take additional science classes with mediocre or worse teachers.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Most high school trainscripts have a section that expalins their grading scale.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>simba, our board of ed & administrators claimed this, too. Most parents argued that with thousands of applications crossing the admissions desks, it was unlikely that they'd notice our town was one of only two in NJ that did things differently. Afterall, it's not a prestigious school like Styvesant. I don't know the answer. I did remember someone who worked in admissions at a local college (Seton Hall) telling me that they immediately sorted the apps into two piles: 1200 or greater SAT, and below. I think some colleges might do the same with GPAs before they even look the application over.</p>
<p>I'm just hoping that my kids' schools have figured out how to best present their records when the time comes.</p>
<p>I'm in Xiggis camp on this.</p>
<p>At our HS, the scale is the 100 point scale. [A wonderful irony.....since we "don't rank" we need a system that gives about 30-40 different grades to passing students to allow intelligent discrimination among them.]</p>
<p>I think the universities simply take the fractional grade i.e., 90= 0.9, and them multiply it by 4.0 to get the conversion. This means that at our HS, the highest ranking student, who usually has about a 95 unwieghted average, will be assigned an unweighted average of .95 x 4.0, or 3.8.
Thus, our highest ranking student has a grade number that would usually rank him near the second decile at most of the competitive grade-inflated high schools. (A better system would be to multiply by 4.25, but I do not believe that this ever happens.) </p>
<p>Meanwhile, at the letter grade schools, the number of students with above 4.0 unweighted averages is material. </p>
<p>The end result of all this is as Stickershock indicates. While our guidance people and administrators run away from their responsibility to properly market their(our) kids to universities, they still claim that the best schools understand our grading system and have a great respect for our students. Our own results indicate otherwise, in my opinion, and we are routinely under-achieving in Ivy and top school admissions. I simply do not believe that with the incredible application volume at the top schools, and the routine turnover in admission staffs, that any admissions officer really gives a hoot about our school. In fact, because of our location and demographics, what they probably know is that we fall into the category that should be scrutinized carefully to make sure they are not violating their "priviledge rectification" objectives when they decide to admit one of our students.</p>
<p>Any school which wants to have its own unique system had better be pretty sure it has great relationships with a lot of admissions offices. Many claim to have these, but the reality is that there are darn few who do.</p>
<p>"While our guidance people and administrators run away from their responsibility to properly market their(our) kids to universities, they still claim that the best schools understand our grading system and have a great respect for our students."</p>
<p>Hear, hear! </p>
<p>The disconnect between schools and the reality of college admission is mind-boggling. From reading CC, it is obvious that there are GCs and principals who are worth every penny they make. However, I also know that more than a few are completely misguided, but worse, misleading. </p>
<p>During the summer, I got the chance to read the "end of season" mailers sent to our home for both my school and my sister school. My sister school, a tough grading Catholic school, claims great success as 100% of their students attend college. Obviously, the fact that more than 75% of the graduating class will attend the local university (automatic admission requires 920 SAT) or community college is well hidden. The destination of the remaining 25% would only earn scorn and ridicule on CC. Over the past years, the school has abandoned ranking, refused to let students leave school to attend the local colleges during the day, and pretty much turned its back to the AP program, all the while completely ignoring the SAT Subject Tests. But again, the grading policies are very hard as every single grade from a test, a quizz, or homework finds its way in the final grade. Of course, using a 0-100 scale means that a 92 or a 93 is a 92 or 93. No magic equalizer to transfrom a 89.6 into an A and the resulting 100% grade. </p>
<p>On the other hand, the school I attended changed its "reporting" policies in the past two years. They abandoned the AP, supported massively a system of dual credit, started to reflect the weights ON the transcript, kept the ranking system, and offered a more reasonable conversion for the final GPA. The result: between 10 to 15% of the class accepted at Ivies (several at Princeton) and other super selective schools. And all of this, despite an idiot and lazy GC. Pretty easy to see that the changes in the transcript worked wonders. And again, the grading and curriculum at the girl's school are tougher! </p>
<p>In my opinion, both of the schools have simply not kept up with the "progress" and the schools cling to notions of PAST glory. Oh yes, they used to send many students to Harvard or Stanford, based on the reputation. However, they are so behind the times that they seem to send transcripts carved in stone with chisels. The GC at both schools do NOT use computers at all as they prefer working the phone. Wonder why they fail to understand the massive changes that have taken place in the US ... or at the local public schools that have -and are- engaging in the most abject window dressing via watered down IB and AP programs and ridiculous grade inflation. I realize that one might discount what I write as sour grapes, but this would not account for the fact that we have friends and team mates who attend the local public schools, and we KNOW what they have to do to get A and A= at their local schools, and we know that few straight A students ever crack 1000 on the SAT. </p>
<p>Do I buy all the publicity about holistic review and transcript analysis? Nope! My take is that schools that have tougher transcript "system" are hurting their students, and that no amount of "explaining" will change that.</p>
<p>xiggi: I'm still confused about how rank (or absense of rank) will impact a kid. In that A Is For Admission book, Hernandez talks about the Academic (AI) ad nauseam. CRS is a part of the formula, and it appears that having no rank, but a weighted GPA will help my d. She's only a freshman, but her weighted percentage average on the conversion table gives her an 80 CRS. I'm praying that it stays up there. I don't know her rank (although I guess the GC does), but even if she were ranked #1, in a class size of 175 or so, the highest CRS she coul be credited with is 78. I'm assuming she's in the top dozen, because only about 12 girls made the highest honors each quarter. So if she's ranked, say, #12, then her CRS is 65. If she's actually #25, it drops to 60. Big difference. It seems as if her school is doing the wise thing. (Am I even reading this correctly?) Do schools other than ivy league use similar calculations?</p>
<p>My town h.s., however, just switched to deciles. So if a kid is technically "ranked" #1 out of 350, but the transcript only reports her as top decile, that is converted to midpoint of 17, earning a CRS of 67.</p>
<p>It sure seems as if some high schools are oblivious to college admissions.</p>