So how much of this can be attributed to grade inflation in high school? Are kids really that much smarter?
One HS classmate who got into Harvard, Yale and MIT and is now a respected MD did not have the highest GPA in our class and certainly did not have a 100 average. Our grades were letters, and the highest GPA was 4.0 (no extra credit for AP classes etc).
My kids HS transcripts now show number grades and I see many kids (due to my job) with As that are 97 or 98. I KNOW that the tip top kids back in the day did not all have 98s for A’s.
So it follows that with so many kids having GPAs north of 4.0, it is much harder to gauge where you will get admitted.
A B or B- student in today’s HS is in some ways equivalent to a C student in 1980s HS.