Same at my kids’ high schools. Add to that, the AP math teacher is notoriously difficult, giving few As. Classes that give just about an automatic A, like PE or choir, also have a letter grade, and they do class ranks based on GPA. A whole bunch of kids with almost no academic rigor end up highly ranked. A kid with a 3.4 in all honors and AP graduates around the 50th percentile.
“I guess Im shocked that a student that makes a 90 is seen the same as someone that makes 100 in a class as the same “A”.”
Yes this is a bit frustrating for those on the higher end. In fact it can be worse than that because some teachers curve grades. A student with a 90 gets the same A as a student with a 105!
“I would think there would be 100s of students with the exact gpa and rank,” Yes, there are, with unweighted GPA. Then if you add a crazy weighting scheme into the mix and get something that makes no sense at all. For instance, if you are in orchestra you get less elective credit than if you are in concert band and also marching band which is an overload elective. Since elective credit brings down the weighted GPA, the orchestra kid will have a higher GPA than the band kid who put in far more hours, even if the band kid also had 100% and the orchestra kid just 90%.
“possibly why some schools dont/can’t rank?” " There are better ways to rank. Most schools don’t use them. It might provide some useful info. I do think the schools which publish the exact numerical rank of each student every semester are promoting a horrible stressful and cutthroat environment. I’ve seen posts on here from kids who go to such schools that are just appalling.
Despite these problems, I actually prefer the letter grades because I see kids on here stressing and obsessing about tiny differences in percent-based grades. I have to hope that the GC’s and teachers will indicate in their letters which of their many 4.0 UW students are the true standouts.
Our high school uses a 100 point system, doesn’t weight, and gives no indication of how the numbers translate to a 4 point scale. On line you can find quite a few “official” schemes, which vary wildly. Where this gets tricky, to my mind, is when you try to use Naviance to gauge your chances, based on your school’s GPA. Yes, it’s the same school, but the numbers aren’t relative, as they are in real life and (we are told) in holistic admissions. Colleges with very different selectivity may have quite similar average accepted GPAs, although the average accepted SAT score may be a a couple of hundred points apart. Clearly the kids applying have been taking different classes but have been getting the same grades in them, making the GPA, the most touted factor in admissions, practically useless for the purpose of gauging likelihood of acceptance.
My son’s school only does A, B, C, D, F (4.0,3.0,2.0,1.0,0) - no plus or minus. If you take the course for honors, 0.5 is added to the number.
Marysidney, the college admissions people see the GPA AND they see the class names on the profile AND they see the school profile that generally will tell them if a student took a rigorous curriculum or not. if you have a 3.8 (A’s or 4.0) and zero rigorous classes as defined by your high school that is a weaker transcript than a student from the same school with some amount of rigorous classes and the same 3.8 (or A’s or 4.0)
Seriously people get hung up on this but it rarely makes a difference. GPA is a predictor of college success but it also will correlate closely to the course curriculum taken in high school when all is said and done. At my son’s big uni their were kids that tested into Calc I who never took Calc in their life and plenty of kids that took Calc in high school but tested into Calc I. and I’m sure there are some kids that took Calc but ended up testing into pre-Calc. Admissions knows these things. They are in the business of admitting kids they hope will be successful and hope will accept their offer.
Momofthreeboys: I’m sure you’re right about admissions committees knowing the difference. My point had more to do with the fact that, for students, the GPA and the SAT scores are the two data points with which they are supposed to shape their reach/match/safety lists. On Naviance, the GPAs of two students from the same high school are compared directly, in order to help gauge the applying student’s chances, but the students themselves don’t know how rigorous the courseload of the students that went before. I can guess, looking at the GPA of accepted students at Skidmore (92) and at Swarthmore (92) that the average applicant to those schools was taking different courses, but as a way to decide which school is likely to take my 92, it doesn’t help. If my high school weighted the GPA, no matter how weird the system was, it would make more internal sense for the purpose of seeing how similar students from my high school were seen by adcoms.