<p>My son attends a small private college prep school. There are 73 kids in his class. He has a 3.75 WA or a 91. The school doesn't rank the class but they do put the weighted grade distribution on the school profile. I saw it last night on Naviance and am somewhat baffled.</p>
<p>A full 53% of the class (39) have a 90% GPA or better. The top 10% have a 97-100%. 32% have a 93-100%. In our state, an A is 93 or better.</p>
<p>Okay, he does have a smart class and the school generally doesn't inflate grades. It has the reputation of being much harder to get As than the local public schools. </p>
<p>Am I calculating this wrong?</p>
<p>When I look at the match schools my son is applying to, they mostly have 3.75 avg GPA but then almost all of them say that 85% of the students admitted were in the top 10% of their class.</p>
<p>I understand every school is different, size matters and well as weighted vs. unweighted GPA but something seems wrong with this picture. I would expect the 50% mark to hit more at the B to B- range (80-83). I'm going to ask the GC but I feel like I'm missing something here or am not calculating it right. Help!</p>
<p>First of all, the avg. GPA of admitted students listed by a college refers to the unweighted average. Not every kid has a weighted GPA as not all schools use one and even so, they weight differently. So, even if a college says the avg. GPA is 3.75 of admitted students, your son’s GPA unweighted is lower than that. You must compare apples to apples…unweighted to unweighted. </p>
<p>Second, colleges will know the rigor of your high school and if it is a very rigorous high school with an abundance of very high achievers, they will dip lower into the class ranking than at another type of high school. In other words, a kid in the 25%tile at your school may have stats in line with a kid in the top 10% at another high school. Your son’s standing in the class and his GPA and everything will be looked at in the context of his high school.</p>
<p>If your HS has a strong student population and is a private college prep school with its own high admissions standards, I don’t find it far fetched that the 50% mark at that high school is not a 3.0 but is higher than that. I would not expect to find 50% of the class with GPAs in the 2 point something range. And I feel this way more so at your school as you say the GPAs are weighted too!</p>
<p>^Thank you! That makes sense. Although… I always hear parents complaining how hard it is to get As at the school. My son has a reputation as being one of the better students, so I was really surprised that his 91% was so far down the grade distribution list. I would have guess around 25-30%. I do know his class is known for being much ‘smarter’ than the average class at the school. I guess I didn’t realize exactly how competitive it is.</p>
<p>How do the colleges know the rigor of the high school? He’s applying to several colleges that kids at his school haven’t applied to in recent years.I see on the school profile that they list ‘student distinctions’ and things such as the fact that 100% of the students attend college, a list of recent college admissions and the fact that the school requires a senior thesis, etc. Is that it or is there some other way this information gets communicated? I know I should be addressing this with his GC. I will on Monday. I didn’t go to college the traditional route right out of college, so I feel somewhat at a loss.</p>
<p>The school profile lists various things such as the courses the school offers. They list the percentage who go onto attend four year colleges and list colleges that graduates have been admitted to or attend. They often list a grade distribution or percentiles for the class with regard to GPAs. Admissions officers’ jobs are to be familiar with high schools and also to interpret the transcript in the context of that student’s high school. </p>
<p>Please remember again that your son’s GPA of 91 is weighted. Most colleges will calculate an unweighted one (not every student who applies to college has a weighted GPA including my own kids whose high school at the time did not use one). And a college does not just examine GPA but also the GRADES on the transcript, let alone the rigor of the courseload chosen by the student. </p>
<p>You said that your son’s HS has Naviance. Lucky you. That should give you some idea of where students with his GPA and SAT score have been admitted or denied in the past. Our high school did not have Naviance. Also, my kids applied to many colleges or programs that others from our high school do not apply to or are not admitted to. They still did fine (they went to public school) and got into their favorite selective schools.</p>
<p>The schools normally send out a schools profile with the transcript that will tell college admissions officers a lot about your school and the performance of the students there, along with the class rigor (lots of APs offered, IB, or whatever.)</p>
<p>I, personally, have never really understood how class rank factors in to admissions. It seems so relative. If a kid goes to a really, really bad school, and is a half-decent student, that kid may end up near the top of the class, but still have pretty mediocre college preparation. On the other end of the spectrum is a kid like the OPs.</p>
<p>My kids had no class rank since they were homeschooled, so we just wrote “N/A” for that question on the applications. Still, I’ve always wondered exactly what the principle is in applying class rank to other measurements colleges consider like grades, scores, etc.</p>
<p>You can judge the rigor of a prep school by average SAT score and college matriculation. A top prep school has an SAT average approaching 2100 and sends 25% plus of each class to ivies plus (plus being Stanford and MIT).</p>
<p>Note it’s typically not the top 25% getting into ivies plus, most top preps have lots of legacies, top URMs and recruited athletes.</p>
<p>Just responding to something in post #5…but I don’t believe that a student at the top of the class in what many here might think is a mediocre high school (not a lot of APs or where the percent going onto college is not super high or the SAT is about the national average), is a student who has mediocre college preparation! I truly do not agree with this and further, have not observed this at all. At our rural public high school where I imagine many of you likely would not consider sending your kids, I betcha that the top kids in the class rival the kids at well known college prep high schools. The difference isn’t in how well prepared or smart they are but simply that there are LESS of them in the high school of this caliber and so an elite college would not dip too low in the class ranking to accept a student but an elite college will and has accepted students from the top of the class. These students indeed are well prepared and capable to do well at the top colleges in the land. I know as my own two kids went to this sort of high school and were these kinds of students and got into very selective colleges and programs where they were not only well prepared, but excelled and won top awards at these elite institutions. I think many here think that only those who attend certain type of high schools are well prepared or are of a certain caliber to attend elite colleges and that simply is not the case. An elite prep school or well known public school will have more students like this, but the cream at the top of an unknown high school where many do not even go to college, are on par with those who go deeper down the class standing at elite high schools. After all, parents such as we, could have opted if we wished (we didn’t) or could afford (we couldn’t) to send these kids to elite prep schools and they could have gotten in and are still the same kids. Honestly, my kids were WELL prepared for highly selective colleges coming from a high school whose profile would never ever impress many parents here on CC. Just saying.</p>
<p>^ That is certainly true. Otherwise, the ivies wouldn’t bother taking kids from anywhere but private schools and my understanding is the vast majority come from ‘non-elite’ public schools.</p>
<p>I also live in a small town with one public high school (and no private high schools), and the top achieving kids are well prepared for college, so I didn’t mean that students from such schools couldn’t be… my only intent to was express how I have never really understood how class rank factors into college admissions. When I see something like 90% of admitted students were in the top 10% of their class, I wonder how that might disadvantage students in very competitive high schools. Yes, I assume they’d “go deeper” into the class, but it wouldn’t look so good on their stats of admitted students if they did that too much.</p>
<p>It just seems like a squirrely admissions factor to me, and I’ve never really understood it.</p>
<p>I have no dog in this hunt, as I said, since my kids were just N/A. Many of their friends went to our local public high… and in my son’s “class” of '08 there were acceptances to Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Middlebury, Carleton, Amherst, and Pomona. From a podunk small rural public high school. So, no, I’m not saying those kids weren’t prepared, but for example there was a parent on CC recently whose child was ranked very high in her class, but who had very weak SAT scores. That happened because the school inflated grades, the curriculum was weak, and the rest of the student body wasn’t that strong academically – and yet the student was clearly in the top 10%. Now, colleges would put all that together and probably not take that class rank too seriously, which is the kind of thing that makes me wonder exactly how it’s weighted, or factored into the overall assessment of an applicant.</p>
<p>The fact is, with all of the initiatives to bring in the low income, the middle income, internationals, first gen, kids from S. Dakota and Alaska…prep school kids are not in vogue at top colleges. Of course almost none of them rank which helps the colleges admit a lot of legacies, URMs and athletes from them without it ‘counting’, but the days of the top colleges going deep into the unhooked class at most are over.</p>
<p>I’ve heard that at one of the local public high school most of the kids rarely get a decent grade (3 or above) on the AP exams.I don’t know if this is true or not, but I would think the colleges could put two and two together and figure that the grades might be inflated and the kids are unprepared by looking at average tests scores across the board.</p>
<p>And I don’t think that public=mediocre, private=automatically means better. We have a some ‘underperforming’ small private schools in our community and some ‘superpeforming’ large public high schools.</p>
<p>As hmom5 wrote, many private schools do not rank and so how deep elite college adcoms go into the private school class (say, below top 10%), it would not affect the published stats as to what percentage of admitted students were ranked in the top 10% of their HS class. </p>
<p>When my D was a freshman at Brown, her roommate came from a very well regarded private college prep day school and it was not that big (I would refer to it as a small school from PreK to 12 and I estimate about 65 in the senior class) and she had 8 students in her class entering Brown that year. Contrast with my D from a rural public school (with about 150 students in the senior class) who had no other students in her class going to ANY Ivy League school.</p>