<p>Well you didn’t post the right information then. You got denied with a 33 ACT, not a 35. I didn’t really check your other ECs or test scores but you got denied with your first round of scores. It doesn’t matter what your stats are later.</p>
<p>Schools won’t compare the two students from the same school like that. They won’t look at one and say they must be better than the other. There would be different classes, teachers, etc. Don’t worry about the school’s crazy grading, it won’t affect what happens, most likely.</p>
<p>Again, an act score of 33 is in the 99th percentile…so is a 35…</p>
<p>At that point a college admissions counselor knows you’re academically capable, because 2 points of an ACT score is again missing 3-4 more questions. It doesn’t make or break you…it’s ludacris to believe that a two point difference on the act would change an admissions decision. Bottom line is qualified people get denied all the time.</p>
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<p>LividDad, has your son seen some of the school profiles at LACs? I think I was looking at either Amherst’s or William’s school profiles once (I woud like to say the former, but it was one of the ‘top’ LACs), and the number of students with 800s (and then 790s, 780s, etc.) that were rejected is really interesting and eye-opening in that top LACs are not all about stats, and that even perfect stats won’t help you very much. So it’s definitely not about being ‘smart’ enough.</p>
<p>If your son has gotten into any safeties or matches, Spring Break might be a good time to visit some of them. I have actually fallen in love with my ‘fall-back’ school, to my parents’ chagrin, because they have done an excellent job of wooing me, and I would be super-excited to attend basically any of the schools I have applied to, reaches, matches, safeties and all. It might be difficult to get your son excited about the other schools on his list, but you don’t want him being rejected at his highly selective schools and feeling like he is ‘settling’-- even if the overall school isn’t Harvard, say, there are unique programs at every campus that could be exciting.</p>
<p>At least he wasn’t rejected.</p>
<p>I do believe “holistic admissions” are a farce designed to instill hope where none should exist.</p>
<p>It really doesn’t matter if thousands think holistic is a farce and USNews is gospel and drives every college movement. Or that you need to find the cure for cancer or or. You have to have some experience with the process to know. And, anyone who looks at the admit percentages can see the vast majority won’t find a seat. </p>
<p>The fact that sooo many kids apply to desirable schools (whatever that means to each buyer,) means those colleges can cherry pick. This does not automatically mean “abuse of power.” (Harvard had 14000 4.0 or better appplicants last year.) The Common App matters very much. I empathize with OP’s original issue- my dau had a nut-job teacher and a few other hurdles. To be frank, I’ve also had bosses who passed me over for a promo I deserved, underdelivered on a raise, set impossible standards, etc. It happens. The real question is: so whattya gonna do next?</p>
<p>OP can have a polite talk with the GC to ask if some mention was made that some teachers are exceptionally tough graders. The GC may or may not agree with this perception. If she does- and didn’t already mention it her letter- perhaps she will help. Perhaps not. The case is stronger if there is some important info to add to the app- son won a recent prominent award or honor, accomplished something of merit, is interning, etc.</p>
<p>Since we know nothing about this college, we can’t even begin to opine on the impact of the B’s. But, if the hs is well known, on the college’s radar- if they know some grades are deflated- then the CA (the rest of the story, after stats) becomes that much more important.</p>
<p>Purpleacorn: My son never considered Williams or Amherst. He knew he would never be admitted to an Ivy-equivalent LAC.
In truth, I have calmed down. I was particularly angry in December, but I wrote my original post as though I was just as angry as I was a month ago.
I should have written a calmer, more generic post about the need to address the problem of high school principal’s allowing different teachers teaching the same course having vastly different requirements and standards. Is this problem as big at many high schools as it is at my son’s school? I don’t think the principal at my son’s school is happy about the situation, but he is powerless to change it. I bet if he had better leadership skills and the respect of the best teachers in the school, he would be able to improve the situation.</p>
<p>In my school, teachers aren’t allowed to take sides on matters like this against their colleagues. I’ve been in somewhat the same situation, except rather than everyone getting screwed out of a grade, I’m the only one being screwed out of a grade. You can check my thread if you’re curious. In the end, there was nothing I could do even after going all the way up to the superintendent. In all honesty, as unfair as some of your classes sound, there’s really nothing that can be done.</p>
<p>Sadly, your son’s situation is not unique. We have had the same problems at our HS. S has exactly the same Honors classes as D two years ago. D had a really tough freshman English teacher, so many formal essays, in-class essays, cumulative vocab tests every week, so many required readings… D’s teacher gave out very few As in the four classes that she taught. S on the other hand had one formal essay so far, no in-class, got an easy A with a different teacher. Luck does play a part in getting a good gpa. It seems unfair. We, parents, do feel powerless at times.</p>
<p>There was a silver lining in D’s case, she got a 12 on the SAT essay on her first try. I do not think that S will do as well. In the end, there is no substitute for hard work. Your son will do well in the college of his choice.</p>
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<p>I can appreciate your frustration with the college application process to the top 20-30 colleges. There are so few available spaces and so many applicants. That said, I wonder how this thread would be viewed by this year’s high school seniors, including your son. Surely not everything and everyone can be as bad as you claim.</p>
<p>Jesse</p>
<p>Fogcity:
Four of the teachers my son has had over the last two years regularly make fun of the principal in front of their classes. Three of them have even bad-mouthed the principal, to varying degrees, at back-to-school night, in one case, to the applaud and cheers/ laughter of every parent in the room. The administration is not exactly beloved.
Three of my son’s excellent teachers in 10th and 11th grades believe that grade inflation hurts the very top students in this school with a very accomplished student population, which explains why my son has received more Bs than he would have received if his teachers had been selected for optimizing his GPA. Other teachers of the same courses feel that they want to help as many students as possible get admitted to college and give a large proportion of A grades. Some guidance counselors help students transfer into the classes of easier teachers and others refuse. It is a mess.
My son agrees with the teachers who feel that As should only be awarded to the very top students, but he also feels all teachers should be forced to adhere to the same standard. In addition, he feels that teachers, even the ones who don’t believe in grade inflation, should give more Cs. It angers him that students who have averages of 78 in a class are frequently bumped up to a B (because the teacher does not want to give Cs), but his 88 average is not bumped up to an A. This has happened several times. He would like to see his B grades mean something, too.
Some students seem to feel entitled to their high GPAs. It is not uncommon for students of an easier teacher to state that he or she would have received an A from the harder teacher because they “earned” high As in their easier classes. One such student in my son’s English class received his first B in English as a senior after years of always lucking out with the easier teachers. My son had been receiving Bs for two years in English and has now finally received an A, probably due to the fact that he has learned a lot over the last two years with tough English teachers.
Compared to previous years, the results from ED this year have been extremely disappointing. No one understands why this year has been so different from other years. Quite a few straight A multi-talented students who have won national recognition in one way or another expected to be admitted EA to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, U of P, MIT, Brown, etc, were deferred and are now applying to Johns Hopkins, Duke, Wash U, etc. To a much greater extent than in previous years, the top students are competing with slightly lower ranked students at the latter group of schools.
With a very large senior class, there just aren’t enough top colleges to go around. I bet if the school split into two smaller schools, the rate of acceptances to top colleges would increase.
Even the students who wind up at places like MIT and U of Chicago, arguably among the most demanding universities in the country, return to the high school during vacations and claim college is a lot easier than high school. The older brothers and sisters of my son’s friends have gone on to an impressive list of graduate, medical, and law schools and have won prestigious scholarships.
I am not saying that my son has deserved straight As. As well as he performed on his SATs, his smarter friends scored even higher. My son does not belong at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Williams, Haverford, Middlebury, Duke, you name it. But I do feel he has had more than his fair share of tough teachers, and he never tried to transfer to the classrooms of easier teachers. He took the tough AP courses, probably more of them than he should have taken, and he refused to take any of the easier ones, such as AP Psych or AP Environmental Science. He took risks he’ll be penalized (rather than rewarded) for taking. He has 4 or more years of every major academic subject (social science/history, math, foreign language, science, and English).
Looking at Naviance, it seems pretty clear to me that many schools have specific cut-offs and won’t consider students with GPAs below 3.5 or 3.8, regardless of SAT scores. For the popular schools, there is often a very clear line below which the school will only consider rare applicants (probably those with significant hooks) and above which acceptances are the norm. My argument is that this is very unfair to the students who have had the more difficult teachers. The people who respond by saying “tough” or “life is unfair” are part of the problem. Admission to the top colleges is a lottery system. Individual high schools should not compound the problem with unfair systems of their own. Colleges should be able to fairly compare two applicants from the same high school with the same set of courses listed on the transcripts.
Although my son is not trying to get admitted to an Ivy or Ivy equivalent school, an unweighted GPA between 3.6 and 3.7 with a very difficult schedule of classes and teachers and 2200+ SAT scores is nothing to sneeze about. Despite one poster’s comment about his “less than stellar GPA”, I am proud of him.</p>
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<p>There’s nothing difficult to understand. There are 30,000 high schools in this country; it is ridiculous and entitled to expect that there should be multiple kids from your one singular high school going to the tippy top colleges. Not because they aren’t qualified - but there are simply far, far more qualified kids than slots in these colleges, which is why they have admissions rates of 15% and below. You didn’t think that these low admissions rates were simply because unqualified kids applied, right? The vast majority of kids applying to these schools are just as qualified as your son, and they have to make choices.</p>
<p>There is a blazing sense of entitlement that these kids “expected” to be admitted early to Stanford, Harvard, et al. Make no mistake - colleges pick up on this sense of entitlement, and they are not impressed.</p>
<p>I’m sorry your son was deferred from his dream school. However, it seems that you think that admittance to a dream school is guaranteed in some way, and that it’s a failure of the system if he doesn’t get in. 95% of those who apply to Harvard are going to be disappointed. That doesn’t make the system unfair, or rigged, nor is it a statement about those kids who didn’t get in. </p>
<p>The “problem” that Madame Smith who teaches French V gives out more A’s than Senora Jones who teaches Spanish V is a complete first-world problem. Guess what? In college, it may be that Professor Johnson who teaches Biology gives out more A’s than Professor Williamson who teaches Chemistry. Such is life. </p>
<p>You say that “colleges should be able to compare 2 applicants from the same hs with the same courses” but what you’re not getting is that top colleges aren’t necessarily comparing two applicants from the same hs to figure out which one is “better.” My alma mater, a top 20 university, explicitly says that they don’t compare or have quotas at the high school level. Anyway, you’re missing the bigger point - which is not that they are trying to figure out which are the “best” students (in which case they’d rack and stack by SAT or GPA), but they are trying to create the most interesting classes from their standpoint. Guess what? That sometimes means that a 3.9 kid is passed up in favor of the 3.7 kid who brings something more interesting to the table. That’s why an elite college strategy simply cannot be all about the grades. The good grades are the ante - but they aren’t the driver or differentiator.</p>
<p>You SHOULD be proud of your son. He sounds like a fine young man. Now here’s how to help him feed his potential – move off the nut of “life was stacked against you and it’s awful that you were deferred.” Sympathize with his pain and then teach him that there are plenty of wonderful schools out there, and that fixating on one school as a dream is no better of an idea than fixating on one career or one girl.</p>
<p>Sorry your son was deferred, but it appears to me that you might have blinders on, regarding your son’s status as a top student. Yes, he is well qualified, but combining information from a few of your comments here paints a different picture than the one in just the original post. You son has a moderately good GPA, which should be improved in his mid-year report. He has a good though not stellar SAT score. You’re arguing that that 2200 SAT score should mitigate his lower grades, yet go on to say his high school produces several students each year who manage a 2400 in a single sitting. That provides as much context as the lower GPA. </p>
<p>You complain of grade deflation by the top teachers, or inflation by the easier teachers, yet these students with the top grades are not getting into the top schools either. So perhaps colleges know what’s going on. Your son’t top choice may be well aware as well, which is why they deferred them. They may be looking for him to distinguish himself in some way. They’re telling him he fits the profile of students they will accept, but is not an “automatic admit” type of student. </p>
<p>If your son can show, through his applications, that he is a top student, despite his lower grades, he will ultimately get in. But a school that expects a 3.8 from its admitted students is going to be a tough school. Perhaps what they are looking for is the students who would have gotten A’s in the tough teachers’ classes - because few students from your HS are interested in an LAC, they don’t apply often, so you have no idea if those students who are higher ranked would have gotten in either - you have the experience of one previous student, who may have written something special in her essays, or did something else unusual which got her in.</p>
<p>Lets call spade a spade here. OP’s son has 3.6 GPA, not 3.85+. You would have to receive quite a few Bs to get 3.6 GPA. I could understand one or two teachers give him underserved Bs, but not enough to bring it down to 3.6. I am not saying 3.6 is not a good GPA. Lets assume if this is not due to OP’s ability, but due unfairness of grading, why did he or the parents try to fix it before it is too late. I would have had meetings with those teachers through out the year to monitor the situation or have transferred my kid out of those classes. There are many students at the school, are we saying that all of those students with 3.8+ were all lucky? Sorry to be so blunt.</p>
<p>We worked with a private counselor for D2. The first thing he said to D2 was GPA, GPA and GPA, and then test scores. He said without high enough stats, she wouldn’t be able to get a seat at the table, adcoms wouldn’t even make it to page 4 of common app (where ECs, awards are listed). He advised D2 that if her GPA started slipping she was to drop her ECs, which she didn’t have to. She did have issues with one of her teachers. She met with the teacher regularly to make sure the teacher had all of her papers, tests.</p>
<p>D1 had 4.1 UW GPA with many good ECs. She went to a top private high school. She was deferred from her ED and WL at the school where she eventually matriculated. I was angry and disappointed with the result for D1. It did take a while for us to get over, but it worked out at the end. We decided to be more prepared for D2 and it was a lot less stressful.</p>
<p>We see similar grading disparities at our high school (for one AP class with two sections - they essentially give the SAME test, however one of the teacher’s grades it on a curve, while the other does not - so if you get the second highest score of a 74 in Teacher A’s class, you get a C; whereas in Teacher B’s class that would be at least a B). I validate my son’s position, but point out that in college he will have to deal with many teaching/grading styles and policies. It’s too bad that the teachers can’t agree on a policy for the SAME class, but the school does not require it (NOR DO COLLEGES). He has politely pointed out this disparity, but that’s it.</p>
<p>As a sort of related aside: When it comes to actual errors in grading, that’s different. He once received a grade of 54 on a final in a class where he had a 95 average. Now you would think that the disparity over his performance ALL YEAR would have made the teacher double check that unusual grade on the Final? No. We persisted, and it turned out the teacher had failed to add in the score for one entire section of the exam. I often wonder how many less obvious errors are made…but that’s a different issue.</p>
<p>I just try to teach my kids to stand up for themselves if they think something doesn’t seem right…politely, of course. That will go a long way to preparing them for college and beyond when I won’t be there to complain to the teacher.</p>
<p>In the end of the day, what is 4.0,3.9,3.8 all this crap? A student can get 4.0 by taking all easy classes (not honors, AP, IB). Every schools and every teachers have different grading policy and there’s no way to fix this. One way to mitigate this issue is SAT, SAT2, ACT, AP, IB (standarized tests)</p>
<p>Lets say, student A in high school A gets 100 on Algebra class, however student A’s SAT math score is 500. However, student B in high school B gets 70 on Algebra class and gets 800 in SAT math… OK… who is better in math? - student B for sure. but who has higher GPA? student A. </p>
<p>GPA differences between schools and teachers are perhaps the most unfair thing in college admission process. Even class rank is extremely unfair because some classes might only have 50 people while others have 700. I personally believe so that SATs should be weighted heavily than GPA…but sad thing is that it isn’t. When the transcript is full with high 90s, although you are in bottom half of grade, it just ‘looks’ better than transcript with full of 70s with 1% in your class. This is really unfair but that’s just how our lives work.</p>
<p>I agree with your anger since I am in same position with my college admission. But if your son’s SAT is 2200+, not stellar GPA can be overlooked. (at least we can hope for this) Dont stress too much about GPA, numbers dont mean anything. if your son’s course rigor is most demanding, that what it’s important. Good luck</p>
<p>The same thing happens at my D’s school. We’ve realized there is really nothing to be done about it, even if it somehow hurts her in admissions. She (and your S) will land somewhere and be absolutely fine. Life isn’t always fair, but I consider any kid whose family can afford to send them to college extremely lucky.</p>
<p>Just adding some thoughts. It’s easy to say, there is a 3.8 cutoff. When you hear an adcoms speak, you have to filter it. Sometimes, they didn’t even say what you thought you heard: “our freshman profile is bulked at 3.8 and above” does not mean anyone less is tossed aside, on the front end.</p>
<p>Sometimes, in ED/EA, the decision can come down to more than one desirable kid (for good reasons, not a stats war,) from that area. Despite assurances here and by some adcoms that there are no quotas, geo diversity plays a huge role, ime. That’s something a kid cannot control. And it plays in RD, too. </p>
<p>For my dau with the nutjob teacher-- she actually took 3 classes from him, by choice. I couldn’t convince her otherwise (and some of this was to fit another, more significant class into her schedule.) Each year, he danced her all over the grade map, an A was never in her grasp. Long tale, but when I look at her now, I can very specifically see the academic and critical thinking skills she got from that experience.</p>
<p>lookingforward: My son refused to try to transfer out of tough English teachers’ classes. All the students in her current English class who had the tough teacher last year received As in English first semester senior year. Of course, the brightest students (as well as some others who were lucky with teachers), received straight As.</p>
<p>Lots of variables go into college admissions decisions. All I am trying to say is that high school principals have an obligation to make sure that the process is as fair as possible from their end. Clearly, that is not happening. I think that is an important topic for discussion. Personally, I don’t think the problem will be resolved until tenure for teachers is ended and teachers cannot rule over their own little fiefdoms with impunity, but ending tenure would bring a whole host of other problems I don’t want to discuss here. The best high schools have excellent administrations and department chairs who can lead teachers in the same direction.</p>
<p>Maybe I am a little paranoid, but I am not mentioning the college involved or my son’s specific SAT scores (which are closer to 2300 than 2200) or his GPA (now closer to 3.7 than 3.6). I am certainly not mentioning his high school or the national awards he has received in his extra-curricular activity. </p>
<p>I do not appreciate the nastiness on this site and the “get off your high horse” type of replies. There are definitely certain feeder schools to top colleges, and the replies telling me how many thousands of high school valedictorians there are in the US does not acknowledge this fact. There are quite a few high schools in this country which would make news in major newspapers if no one was accepted to an Ivy League college in a given year. My son’s high school is one such high school. There have been years where 50+ kids have gone on to private Ivy League and Ivy League equivalent universities, including Stanford and MIT, from my son’s high school.</p>
<p>Once again, my son is not applying to Ivy League or Ivy League equivalent schools. I wish the replies did not imply that he is.</p>