Data10, your link to the NACAC comments includes the small v large.
More recently, your 2nd link goes nowhere. That leaves me with the anecdote of a 20 minute viewing by an admitted student, her own file notes. She says, “SU6, A unique score generated by Stanford; essentially the unweighted GPA of your last 6 semesters of high school.” Not quoting any policy or process, nor exactly who it applies to.
Nothing I find offers more info on “SU6.” Basically, this all shows up under…you guessed it…CC.
Different schools assign different number values to letter grades.
Some schools do NOT us - or + at all.
Why are you asking? The only numbers that should matter to you are what YOUR school does.
Oh…and remember too…some colleges won’t use the GPA the HS calculates at all. Some colleges recalculate GPA using the COLLEGE’S formula to do so.
ETA?..there are already schools that have a 5.0 scale. Guess what? Those schools provide a school profile to,the colleges…so the colleges KNOW that this is the case.
Selective colleges may or may not mathematically “recalculate” high school GPAs. But they all “evaluate” and “score” the HS transcript based on rigor and quality. I’ve seen an admissions officer do a demonstration of this – it takes less than 60 seconds to do. Often times, they throw out any classes that aren’t from core academic subjects. So As in choir, gym, health, etc. don’t count.
End of the day, the colleges aren’t trying to figure out some kind of high school GPA number. What they really want is rigor-adjusted class rank.
If high schools would provide class rank information, the colleges wouldn’t need to spend much time scoring transcripts.
No such thing as an A+ at my kids’ high school, so an A (97% and up) is 4.0 and an A- (93% to 96%) is 3.7. The kids’ school used only unweighted GPAs (because that is what UofM used to looked at and may still do it this way). Weighted GPAs were calculated the last month of high school for every student and used to designate the senior scholars only.
It’s really not mystical to look at a kids’ transcript and eyeball the GPA…really. A school that uses 90 as the bottom for an A is going to have alot more kids with As than a school that uses 93 for the bottom of an A and so on. A school that has a bunch of kids with over a 4 pt. is doing some weighting. I would presume that college admission officers are pretty good at glancing at a transcript and evaluating what it all means in the grand scheme of things.
I was pretty hung up on GPA with kid number one a decade ago, but quickly learned that admissions does a pretty good job of sorting out grade parity, grade deflation and grade inflation from the school profile and their own knowledge of different schools.
Yes, they reviewed differences in survey results among the ~500 colleges by many measures – small vs large, public vs private, more selective vs less selective, etc. However, unless I am missing something, they didn’t specify any relationship between small vs large and grade recalculation.
My 2nd link was http://web.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/93/931020Arc3096.html . If the link is not working for you, I expect it is on your end, as the link works both for me and for Google robot history. If you are referring to the links on the line above quotes in the form “… wrote:”, that’s the Vbulletin quote system. “… wrote:” links go to a username on the forum, rather than external websites.
I’ve quoted 3 sources – a recent admit student viewing her admission file via FERPA request, the Stanford admissions website, and a old Stanford news article about the recalculation process showing that Stanford has been been recalculating GPA for a long time. The latter 2 sources imply a recalculated GPA based on core classes taken in 10th grade and beyond for all students, even if they don’t use admission file notation like “SU6” , “5E”, or “2P.” I can quote additional sources referring to a recalculated GPA at Stanford, as well as a recalculated GPA at various other highly selective colleges (not all, but a significant portion). However, I’d expect the existing references to be more than enough to show Stanford recalculates GPA.
Northwesty, I’d call it “a sense of rigor-adjusted class rank.” Not an absolute rank, which would need to know the rest of the class. Maybe it tells how the applicants compare.
Data, 1993. An ice age ago. Just quote me something recent, from the horse’s mouth. When I went back over some CC posts on this, fer gosh sakes, they asserted things about the school I work for.
She says, “A unique score generated by Stanford…” For all I can tell, this refers to a qualitative assessment, not a new gpa. And when you look at the list of bullets, SU6 is the only one which would cover academics (that and the rigor bullet.) She’s a blogger.
Agreed…23 year old news…is OLD NEWS.
My post stated ,
" Stanford using a 6 semester recalculated GPA isn’t exactly a surprise. Publications have mentioned Stanford’s 6 semester recalculated GPA for more than 20 years, such as the 1993 news story…"
The point was showing that a 6 semester recalculated GPA is OLD NEWS. That is, the recalculation mentioned in the admissions file was not a surprise to me, nor is it a big change in policy. Instead it has been around a long time and is fairly common knowledge.
The most recent Stanford published comment about the recalculated GPA I am aware of was one of faculty senate minutes from 2014, in which a professor proposed substituting HS reported weighted GPA for recalculated GPA to save admissions resources. I think it is very unlikely that the GPA calculation changed since then. I’ll dig up a link to the PDF of the minutes, if I have time later tonight.
@ClaremontMom “At our HS, all A’s are 4.0.”
Wow! That is the life! At our school, an A- is a 3.5.
Right…the numbers assigned vary wildly from school to school.
Not sure what the OP is hoping to learn.
This has been asked before by you @californiaaa . Enough. There is no one way. Different high schools use different methods, different colleges use different methods. They are internally consistent, but not necessarily comparable to each other exactly. Colleges tend to be very close in how they grade, but there are exceptions. End of story. Do not ask this question again. Closing thread.