<p>My neighbor told me his AP Test scores. I was shocked when he told me them.</p>
<p>He goes to a private school. He has a 3.94/4.0 (better than my 3.8 at my public school). Yet on his 4 AP tests, he got a 2s/3s (he got an A in all of those AP Classes).</p>
<p>After I found out about his AP test scores, I realized that his school must have some extreme curving at the end of the year. The students who get 2s/3s on AP tests in my school are those with the Cs (or worse) in the class. Heck in some classes, even those C students get 5s. </p>
<p>If there is that much grade inflation, how is GPA even valid. There are so many subjective/outside factors that influence it.</p>
<p>Plus I found this on Encarta</p>
<p>"GPAs reported by students on surveys when they take the SAT and ACT exams have also risen--and faster than their scores on those tests. That suggests their classroom grades aren't rising just because students are getting smarter. Not surprisingly, the test-owners say grade inflation shows why testing should be kept: It gives all students an equal chance to shine."</p>
<p>I think class rank is more important because it measures your ability within the environment that you are in. </p>
<p>Also, what you mentioned above might mean that his teachers are not as good in preparing him for AP tests as your teachers, not necessarily that he was a bad student that just got got high grades because his teachers were easy.</p>
<p>yeah but class rank varies soo much between schools. in a really competitive school, one could be ranked in the top 20% of their class but if they were put into a school with students less driven, they could be ranked in the top 5%. using class rank is not eally “fair.” colleges just look at your transcript to see the classes you have taken and the grades earned in those classes…</p>
<p>^Well a representative from a top college last year said that although GPA is important, they are concerned with class rank even more. Of course you do have a point, but that is why I think they not only care about class rank but also the type of school (if its nationally recognized…)</p>
<p>^ I’ve spoken with quite a few admissions officers at highly selective colleges over the years. To a person, they’re supremely confident that they “know” which are the best/most competitive high schools and they take that into account in evaluating class rank. Consequently, a candidate from a non-competitive rural or small-town school probably needs to be val or sal even to get a serious look at the top schools, whereas for a student at a top suburban public school top 10% may be enough, and at a highly competitive private high school top 20% might make the cut. It’s all about how well you do in the environment you’re in. The val at the rural or small-town HS with little competition, few (if any ) AP courses and such, can’t really be faulted for the environment they’re in—they obviously made the most of what they had to work with, as evidenced by their class rank. But top 10% at that school won’t be seen the same as top 10% at a more competitive HS.</p>
<p>spectravoid, thats why I think that although his GPA is higher than yours, his class rank might not be. As I said earlier, I think a lot of colleges consider the class rank + school context more than just pure GPA because they know that the AP class is not taught the same way by every teacher in the US.</p>
<p>Or perhaps, he is just an extremely hard worker that happens to not be a good test taker. At the end of the day, his hard work will get him farther than any test score.</p>
<p>i agree with nyorker: class rank is supposed to make gpa more understandable, but it doesn’t work that way at my school. we don’t weigh the gpa so many kids with full ap course loads will have a low rank, which doesn’t show how difficult our high school is. an adcom could think that the low rank is because the high school isn’t competitive and has grade inflation and there are kids who didn’t have any Bs who tool the top spots.</p>
<p>“How is AP even a valid indicator for college admissions?”
It isn’t and therefore minimally important. There are other threads on this from recently.</p>
<p>It is entirely possible to get a good grade in a class and get a 2 or a 3 on the exam. The exam is one day of testing; the grade measures your performance over an entire class’s worth of work. I got an A in physics and a 2 on the exam; I did excellent work and I still remember the physics 5 years later, I just was under so much pressure and the physics exam was one of the last I took. I got an A in comparative government and a 2 on the exam because my comparative government teacher was still teaching American government the semester we were supposed to be learning comparative. I gave up halfway through the test and didn’t even write any of the essays. And I got an A in U.S. History and a 3 on the exam <em>shrugs</em></p>
<p>On the other hand, I got a 5 in AP English Literature but a B in the class because I was really good in English and didn’t bother to do the homework. My school was not known for grade inflation. I graduated with a ~3.7 GPA, which was the top 10%; the valedictorian graduated with a 4.1. (I also took English Language - 5 - and Calculus AB - 4. This was in 2003-2004.)</p>
<p>AP scores don’t perfectly map onto grades; they measure two separate things, really. Just like it’s possible to fail a final exam and still pull a B, or to get an A on a final and still get a C in a class – it’s also possible to perform relatively poorly on the AP exam while still getting the material all through the class. Class rank allows one to put GPA in perspective – if a student has a 3.9 but isn’t even in the top 25% of his class, the school has crazy grade inflation. If a student has a 3.7, like me, and is in the top 10% – not as crazy grade inflation.</p>
<p>The single most valid predictor of all measures of success in college (first year GPA, final GPA, graduation in 4 years, etc. etc. etc.) is the high school transcript. In other words, the courses you take, and the grades you earn in those courses. This is because for the VAST number of students, study habits developed in HS continue in college. SOME HS slackers shape up and get their act together and do well in college. SOME HS valedictorians fall apart in college and drop out. However, over all good HS grades generally predict a positive result in college.</p>
<p>AP exams are designed to test HS students’ knowledge of a subject at a level roughly equivalent to that of a student who has taken a first year course in that subject in college. Not all courses labeled AP are truly equivalent to a college course - some people would argue that no course offered in a HS setting can be truly equivalent to a college course. If the course labeled AP doesn’t prepare the students well for the AP exam (and it may be a very good course indeed, just one that doesn’t hit the points actually tested in the AP exam), or if a given student is a bad tester in AP exam conditions, it is entirely possible for a student to earn a good grade in the course, and a bad score on the exam.</p>
This may be the biggest reason why college admins believe that AP test scores aren’t too informative and thus don’t weight them heavily in the admissions process.</p>
<p>AP test scores are one of the few quantitative measurements that depend perhaps more on the teacher (and the teacher’s class) than the student.</p>
<p>^ Very good point. It’s entirely possible to teach an AP US History course, for example, as essentially a year-long prep course for the AP exam. That may not be as nearly as good a course as one that sacrificed some breadth for greater depth in one or more major topics, or that emphasized work with primary documents and actual historical research, for example; but the shallower test-prep version is likely to produce better AP test scores.</p>
<p>This is especially true in some subject areas. We homeschool and don’t do APs, but it seems to be generally accepted on CC that the SAT II US History Subject Test covers substantially the same material as the AP US History exam, and that students who do well on one typically do well on the other. My D recently took the SAT II US History test and did very well, but as she was prepping for the exam I couldn’t help but think how different the subject matter of that test was from anything I ever did in college, where I took quite a few undergrad history courses. The broad introductory US history survey course that attempts to provide a comprehensive, highly fact-intensive overview of the “main outlines” and “major developments” in US history went out of fashion at the top colleges decades ago. Today’s college freshmen might start out studying US history with a course on cultural history over a specified (e.g., at Yale, Hist 105A, The Formation of Modern American Culture 1750-1876), or a partial history of U.S. foreign policy (at Yale, Hist 023b, The United states and the World 1898-1963), or a more general history of a specific period (at Yale, Hist 115a, The Colonial Period of American History). Or they might start out with a freshman seminar devoted to a thematic topic (e.g., at Swarthmore, Hist 001K, Engendering Culture, or Hist 001S, The American West, or Hist 001V, Witches, Witchcraft, and Witchhunts). Or perhaps a topical course tracing the roots of contemporary social problems,(e.g., at Amherst, Hist 12, Black Diaspora from Emancipation to the Present, or Hist 28, People and Pollution). The comprehensive survey course—the course for which AP US History is supposedly the “equivalent”—is simply nowhere to be found in the college curriculum. Test a college freshman at an elite college after two semesters of very good and very challenging introductory-level US history courses, and she might do very poorly on the AP US History and SAT II US History tests—or if she does well, it’s because she still remembers it from that AP course in high school.</p>
<p>As a parent, I’m not unhappy that my D got the exposure to the broad outlines of US history that study for the SAT II US History (and by extension, AP US History) provided. But that’s high school stuff. The idea that cramming in memorization of a bunch of additional factual detail that might come up on the test makes it the “equivalent” of a college history course is just a bad joke.</p>
<p>Yea, I understand that, and that is why I said that school context/background is also important. Getting top 20% at a renowned school like Exeter is not the same as getting 20% at my public school.</p>