I know the “discovered a compound” kid. His family is upper middle class and it was his own work. The key to his success was his high school has a research seminar class that he started taking his sophomore year that placed him in a lab at CU Boulder to learn and do research.
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I mentioned earlier about students or parents posting only a weighted HS GPA. This can often be a self-deception, since a weighted HS GPA may look a lot better than published HS GPA ranges from college frosh profiles (which may be unweighted or less heavily weighted in the college’s recalculation than the high school’s weighting).
High schools that use an exaggerated weighting for HS GPA are probably doing their students a disservice.
But then there is a related issue that many students seem to be unable to calculate an unweighted GPA, even though it should be a simple application of math learned years ago (yes, you can calculate variants with +/- and without, but it is not that hard to do both variants).
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I agree we always have to get uwGPA from posters, but there are many colleges that take the GPA directly from the transcript…and many HSs only show the weighted GPA to put their students in the best light.
So, for these students, the wGPA is actually an advantage at these schools…which include IU, Wisconsin and others that don’t recalculate GPA.
That must give students in South Carolina public schools a substantial advantage at colleges that take weighted HS GPA at face value. See Table A on page 2 of
https://ed.sc.gov/tests/tests-files/eocep-files/uniform-grading-policy-february-2018/
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Great points and don’t underestimate how the “self deception” makes it a lot harder to do the simple math.
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“those things are not toys for poor families.” Just remember, these achievements are not all it takes. And most kids don’t have this involvement.
Not all top colleges recalculate gpa. That’s not a liability. You’ve got the transcript, can see courses and grades.
Not all colleges recalculate GPA? Do you have a source? If you are correct, which you “may” be… note that good evaluators do.
Many schools don’t recalculate GPA, I noted a few in my post above…IU and Wisconsin. But there are many more, the non-recalculators tend to be larger publics, but not exclusively. Here are IU Kelley’s Direct admit criteria (where those HSs who include only weighted GPA on the transcript are giving their students a huge advantage)
“Earned a cumulative GPA of 3.8 on a 4.0 scale in high school. We will use the highest GPA that is sent to IU Admissions from your official high school transcript. In most cases this is the weighted GPA.”
It’s also important to note that some Institutional Reporting Departments calculate the CDS gpa (for those schools that even fill in that field) differently than the school’s Admissions team.
Not looking to argue this point, but a good evaluator, might do this on his/her own - regardless of what the school dictates or in certain instances.
Awesome. Cuz it’s off-topic debate. Let’s all move the conversation forward please.
The AOs don’t have that kind of time at many schools. We are seeing more schools use the SRAR, a trend which will likely continue. In the SRAR schools can create whatever weighting algorithm they want. A pain for applicants to enter their data though!
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Sure is. My daughter just had 2 schools like this to include IU/Kelley. Pulling this back to exaggerated stats - my point is that there is little reason for a student to mislead people with an inflated GPA because the minority of colleges state something that may or may not always hold true.
McGill was extremely challenging. Maybe user error.
As you “may” know, seeing the transcript is a subtle recalculation.
While using SRAR adds work to the applicants, it eliminates the bottleneck of the college having to do the same thing for every application if it wants to standardize high school records and recalculate GPAs. It also reduces the dependency on high schools sending transcripts – only the college that the student matriculates to needs a transcript to verify SRAR information.
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To be clear on concept, my earlier note was not meant to be construed as compliance-optional.
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I’d seriously doubt many get internships except as part of a specialized program. And these are pretty rare. What is common is the children of these companies getting internships. My spouse worked for one of the companies you mentioned in the past and many peers had their kids working Summers. My oldest was too young. Many of these parents have connections across multiple companies ( for those in the corporate world) and colleges for those in academia. So, the kid is plugging into something rather than creating it.
It’s not to say these kids aren’t interesting and strong students but the foot in the door is often parental.
Let’s face it, even a super outstanding high school kid who is really interested likely has very little skills to offer an employer who can pick and choose from people in the field.
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Sure, connections help as they always do. And when your network is primarily tech and professor parents—because all the children have grown up together—opportunities present themselves. There doesn’t need to be a specialized program if the friend’s parent owns the company or runs the lab. Yes, they hire their children but they also hire the children of their friends.
And children can have great, original ideas that just need guidance and resources to come to fruition. I have been amazed by some of the student work I have seen.
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Somewhat related, my son won some award for World Affairs Council.
He was an alternate that didn’t get the memo he was replacing someone and read over the topic on the bus on the way to the event. We were the only public school there, and some were Charter Schools with a Gov’t and Politics concentration.
Anyhow he wound up winning the award for “Outstanding Delegate” when in fact he told me, “I just started BSing whenever the guy doing the judging walked into the room”
Still goes on the ol’ transcript package though LOL.
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