I’m a little confused and obviously out of the loop. Back in the 80’s & early 90’s, a GPA of 3.5 +/- was quite respectable and a 30+ ACT (or SAT comp) was great. Generally speaking, it would easily put most everyone I knew (friends & cousins around the country) in the top 10% of their classes and very competitive (shoo in) for most colleges.
Looking at quite a few college specific threads, there are so many students now that have 3.5+ GPA and 30+ ACT scores getting deferred, rejected, wait listed from colleges that aren’t even considered top tier schools. It feels like 3.5+ GPAs are everywhere & a dime a dozen. I asked my HS senior how a 3.5 GPA was perceived at his school (average rural public school) & if it was still considered a very respectable GPA. He looked at me like I was sprouting broccoli from my ears. Apparently applied to his class, it was just an “OK” GPA & he thought it was laughable that it was ever considered a really good GPA.
@jumbletumbles: Back in my day, my HS did not offer Honors/AP/IB classes so no extra weighting was not given to achieve that 4.0+ GPA. We were offered CP (College Prep) classes vs regular classes but were graded on a 4.0 scale. Also when I went to our local state colleges (California), any GPA over 3.0 was an automatic admission regardless of SAT score. Yes, the competition is fierce these days for college admissions/scholarships etc…
My HS had 3 AP classes in total available and you weren’t allowed to take them until senior year. And we did have many Advanced labeled classes which I would assume is the equivalent of Honors today. However, very very few schools I knew of weighed those grades differently; I only knew of 1 cousin in NJ whose school weighed their grades.
So I understand W vs UW GPA differences now, but even UW GPAs all seem to be higher now. I can’t help but wonder how I’d fare now if I were in this pool rather than the ancient one I came from! Lol
“Looking at quite a few college specific threads, there are so many students now that have 3.5+ GPA and 30+ ACT scores getting deferred, rejected, wait listed from colleges that aren’t even considered top tier schools. It feels like 3.5+ GPAs are everywhere & a dime a dozen.”
While average ACT scores have not moved, the top tail of the distribution (30+ scorers) has become increasingly competitive.
Top students have become much more likely to apply to many schools across the country instead of only to their local schools. They can easily research any school in the country with the internet.
There are more outstanding international students who are competing for the same places at top colleges.
Student and parent awareness of college rankings is much higher than it was 30 years ago. That further encourages students to apply to top 100 schools.
I think people are so jaded they don’t realize that a 30 ACT is the 95th percentile with just 90,000 students achieving that score. A 32 just 36,000 students.
Kids getting rejected from schools is because their acceptance probability is distributed over a larger group of schools. The Common App is responsible for this. It would have been unheard of to apply to more than 5 schools in our day but now 15 is not uncommon. Kids unknowingly have traded certainty for convenience. They don’t see the downside but feel it. If the Common App had a limit of 5 applications, the landscape would change in the blink of an eye.
Nothing other than this has changed. In fact the population of high school students has been stagnant for a while.
“Nothing other than this has changed”
NOT correct.
These days there are tens of thousands of very smart International students applying every year for the very same spots as top students from the US.That makes it much more competitive for all applicants.
What HASN’T changed is the overall number of openings for Freshman at US colleges.
Sorry that is not correct. Do the math. 1979, 5 schools time 36,000 is 180,000 applications. 2015, 15 times 36,000 is 540,000 applications. This just covers kids with a 32.
Compound that with the ease of applying to a top school in 2015 vs 1979. In 1979, you applied to schools you had a reasonable chance of getting in because it was so much work. This does not happen anymore. You have complete Hail Mary applications being sent because its so easy.
International students are just below 4%, so it is a minor factor.
As far as GPA is concerned, at my kid’s school I was shocked at the number of ways kids could increase their grades. Besides weighting there was extra credit movies, extra credit projects, test retakes, etc. Plus there are countless opportunities on the web to get answers to homework, test questions and etc.
Back in my day, if you bombed a test you were out of luck. You kid get off my lawn!
Remember that population has grown, but the spaces in the most desired colleges have not increased by the same proportion.
So competition for these most desired colleges has grown. New colleges that take up some of the extra students typically start lower on the desirability scale.
Grades are inflated. Our school counts a 90 as an A and there are all kinds of ways to raise grades–homework completion, extra credit, exam corrections, group projects where the stronger students carry the weaker students, etc. I do also think kids do a little more, but keep in mind they have much better tools than we did. They can find information in one minute that would have taken us an hour long trip to the library to get. They can edit their writing effortlessly–no painstaking hand-re-writing of work required. They own calculators. I think I was in calculus before i owned a calculator.
There is a public high school near me with a graduating class size of about 750. Twenty-two percent of the seniors had a GPA between 4.0 and 5.0. Another twenty-four percent had a GPA above 3.5.
They are, at least among those aspiring to college.
According to College Board, a whopping 48% of seniors taking the SAT report having an A average (A- to A+). Another 43% report a B average. The average GPA for all seniors is 3.39. For frame of reference, a B+ average is a 3.30.
“International students are just below 4%, so it is a minor factor.”
4% of what? applicants or enrolled students?
and what is your source of the 4% figure ?
I also wonder if it’s grade inflation because of all the do-over type situations kids are presented as @mathyone mentioned. I know I was absolutely floored when I’d heard my stepdaughter had received a C in a HS class is Arizona a few years ago & had the option to re-take the class in the summer (which was known to be easier). The summer grade would then completely erase & replace the regular year class grade even on her transcript. My exact thought was WTF?! That’s not right. But, of course, I’m an evil stepmom who apparently doesn’t have a heart & I guess wants her stepchild to end up unsuccessful in life leaching money off of us forever… I honestly felt she would be better served taking her C & if she didn’t like it, learn from it & work harder the next semester. A life lesson that’s more valuable than a grade.
Since then, my son has also had a class (different state/school) where the teacher would not allow any makeup tests or late assignments at all - even with an excused, doctor’s note absence. He felt it was too harsh, I disagreed. The teacher made many portals available for submitting homework & deadlines for everything were given a minimum of 2 wks ahead of time. My son did struggle to keep an A in that class because he did miss a good deal of school due to a sport injury & subsequent treatments, etc. I still backed the teacher’s line & refused to go to bat for my son. He had the lesson plans & could easily do his work from home & show up (albeit on crutches) for exams in that class. I honestly believe it was good for him to learn the world doesn’t bend for him -because it doesn’t.
Perhaps it’s because of these experiences I seriously wonder if it’s grade inflation vs population increase.
Back in the early to mid '90s, my public magnet felt the need to enforce a hard limit of 8 applications to colleges…of which one had to be to our state/local public colleges*. Most of our GCs also strictly enforced limits on how many reach schools one can apply to unless one was practically near the top 5% or so of our graduating class. And even the top kids were usually strongly discouraged from using all 7 of their non mandated state/local public college apps for reach schools…especially Ivies/peer elites.
If those limits weren’t put into place, the level of competitiveness, especially among the top quarter/third* of my graduating class would have been even more fierce than it already was…and that would inevitably filter down even to “slackers” like yours truly.
One can apply to up to 8 4-year colleges within the state/local public system and have that count as one state/local public application.
** Around a quarter of my graduating class were admitted to at least one Ivy and a third were admitted to at least one peer elite college.
I think it is a combination of both. These days a 90 is an A at many schools and that was not true at least at my school. As someone pointed there is extra credit and this and that which never happened at least in the 70s. Also I think kids are just learning more. When I was in high school my class was the first class they segregated and taught “harder” classes like Great Books and my cluster took a different history class etc. Now there are AP and IB and all sorts of classes for high achievers. The more you learn the better you do on the ACT and the SAT and especially now as those tests have been tweaked to try and show what kids have learned as opposed to the more verbal and abstract version we took back in the 70s. But really for the most part kids end up pretty much where they belong as far as colleges go. I see the biggest difference is the socio-economic diversity in colleges. Back in the day you went where you could afford, now there is a presumption that everyone should be able to go to any college they can get accepted to regardless of money.
A friend of mine who graduated from high school in 1970 said the highest level math course his high school offered was Algebra II. My son attends the same high school today and is currently enrolled in BC Calc (AP). For his senior year he will probably take AP Stats or a university math course. The school just has a lot of very rigorous courses. And of course back then there were no AP courses.
Sometime around 1991 the ACT test was recentered, so that an 18 on the current test is equal to a 15 on the old test. So to compare today’s scores to scores prior to about 1991 you need to subtract three points from lower scores, say 24 and below, and about two points from the remaining scores. I’m not sure it’s possible to compare a 35 or 36 today to one back then. They were much rarer back then because the test was scored harder.
A friend of mine and I were talking, and he told me that he never remembers his parents telling him that it was important to do well in school. He never finished remedial math at college, but he makes more money than Carter has Liver Pills. But he encourages his children to do well. I think the brightest kids are much smarter and more educated today, and as a result they are doing better on the ACT and grade-points are higher.
My brother graduated high school in 1973 with a 33 on the ACT. My recollection is that it was the highest score in Mississippi that year. Last year Mississippi produced thirteen 36s, forty-three 35s, and sixty-one 34s. Some of that is due to recentering, but most is due to better education quality and emphasis.
Students take the tests 2-3 times, they study and go to ‘test tip’ classes. Of course they are going to have higher scores than those of us who were ‘one and done.’ I don’t think my kids are smarter than I was, but they knew how to take the test better.
I originally went to hs in Wisconsin, where ACT/SAT weren’t required for in state schools. Very few of my classmates took them, and in fact they weren’t held in our town (one of the biggest h.s. in the state) so we had to travel about 45 minutes to a school that hosted the exams. I hadn’t had years of practice with ‘bubble tests’ and probably had only taken the Iowa Basics a few times in the lower grades. I moved before senior year and took them in the new state, ‘practicing’ by reading the 10 or so questions that were included in the registration packet. I don’t remember having a calculator (or even a slide rule) to use during the test. Not many students took both exams, especially the SAT which was only taken by students heading east.
Went to AP awards night at the public high school a couple of weeks ago. About 3000 kids and they read over 300 names and this didn’t include last years seniors which would have doubled the number of names read. The school had 10 national AP scholars, which means these 10 juniors had taken at least 8 APs with a minimum score of 4 on each of them. It was a long night.
Kids have more opportunity today than we did and they are taking full advantage.