I see my high school junior working harder and taking harder classes than I ever did in HS and getting as good or better grades. Yet her likelihood of getting into a top tier school seems far less than what I could have expected, back in the day. As others have mentioned, I think that the Common App is partly to blame and increased enrollments of qualified international students also plays a role.
At my daughter’s independent school, an A is a 94 or above and the mean GPA for graduating seniors is a 3.42. They do not weight GPA and they do not rank. This does not seem to be the norm among high schools, based on what I see on CC.
Well, when 4.2 or 5.1 is given, then yes, I assume it’s weighted then; the 4.0 scale is traditionally used.
I agree with @mamaedefamilia - My D and her peers seem to have harder classes, work harder, have much less free time than we did - and are also in more structured ECs. Yet the grades and test scores required for getting into top colleges are much higher than they used to be.
There is no question that top students today work harder and put in more hours than in the past. Historically, you would not see high schools offering multi-variable calculus like many are now.
In addition, grades and ACTs are usually not enough to get a student into a top 10 school these days. The student needs something impressive as an extracurricular. The amount of work that is going into ECs and summer activities has also risen significantly. Top 25 schools reject 34-36 ACT scores all the time.
@ucbalumnus The population of graduating seniors has not grown. The “competition” at the say the top 25 universities and top 25 collges, or even a slighty more expanded list, has grown simply because of applications per student.
If one student applies to 15 schools and the rest 5, that student raises his or her chances of acceptance to more schools. If all students apply to 15 schools, then the chance of acceptance gets distributed over 15 schools rather than 5.
This is why getting in one particular top school is more difficult but getting in a top school is about the same. So students craving convenience have made it more difficult for themselves to get in the school they want. I believe they assume convenience has no cost. The Common Ap is like applying ED, the more that use it, the lower the net benefit.
The highest level math class offered in my HS was Honors pre calc. I was in that class.
A few months ago D pulled out one of H’s yearbooks and the school handbook fell out. The school required just one year of math, one year of science, no foreign language to graduate (although 4 years of PE was required). This was in the '70’s. The requirements at my HS were higher, but not much. Neither school offered any AP classes at that time.
Of course there were kids who took more academic classes mostly because the parents of those students (i.e. my parents and my in laws) told their own kids they would take a more rigorous curriculum. Even then it was nowhere near as demanding as what my kids took.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_219.10.asp indicates that the number of high school graduates grew from 2,888,639 in 1970 to 3,142,120 at a peak in 1976, then fell to 2,480,399 in 1992 before rising again to a more recent peak of 3,452,470 in 2012.
Many reasons why GPAs are higher. Allowing retests, extra credit, Honors and AP courses. I just looked at the latest course offerings at my former HS (from the 70s). They now offer Honors and AP courses (not when I attended). Students are taking more advanced courses but are also getting more bites at the apple.
When I was in school (late 80s), those kids who were college bound typically had 4.0s or very high 3s. My school which was considered very good offered 4 AP classes, three of which were offered senior year. The coursework wasn’t all that difficult outside of a few classes and teachers were much less lenient with students who did not do homework or study. The teachers who I consider lenient in my current school usually justify it with “I understand how busy these kids are with 5-6 APs and ECs.”
Grade inflation aside, can it really be a problem if kids are working hard, taking difficult classes including APs, getting good grades ? For say future engineers, taking two years of calculus and AP calc and AP physics in HS can only help get through that freshman courseload. For anyone, taking something like CoGoPo which involves reading and thinking … can only be good.
If the additional 25% of people are actually going to college, isn’t it appropriate that they are trying harder in high school too.
Title should be : Smarter kids, harder working kids, or inflated grades and SAT scores
I am not sure I feel high SAT scores either mean anything or that the process of studying for these mundane tests are really going to make anyone smarter or more successful (maybe going from a 400 to a 600 would, since you should know how to do basic math, have some vocab, and be able to write if you are going to college).
But taking AP classes … yup … college level content … how bad can it be ?
Now if your child doesn’t want to take 5 APs, you also don’t have to settle for some busywork school, most of the schools below say 50 or 75 rank are not that hard to get into … and if you are ready, you can actually get your degree in 4 years and have a good life.
“The number of international students enrolled at U.S. universities increased by 8.1 percent, to 886,052 in 2013-14, according to “Open Doors,” an annual report on student mobility published by the Institute of International Education.”
"According to the Institute of International Education, 274,439 students from China attended school in the United States in 2013-4, a 16 percent jump from the year before. Chinese students represent 31 percent of all international students in the country and contributed an estimated $22 billion to the U.S. economy in 2014.
In the past, Chinese students in the United States tended to be graduate students living on tight budgets. Now, many young Chinese are getting their undergraduate degrees overseas. A large number of these students come from China’s wealthiest and most powerful families—the daughter of President Xi Jinping, for example, studied under an assumed name at Harvard. The presence of wealthy Chinese students at American universities has even caught the attention of luxury brands eager to capitalize on them. Bergdorf Goodman, the New York City-based department store, sponsored Chinese New Year celebrations at NYU and Columbia, while Bloomingdales organized a fashion show for Chinese students at their shopping center in Chicago."
Special spots were not created just for International students- those spots were given to them instead of to US HSgraduates.