Any elite college admission criterion will attract attention from parents with money, many of whom will use such money to maximize the opportunity for their own kids to excel at this admission criterion. This includes standardized tests, high school grades, and extracurriculars.
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Your situation is similar to ours. I have learned that gpa is absolutely not comparable across schools. That is why standardized tests like ACT or AP do give some reference point if AO is unfamiliar. Case in point.
- DS21 goes to private HS with tough grading (A starts at 93, no make ups, no curves, no dropped grades, little credit for daily work). Tries to be “like college”. He earned B/B minus in some AP classes - got 5s and 4s on AP. His GPA would easily be .3 higher in the public school even though he is the same kid.
- public school student in adjacent town with 4.0 got a 23 on ACT (and not due to SES) - that is their valedictorian
- DD23 transferred from private school to our public for more rigor (better teaching and more honors/AP) and has a 4.0 both places but public school requires much less effort for her to achieve that - students have unlimited test make ups, can donate to charity to get out of final exam, much more forgiveness for late work. Interestingly the QUALITY of the teaching in many subjects is much better than at the private despite it being easier to get an A.
Bottom line - every school is unique and low gpas hurt more if the AO doesn’t know your school standards and how could they know every school? This is why I think some high schools are feeders for some colleges - familiarity and track record.
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My D’s school avg ACT 30 / SAT 1305 (class of 2019). 80% score 3+ on AP; 54% score a 4 or 5. This is at a small private day school.
Regarding “haggling” (this line of conversation gave me a chuckle), the ability to earn extra credit is teacher dependent. For example, some teachers are notoriously strict graders (average test scores in an AP in the 65-75 range) but then allow partial credit to be earned back by reworking the missed questions/problems or completing some type of bonus assignment. While I’ve never heard her mention it, my D has a close relationship with most of her teachers and I could certainly see her challenging a missed question and advocating for a better grade if she did not agree with it. Respectfully, of course, and accepting the teacher’s decision whatever it may be. I appreciate the school encourages self-advocacy because that is a valuable life skill.
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Grade inflation is universal. The variation is in the degree of inflation. It may be more rampant in some places than in others, but It isn’t limited to certain types of schools (e.g. public vs private). We all like our kids do well in school, but a 4.0 doesn’t mean nearly as much as it used to.
Wow I’ve never heard of kids haggling for grades either as someone mentioned earlier and the honors/AP classes don’t give students EC opportunities or things like that. I had one kid who did poorly on a test and to this day remember the teacher telling her that test won’t keep her out of college. While it definitely taught her to self advocate, it didn’t get her anywhere with the teacher and it didn’t keep her out of her top choice college either. Was a great lesson to learn as well!
Lower level kids it’s a slightly different story but often these are often kids that need these opportunities and extra help when given.
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Agreed. Haggling or grade arguments, as they’re known at our high school, are common and encouraged in some classes.
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Our high school only reported grades on a 0-100 scale (both weighted and unweighted) and left it up to colleges how to translate to a 4.0 scale, though the high school included a flyer with info about the grading scale along with info about average SAT scores, number of AP classes, number AP scholars etc. I believe they said 90-100 was an A.
What I don’t know is how many kids had a 90+ average. I do know that my kid with a 93/97 unweighted/weighted gpa was in the top 6%. The one with 97/103 was 8th in a class of 650 or so.
Many of the top schools have regional admissions officers and they know how to put these grades in context.
An AO for a T5 over at reddit said that the single best thing parents can do for our kids, if we are serious about improving our kids’ chances, is to enroll them in a known feeder school to T5s.
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Wow. Guess we weren’t serious about improving our kid’s chances.
Guess not!
He also said that this advice goes double for internationals. So basically, if you are international, you have close to zero chance of making it to a T5 unless you are from a feeder school in your country!
I think this gives us an indication of how much difficulty AOs at T5/T10/T20s have trying to evaluate all the different transcripts and gpas.
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And to get into that feeder high school, does one have to enroll the kid into feeder (to that high school) elementary and middle schools?
Probably! Check out this article on the competition to get into the “Baby Ivies” 
Inside the World of Elite Preschools in New York City
rochboy21 - I am with you. I’ve seen your point #2 several times at our large low SES school. and we’ve lived through point #3 several times with the older kids. And we’re opposite; we pulled D23 from large public to go to small private this year, and I’m seeing this in some areas:
I’m going into the way back machine for this comment but my wife and I attended both public and private schools. All of my brothers and sisters also attended a mix of private and public schools. Based on that experience, it was much easier to get good grades in private schools. There are a host of reasons for that. Smaller classes, more structure etc. However paramount is the fact that someone is paying a ton of dough for you to attend and they don’t want to hear that you are getting Cs or Bs. Lots of pressure to give good grades. I know that happens at public schools as well but in our experience the privates are certainly more inflated. That’s been our experience.
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The reason why you can see such a large disparity between a class grade and an AP score is because the actual percentages for each score on AP tests varies by the subject and by year. It is a scaled score converted from a composite score which is itself converted from a raw score. It’s basically where you fell as a percentile among all test takers. You’re basically being marked on a distribution curve. It’s not an absolute mark. One example I saw was for AP English. Scoring a 5 required a composite score of between 104-150/150 and a 4 required a score of 92-103/150. 104/150 is 69% and 92/150 is 61%.
Feeder schools?You can’t take what any one person says on some forum as gospel. Lol, it’s not even the level of thinking (or exploration) a tippy top expects.
Kids in so called feeders (and this includes a broad variety of SES high schools) are vetted in their context, by elites, looking for direction and strengths (beyond gpa.) And nearly everything depends on the app/supp itself. There are very, very few “givens.”
"The reason why you can see such a large disparity between a class grade and an AP score "
AP score is a snapshot of a day of the students and it is normal that a few percentage (0.5%, 2%) of couldn’t reflect their true skill to a test setting.
While in coursework, student can get a B+ and catch up to be an A student.
Nothing wrong, but I would say grade over AP score over Standardized Test (truly non rigorous)
Unfortunately, most feeder schools to T5 colleges serve the same high SES and connected community who attend T5 colleges. There is a LOT of overlap between legacies at “elite” private prep schools and legacies at “elite” private colleges.
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Any hs could be a feeder if its students have a good track record at the college. Eg, magnets and some lower resourced hs.
Yes, the big feeders tend to be the prestigious boarding schools like exeter and deerfield, but there are also some famous public feeders like Bronx Science in NYC. I don’t have kids at boarding schools, but I would assume that parental legacy at Ivy+ helps with admission to these schools too and that’s why there’s so much legacy overlap.