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<p>This is absurd, in my opinion.</p>
<p>Eventually, students reach a point where they need to learn to study. Doing the assigned homework is no longer sufficient to enable the student to master the content of a course.</p>
<p>"I am an alum of one of the coveted Ivies and am actually on a committee that works on the fact that support services are overrun with student’s needing help because many admitted kids who looked awesome on paper really arent that well prepared for college and do struggle when they get there. "</p>
<p>erlanger, I find this fascinating.
Does this college somehow track this info about the individual students back to the Admissions Office, so that they can get a better perspective on how prepared the students REALLY are from certain high schools?
This might really be of interest to AdComms.
I have often wished that there was more “back-testing” of Admissions decisions and policies on the the admitted students as they go through the college, and also afterwards: GPA’s, rigor of courses chosen, activities, leadership, major chosen, need for remedial help, internships, jobs, grad school, etc,</p>
<p>Marian,
Yes, there is a huge difference between getting homework assignments done, and studying the material, the second of which is not performed as often as it should be.</p>
<p>Going from class to class, assignment to assignment, test to test, paper to paper can limit the true understanding of the material. Cumulative learning, critical thinking, pattern- finding, and application of knowledge seem to be necessary for true learning.</p>
<p>My sense is that fewer and fewer HS are offering final exams and overview/conclusory essays, to the students’ great loss. </p>
<p>Also, there is thread on CC somewhere on the topic of which the students would do if they had to choose between getting a good grade and actually learning the material: 98% of the posted said they would have to go for the grade. So they know the difference, but feel the pressure, and the teachers are just going along with regurgitation.</p>
<p>It is much harder to provide a true education with deep learning than just to feed facts to students.</p>
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<p>Perhaps your Committee should be meeting with the Director of Admissions. They shouldn’t have a job if they are admitting “many kids who…arent that well prepared for college and…struggle…”</p>
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<p>Perhaps in your neck of the woods, but I had never heard of such a scale until I joined cc.</p>
<p>Well gravenworld, when I went to high school (late 60’s/early 70’s) an A was 90-100 - with an A* being 97-100. Even back then high schools were different. My sons’ school weights honors and APs the same which some would not consider fair and hurt both my kids. It also weights orchestra and band as academic courses, which I think is wrong though it benefited my younger son. Since my son with the 93UW GPA / 97 W GPA was in the top 6% of the class - I have to assume that the average GPA is some sort of C. Doesn’t look like grade inflation to me. We are just a large urban/suburban high school.</p>
<p>After hearing about all the various weighs of figuring out GPAs and ranks, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no completely fair way to calculate them. But I do believe that in a school where some students take courses that are much more difficult than other students take, that should be reflected somehow in the GPA/rank. In schools with a more homogeneous population it may be better not to weight or to rank. By the way, I went to a small private school that didn’t rank and it didn’t hurt us, but I don’t think it would have been a good system for my kids.</p>
<p>My kids have been well prepared for college.</p>
<p>This “back in the good old days talk” is nonsense from where I sit. I was accepted at Penn (couldn’t afford to go) in 1985 and went to Cal as fall back. I had mostly great grades and very good test scores, but not a 4.0. Nothing that I did in my “college prep” high school bore any resemblance to the level of difficulty and the complexity of the work my kids are doing today. I am willing to accept that they are in a rare pocket of good education - I don’t know - but I do know that they are much better educated in all subjects than I was. D works much harder for her As than I ever did. Showing up and jumping through the right hoops worked in middle school. In fact I spent a fair amount of time trying to get that across to my son. High school not so much, though.</p>
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<p>There was much concern in our district a few years ago about how heavily to weight final exam grades when determining course grades.</p>
<p>There’s a fine line to be drawn here. If the exam doesn’t count for much, many of the students will blow it off. They won’t study because their grade on the exam doesn’t really matter.</p>
<p>But if the exam counts very heavily, you have the even worse situation in which excessively optimistic students blow off much of the course, thinking that they can make up for it by getting a very high grade on the final.</p>
<p>Of course, many college courses weight final exams very heavily – 50 percent or more of the course grade. But HS students are not mature enough, in most cases, to deal with this situation.</p>
<p>I agree with saintfan. My daughter, who is a public high school senior, works much harder and is learning much more then I did in high school.</p>
<p>This is why standardized tests are so important.</p>
<p>A teacher can give out “A’s” like candy in an AP class, but her students must ultimately take the actual AP exam, and that will demonstrate whether that “A” grade was deserved.</p>
<p>Otherwise, how can a college possibly compare an “A” grade give in AP Psych given to a kid attending a small high school in Iowa to an “A” grade given to a kid attending a large public school in Long Island?</p>
<p>The same with respect to ACT and SAT. I am always amazed when some kid says on CC that he is valedictorian at his high school, but somehow only scored a 29 ACT.</p>
<p>I am not privy to the admissions office voodoo but my sense is that there’s no “tracking” since there are so many variables as to why kids are/are not successful (in hs or college) . And, we all know AOs are way too overwhelmed each year to spend too much time looking back. Of course, while there could be trends/patterns that the AOs could gleen, I am sure this is just one small piece of the multidimensional objectives under consideration when those AOs are tasked with putting together a class. However, there can be and likely is some push and pull between (somewhat conflicting) admissions objectives and the demands on University resources.</p>
<p>erlanger:</p>
<p>while your post #30 is well-taken for any old college, even the poorest Ivy is filthy-rich and could perform a perfunctory analysis if it chose to do so. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson: they don’t want to know the truth.</p>
<p>IMO, there is absolutely zero reason for any Ivy (or other top UG) to be accepting “many” kids who aren’t “well prepared” and who “struggle.” It just doesn’t pass the smell test. Sure, by definition, 49.9% of them will be in the bottom half of the class, but that ‘bottom’ starts at ~3.4 gpa, at least at the Ivies (even higher at Brown and Yale).</p>
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<p>The purpose of standardized tests (to give a common measurement for students from widely varying high schools) is important and necessary.</p>
<p>However, there is considerable question about whether the current collection of standardized tests used in the US is optimal for predicting student performance in college. Indeed, it is well known that high school grades were better correlated to college grades than SAT scores were. Even the CB noted that, although it said that high school grades and SAT scores correlated better with college grades than either alone.</p>
<p>Also, some people happen to have much better or much worse test taking ability compared to ability to do other things one would normally do as a student and in work (e.g. research, projects, etc.).</p>
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<p>Indeed, based on a study of its students, after gpa, UC found that the best predictor of college grades was AP/IB scores. Next after AP scores was scores on Subject Tests. In other words, ST’s were better predictors than SAT/ACT scores, which was third. </p>
<p>Of course, utilizing wisdom that only a state bureaucracy with an agenda could understand, UC promptly dropped STs as an admission requirement.</p>
<p>The second HS I went to was a well regarded NYC public HS in a lower middle class area. The quarterly honor roll was called “The Top 100 Scholars List” and consisted of the top average earning 100 students in the school of 4000+ kids. There was no weighting of honors classes and only one AP (APUSH) was offered. I graduated 56th in a class of 600+ and consistently made that list.</p>
<p>My sons attend a well-regarded public HS (which does not rank) in a suburban area which is socio-economically diverse but perceived as being very wealthy. 65-70% of my son’s class made the honor roll one quarter last year. My son, with a 3.23 GPA, not only did not make the honor roll but is apparently in the bottom quartile of the class. I find this somewhat humorous since he is a National Merit Commended student. 30 out of a class of 400+ were either commended or SF and he is one of them, yet he doesn’t make the honor roll because he doesn’t do his HW or work he deems beneath him, which is another issue in itself.</p>
<p>At my sons’ HS, grade inflation is ridiculously rampant.</p>
<p>I’m in high school and I have a 4.74/4.0 gpa - honors, city college, ap, and ib are all weighted as 5.0 - and I’m not even in the top 2%. MASSIVE grade inflation.</p>
<p>On the definition of inflation . . . If a student has all As (4.0 unweighted) any weighted GPA is based upon an increased percentage of weighted As (5.0) on that student’s transcript. There are several ways to have more weighted classes. The basic, of course is to take a full IB or AP schedule. A student can be in an accelerated program so sophomore year schedule is predominantly IB/AP. A student can jump ahead of many classmates in several subjects (e.g. D) to have more weighted grades. A student can take mandatory electives “off the books” somehow, pass/fail summer school health maybe or have tech ed credits waived for work experience. A common example is substituting varsity sport for 1 semester of PE credit. A student can attend a private school or live in a district or state that doesn’t mandate tech ed, health, PE, etc. - all unweighted classes. Conversely, a way to lower your weighted GPA is to participate in the arts.
The “inflated” weighted GPA is purely a function of the number of weighted classes above and beyond the standard max number. At our school that normally happens with kids in the magnate gifted program who have more weighted classes in early HS years. In the case of Rush10, it sounds like an enterprising kid or tiger cub could take summer community college credits which might pump up their weighted score. However, the term “inflated” implies that kids are receiving grades which are not deserved based on the quality of their work. Maybe the scale has shifted because there are so many ways to push GPA towards 5, but that is completely unrelated to the quality of work or whether or not those As were earned.</p>
<p>@Rush10, exactly how many AP courses can one take that bring up the GPA to this level? Unless one is taking AP lunch and AP recess, there’s got to be a theoretical maximum - one can’t take ALL AP / IB courses for four years.</p>
<p>at my school AP classes are weighted 1.2 and Pre-AP classes are weighted 1.1</p>
<p>I have a 97.15/120 Weighted and I’m in the bottom 50% of my class.</p>
<p>7.0 scale- never heard of it until now, it was never used most places- yours could be unique. Assigning percentages to subjective work such as essays instead of just a letter grade doesn’t seem right to me.</p>
<p>Weighted/unweighted grades have pros and cons. Local flagship (UW) only considers unweighted grades. Our local HS does not weight, only uses A,B,C… It would have made a difference in son’s class ranking if weighting had been used- that’s the advantage for good students with weighting.</p>
<p>Back in my day I think there may have been more grading on a curve both in HS and college. It is better to have a standard and however many students meet the standard for a grade get it. It doesn’t need to be 90-100 = A or other such parameter. Some of the best college exams I had in my Honors Chemistry were so challenging an A grade was a score in the 60 plus % correct range (and typically one in the hundred perhaps getting the top 80 something points of 100)- you really learned how much there was to know.</p>
<p>Perhaps there is “dumbing down”- expecting less to be known/learned for a given grade. That would be reflected in how many students are prepared for college level courses.</p>
<p>Turbo93: Since city college courses are weighted as heavily as APs and IBs, it is very possible to have a 5.0 GPA. In fact, one of my best friends has a 4.97 or something insane (she is obviously the valedictorian, with the salutorian not far behind). If I had an older sibling and had known how to take dual enrollment classes freshman and sophomore years, I would have.</p>
<p>Here’s the list of our APs off the top of my head:
Bio
Chem
Physics
Comp Sci
Micro/Macro Econ
Gov & Politics
US History
World History
Language
Literature
Environmental Science</p>