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<p>I agree with this, both based on personal experience (via two Ivy offspring - no reports of “many” classmates who are unprepared and struggling) and logic. Surely these colleges, which have been around for hundreds of years, have figured out by now which high schools produce good college students and which do not.</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 . . .”</p>
<p>There is no test that is “optimal” for predicting future performance in college (too many variables), but standardized tests (SAT, SAT Subject Matter tests, ACTs, etc can be useful tools in helping to sift out the applicants who may have been victimized by grade inflating teachers.</p>
<p>The AP’s and IB’s we have do not look much different (full range of AP/IB and then some, thanks to a 4000+ student HS :-)). Do you have access to AP English for all 4 years of HS? every Biology, foreign language, art elective, and so on? AP Geometry? Or, are these taken at the city college level? Here we do have a satellite campus of the community college system and a lot of their courses are dual-listed so I guess it is possible… - </p>
<p>Also, are there no restrictions on what to take in, say, 9th grade? there’s only AP World History… For 9th and 10th grade they have a bunch of pre-IB courses… Do these count as 5 pointers?</p>
<p>I’m working on my 8th grader’s 9th grade schedule and I was just curious!</p>
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<p>When I went to high school, there were honors sequences in English, math, Spanish, and French, with the top level being labeled as “AP” instead of “honors”. It does not make sense to put an AP label on a course that really is not college level and/or does not have an associated AP test (e.g. high school geometry, high school freshman/sophomore English, etc.).</p>
<p>UC and CSU count both certified honors and AP courses as +1; transferable community college courses are also counted as +1.</p>
<p><em>**Anybody who completes all homework assigned and completes it correctly and on time should be able to pull straight “A” at any HS in the USA. </em></p>
<p>This is ludicrous. My D goes to our local public school, which I consider to be an excellent school, but it’s not a private college prep school or a USNWR “gold medal” school or anything like that. She does all her homework correctly and on time. She also studies, behaves, does any extra credit that is offered and works hard. She’s a bright kid, and her ACT score is in the top 1% of the national rankings. But she doesn’t have straight As. Her teachers give hard tests and final exams. Most are tough graders on papers. They have high expectations. She has taken AP classes where she got a B in the class but a 5 on the AP exam (and the HS doesn’t weight enough to bring a B up to a 4.0, either). The tests and finals in her AP classes have been harder than the AP tests. There are kids at her high school who do have straight As, but there aren’t all that many of them and they tend to be the extremely bright kids (the ones who were placed into gifted and talented programs back in 3rd grade, who have been groomed to take SATs since 7th grade, who took math at the high school in 7th and/or 8th grade). So to say that any kid who does his or her homework properly and on time can get all As is just silly.</p>
<p>I went thru our local high school’s program of study for my younger daughter next fall and it indeed has no AP freshman or sophomore English, or Geometry, etc. Just honors. But these honors (or pre-IB :-)) courses are not counted as +1 (out of 5 I assume). Likewise, I do not believe our dual-listed courses (HS and community college, convenient as the two are next door to each other) are GPA’d as +1 or out of 5. So, the opportunity to have nearly every class taken out of 5 is not available, and indeed, the highest scores I remember from a few kids were in the 4.2 range.</p>
<p>Our experience is a lot like mdoc’s above. There are some kids that manage > 4.0 GPA, but not many. Anything over a 3.5 in fact is stellar. Heck, regular HS Chemistry is taught by a couple of teachers with PhD’s using a college textbook (and chem ain’t easy…) </p>
<p>Many of the ‘slacker’ kids end up transferring to the parochial schools to accomplish easier GPA’s.</p>
<p>The h.s. I attended (private college prep school) was actually known for grade deflation and functioned in a similar way to most colleges. Our average GPA was a 2.7 but 25%+ of our class attended Ivies+Stanford+MIT+Top LACs. The way our school functioned was on a forced distribution curve for every class (15% As, 25% Bs, 40% Cs, 15% Ds, 5% Fs). We also did not technically have AP /honors courses (so didnt get additional weight) as all of our courses were supposedly rigorous enough to take and pass the related AP test at the end of the year. Which at the end of the day proved quite true…I think our school’s 5 year AP test score average at the time I attended was ~4.1. In terms of functioning like a true college, although we had problem sets or homework for the most part they did not count towards your final grade…the only things that counted towards your final grade were a midterm, a final, and sometimes a final project / paper. </p>
<p>The benefit of the above grading system and class structure was that it truly prepared you for college. I remember when i first got to school how so many students were freaking out that 50% of their grade was determined by a midterm and 50% by a final and there was a forced curve and that they couldnt use homework to bank on getting an A for a sizeable part of their final grade. Having been accustomed to this made the college transition quite easy…most of my classmates now say that college for them was a breeze.</p>
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<p>That is a GPA of 2.30, much lower than just about any college or university these days, according to [National</a> Trends in Grade Inflation, American Colleges and Universities](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com%5DNational”>http://www.gradeinflation.com) .</p>
<p>Also, it is likely that even under “curve” policies in college, D and F grades have to be earned with obviously poor performance in tests and/or projects.</p>
<p>In my high school (which happens to be in Asia), 2% of the entire cohort get A for the internal exam in one subject. But in our national exam, 70% get A. Honestly, it can be quite demoralising sometimes. </p>
<p>Also, my school is structured much like whartongrad08’s high school in that the final grade students receive is dependent on a midterm and a final or sometimes just a final only. Our exams almost never have multiple-choice and are usually essays or structured questions (in the case of science subjects). </p>
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From what I heard, it really did make college a breeze for many of the people I know.</p>
<p>Thread in HS Life: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/high-school-life/1240161-your-school-known-grade-deflation.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/high-school-life/1240161-your-school-known-grade-deflation.html</a></p>
<p>@ucbalumnus: just on a side note, our avg. was actually around a 2.7 as there were + and - in each of the grade levels which had different GPA weights and I dont think there was much of a forced curve within each grade category so it was skewed up slightly. But yes it is definitely lower than just about any college…which is again why most of the people in my school found college to be a cake walk. When you have been used to the final, midterm, paper structure used at most colleges where BS homework assignments and extra credit have no impact on grades then making the transition to college was not tough…add in the fact that at my h.s. you got used to consistently writing 25-50 page research papers starting in freshmen year…at most of my friends other schools, public or private, most kids had never written more than 10-15 page papers in their h.s. careers. Honestly, now when i talk to friends from my h.s. at reunions or when I am back in town for the holidays most of them comment that they worked so much less in college than they did in h.s.</p>
<p>Also regarding the following:</p>
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<p>I agree to a certain extent at least with regards to Fs. At Wharton where our curve is notorious, Ds where definitely common place in the forced curve and there was always a % that got them…I remember one test freshman year where I got 21 out of 25 questions correct on a test (i.e. 84%) and was given a D. lol. 
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<p>Fs on the other hands definitely had to be earned with obviously poor performance.</p>
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<p>In Ontario here I heard a lot about Wharton, but not about the forced curve. How bad is it? What percentage of students are given As, for example? Our forced curve here is 20 to 25 percent As.</p>
<p>Some of us that were HS educated abroad are all too familiar with what it takes to get an A. Back then, a 20/20 GPA thru high school was nearly impossible, as impossible as the few hundred kids a year who get perfect SAT/ACT’s. Typically that would be some pudgy Coke bottle eyed freaked out student in the boonies where they managed to get 20/20 for 6 (or 3 now) years. A GOOD GPA would be an 18 or above, and these were rare. 16’s-17’s were defacto B+s and anything over 17.5 or so would be stellar. Likewise, 14-15 would not be all that bad. Pretty much one’s fate was determined by the national exams.</p>
<p>Even in college when I attended engineering there, grading was different - one could get 9’s or 10’s in some classes, but most everyone was 7 to 8. I only know one person with a 9 GPA and he became dean of engineering at a well known top 20 US school :-). Some profs there had ‘quotas’ on how many students they’d **pass **every semester, let alone give decent grades. </p>
<p>Grades, in both cases, simply did not matter. Here, unfortunately, the only thing that matters is grades, and this necessitates creativity in obtaining the almighty A. Given how important grades are in the US, and the vast variance among schools, it’s not difficult to see how meaningless grades have become here - like back in my birth country - except back there we all knew it. Here, we don’t.</p>
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<p>Small (statistical) nit whartongrad, but the above anecdote doesn’t support your point, about a notorious curve at W. If an 84% was a D, then a large portion of the class must have received a 25 (100%) on that test. An example of grade INflation, to me. :D</p>
<p>In our area, students in the higher level classes are (IMO) give extraordinary chances to earn the A. When I was in school in the dark ages, if you bombed a test you were out of luck. My daughters (in a public high school) and some of their friends (private) are given numerous opportunities to retake tests and do extra credit to bring up their grades. The grades may help kids get into college but they certainly aren’t prepared for the college professor that calculates final grades based on a comprehensive mid term and a final.</p>
<p>^^I do agree there is grade inflation. I found my high school transcript and I graduated third in my class. Had some Bs on it that I didn’t remember and we did track and I did take a full load that would be considered rigorous now and included Great Books curriculum. I did well on my SAT and ACT (you only took them once back then). I don’t remember “extra credit” to the degree teachers use now to elevate grades. These days I suspect you don’t find many high schools where #3 has any if many Bs. C used to be average…I think now B is average in the public schools. I highly doubt the top 20% of college bound students in 70s as a group were “dumber” than the top 20% of college bound kids today. I really don’t think they “work” any harder at it either. I worked, I studied, I played 2 spots, and I played an instrument in local symphonies and in high school and I had piano and dance lessons all four years, and was a student council and NHS officer and actually a few other time consuming school activities that if I post someone might figure out who I am. My parents never worried that I was “doing too much.” These kids just got raised as a Barney generation where everyone is great so in some cases the pressure is caused by themselves and their parents because they’ve been told since they could spoon baby food into their mouth how great they are. Kids feed off each other, too, so it spreads. But yes, the grades are definitely inflated pretty much across the country. As you can tell I’m not too big on coddling kids LOL.</p>
<p>^^^
Momofthreeboys -
It does seem that GPAs were at least somewhat lower in the olden days. I’'ve looked for actual data and only found a few limited surveys which track GPAs vs. Standardized test scores over time.</p>
<p>I do remember there was no such thing as weighted GPAs back in my time, at least at my HS.</p>
<p>Out of curiosity, were you able to get into one of those fancy colleges with that resume? You know, those schools that everybody wants to attend?</p>
<p>(Assuming you applied to one)</p>
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<p>The problem in the US is that high school grades, as inconsistent as they are, are still the best predictor of college performance. In other words, they are better than standardized test scores, although the standardized test scores do add some value (the SAT Subject tests more so than the SAT Reasoning test).</p>
<p>Still, the predictive value is not all that great for any of these academic criteria used in the US to select between applicants to colleges. That is why the most selective schools use all kinds of holistic criteria to distinguish from thousands of applicants with near-maximum GPAs and test scores.</p>
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<p>Wouldn’t that be more of an indication that the test was just too easy if such a large percentage of the class got perfect or near perfect scores that distinguishing between (for example) A and B students could not be done?</p>
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<p>That’s quite funny based on my experience and those of many classmates in high school and college. Seen far too many kids who had below-average HS GPAs excel even at the most elite colleges/universities and conversely my high school classmates and I saw far too many straight-A type kids with APs up the wazoo floundering to graduation with 2.x-level college GPAs, placed on academic probation/expulsion, and/or even expelled for academic deficiency. </p>
<p>Granted, standardized scores aren’t necessarily any better…but in my limited observation…it seemed the kids with high scoring/low HS GPAs did much better in college than their low scoring/high HS GPA counterparts. YMMV, though.</p>
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<p>That high school grades are the best available predictor does not mean that they are a good predictor. Of course you will see a lot of anecdotal counterexamples.</p>
<p>Table 4 of [CSHE</a> - Validity Of High-School Grades In Predicting Student Success Beyond The Freshman Year: High-School Record vs. Standardized Tests as Indicators of Four-Year College Outcomes](<a href=“Publications | Center for Studies in Higher Education”>Publications | Center for Studies in Higher Education) indicates the high school GPA explains 20.4% of the variance of fourth year college GPA. That is not particularly good, but better than the 16.9% explained by SAT Subject Tests or 13.4% explained by SAT Reasoning Tests. Using all of these explains only 26.5% of the variance in fourth year college GPA.</p>
<p>Bovertine, I did but did not attend. I cried for a long time. My parents would not let me go “that far away”…I went to an LAC and got an excellent education and had a great time. It is funny because in “today’s world” I had the absolutely perfect application for those brass ring schools…passions, interests, accomplishments and a real job and an excellent academic and test record only I never once gave any of it a thought. I was busy, I do remember that but I rode my bike from here to there until I got my driver’s license so I don’t think my parents gave anything much of a thought either. I still think alot of those kinds of kids still get into those schools.</p>