I grew up down the hill from CCNY and attended a different CUNY for a couple of years. But waaayyyy later than your play/dialogue/whatever that was I just read.
I think there are a fair number of bright kids who get B’s because they get A’s on their tests and don’t bother with homework most of the time so they are dinged by that, they then take the SATs and get high marks and now you have a high SAT, middle grade which shows bright but lazy or bored student
Again, tho, SAT quantifies that: ~15% of students are identified as “anomoulessly low GPA/high SAT” - which mean 250k out of 1.6 million per year.
Now, SAT has NOT done the study (that I’m aware of) that says how that particular subset does in college.
The question that still is going unanswered: are these “gifted” kids who don’t work hard likely to adjust their habits in college and succeed at a rate higher than their GPA suggests.
If anyone has good studies on that, I’d be interested. My guess is the % of low GPA/ high SAT students who “punch above their GPA weight” in college is not huge. But I certainly don’t know and would find it interesting.
the problem I have with just GPA is one we recently had at our school where a group of 5 kids had the CALC exams from last year and the teacher was too lazy to change exams so this group of 5 kids are getting really high grades and blowing any curve- they are clearly not learning so they will likely get poor AP results but will have A’s in the class- this is not uncommon in college, but I find it despicable that the teacher is too lazy to even change up a few numbers
What’s “low” GPA in high school these days? 3.7?
“Recent findings show that the proportion of high school seniors graduating with an A average — that includes an A-minus or A-plus — has grown sharply over the past generation, even as average SAT scores have fallen. In 1998, it was 38.9%. By last year, it had grown to 47%.”
The rampant grade inflation is most pronounced in wealthy, largely white districts:
And now, with the SAT being increasingly “dumbed down” (a process which has continued, uninterrupted, at least since the very early 1990s (the ACT has always been of limited value in identifying innate talent), the latest push to remove standardized testing should benefit already privileged kids even more. Which is precisely the intent.
There’s a corollary - the SAT doesn’t bother to change its exam for international sittings, so we have seen - repeatedly - kids also that test with prior knowledge of the questions.
A kid of my friends got lots of B in high school because she was involved in lots of ECs and didn’t bother to do homework. She achieved high scores in all of her midterms and finals, but they weren’t enough to raise her grades in those classes. Last year, she got rejected by all of the top US schools that she applied to. She took a gap year, took the new SAT (got full score), and will be going to Oxford this year.
But you refuse to simply admit that the SAT itself (along with UCSC and many other college studies) says GPA is best predictor.
You are smart enough to know that “relative” GPA doesn’t matter a whit if ALL students for any given year benefit or suffer from it. The band could be 3.5 is a D 4.0 is an A and as long as you can put grades in context of curriculum, relative ranking, LOR etc. you can get the same results.
So whether anything is inflated or dumbed down doesn’t matter as long as all boats rise or fall on the same tide.
It’s interesting we’re sure that adcoms can properly evaluate GPA, rigor, LOR, EC and SAT/ACT, but are certain they suddenly go brain-dead when that precious SAT is removed from the equation! How do they get ouf the closet once they turn the light off! Lol…
SatchelSF want to make this a “top end intelligence” debate cause that’s their thing. Which is all fine and dandy, but of course it’s not this debate. Even if SAT is the “gold standard” the 1% at the top is probably, like, less than, like, 10%! of the all the people taking the test. Maybe not even, like THAT many…
Lulz.
@StevenToCollege
What did she get on the old SAT?
How is she going to Oxford without 5 x 3 APs after a gap year?
Did she study/take courses during her gap year?
“the latest push to remove standardized testing should benefit already privileged kids even more. Which is precisely the intent.”
Optional standardized tests are a vast white privileged family conspiracy?
I am not a fan of overemphasizing the SAT. . However, test optional actually in my view levels the playing field for tests where scores are highly correlated to parent’s education and career which is usually highly correlated to intelligence and work ethic. I’m sick and tired of hearing that my son is “privileged” because my husband and I have had the “privilege” to work our rears off for 30 years.
Yes, we are blessed and fortunate and never take it for granted because we’ve been through the tough times of lay offs and slow economies, but I really dislike this word “privilege” being tossed around in a way that seems to sneer at people like us who studied, work, and get compensated.
This is not remotely true. Grade compression at the top end requires a completely different approach to learning.
Our high school was very rigorous. They didn’t rank, but they provided a grade distribution that showed that only ~2% of the students achieved a GPA above 4.5, which is an equal mixture of As and Bs when taking all honors/AP courses.
Because Bs were just normal even for the best students, and because the school had no val or sal, the top students focused on doing well as possible but didn’t obsess about grades. There was also a lot of camaraderie rather than competitiveness, because everyone in that group uniformly did well in terms of elite college admissions.
My daughter was in the top 2%, but probably not #1. My son who is a few years younger is at a different level. If we could accelerate him to put him in her class (and if we were cruel enough to do so), he would without a doubt have been the #1 student in her class.
So surely he must be at the top of his class, right? Actually it is much more complicated than that. Notice that I said was very rigorous. Because the school board recently decided that our high school was too stressful, it made grading much easier. My son personally knows 15 students (about 3% of the class) that are getting above a 4.7, and there are likely more. Perhaps close to 10% are getting a 4.5 or above. So staying at the top of his class is about perfection (i.e. avoid mistakes at all costs) rather than learning as much as possible. As I said, a completely different approach.
@CaliDad2020 - You were right somewhere up thread when you said we are all just digging our trenches (I think it was you).
A few observations, not to extend the good-natured banter for its own sake, but because they go to the heart of what has been happening to college admissions and high school stress levels over the last few decades.
“So whether anything is inflated or dumbed down doesn’t matter as long as all boats rise or fall on the same tide.”
This is a basic conceptual error. Inflating a grading or scoring system means moving the mean to the right (higher GPA or higher score). This “compresses” the distribution of grades and scores. Students who were formerly B students are now A students, while students who were formerly A students are still A students. In effect, the system has lost its ability to distinguish between the excellent and the exceptional. The exact same process has occurred with standardized testing. The predictable result has been that since many more students believe - or can represent - themselves to be exceptional than previously, although there has been no true change in ability, all students will compete frantically to try to distinguish themselves on other criteria. This is one of the key dynamics underlying the increasingly frenetic “rat race” of college admissions. (BTW, “dumbed down” is equivalent to “inflated” so only some boats rise and none falls.)
“It’s interesting we’re sure that adcoms can properly evaluate GPA, rigor, LOR, EC and SAT/ACT, but are certain they suddenly go brain-dead when that precious SAT is removed from the equation!”
I’m not sure at all they they can evaluate anything properly. I am sure that that is not what they are doing. Picking students who can “succeed” is a trivial exercise for most selective colleges - given the rampant grade inflation, just about anyone can succeed. The art of admissions is balancing the institutional priorities. A certain portion of any school is allocated to the most intelligent because it is that portion which maintains the academic reputation of the school. The remainder is comprised of various groups of students - able, surely - who meet other institutional priorities having nothing to do with picking the “best” or most capable students.
Besides simple marketing to expand the potential universe of “qualified” students, most of the test optional push is designed to mask poor scoring students. It’s easier to paint a picture of excellence when you can legitimately fail to report low scores on your CDS (which get reflected in USNWR rankings). Read the Ithaca College report carefully and you’ll see this is the case. (Look at the stated motivation for the test optional policy as reported and then look at the only significant negative bivariate correlation noted.)
“Even if SAT is the “gold standard” the 1% at the top is probably, like, less than, like, 10%! of the all the people taking the test. Maybe not even, like THAT many…”
What? 1% is less than 10%, I agree. Am I missing something?
“Lulz” indeed!
The jump from “everyone is undergoing grade inflation” to “the system has lost its ability to distinguish between the excellent and exceptional” is a whackadoodle leap in many ways.
- What evidence do you have of that? Are MIT GREs getting lower? Are Harvard grads leaving more clamps in their open heart patients? Are Princeton CIA Agents losing more “assets” to the GRU then they did in the 70’s? Seriously though, you present yourself as a stats person then throw out these weekend talk show soundbytes as if they are real.
Do you honestly think Harvard, MIT, CIT, Stanford and Yale are now “less” able to discern “exceptional” from “excellent” due to HS grade inflation? So, you are arguing they are missing out on a greater number of “exceptional” applicants in 2017 than they did in 1997 due to grade inflation in HS?
Ivies, Stanford, UChicago, MIT, CIT enroll over 20k kids per year… All have more applicants every year, you think they’re missing out on a lot of “eceptional” kids for the “merely” excellent out of that increasing pool because they aren’t clever enough to evaluate grading systems?
- You continue to (purposely) try to misconstrue the discussion. This is not between “excellent” and “exceptional” unless we have different meanings of the word.
There are like 80-85 schools on Baron’s “most selective” list - all are higly competitive - admit rates below 25% I think is the standard, all enroll between 500 and 5000 Frosh each year. Again, these are the most competitive. You think there are a large number of “exceptional” kids being left out of that admit pool due to “grade inflation?”
You continue to want to play only in the deep end of the pool, which is awesome, but this is a lap swim we’re doing here. You’re at the wrong event.
Compeltely different approach, but completely evaluatable. Heck, you gave very precise percentages. Your GCs know those numbers, they get communicated to the Adcoms. It ain’t that hard.
Every system will have mistakes, of course. But Adcoms look at all students in context. Grade scales differ between schools - and have for years. 100 pt. 4 pt. 6 pt. IB, W, UW, UCW,
Adcoms see 10 - 50k of these every year. They know what they are looking at. Will they get it right every time? Nope. Not with SAT/ACT either.
But Bates has very tiny differentiation between it’s test optional students and test submitting students over 25 years.
So obviously they often do get it right, despite grade inflation.
The discussions on this forum often center around HYPSM… type top ranked, highly selective colleges where nearly every admit is capable of being successful, 95+% graduate, and the most common college class grade is A. However, Ithaca College is completely different, as are most colleges in the United States, including both test required and test optional colleges. Ithaca doesn’t have a top USNWR National or LAC ranking. Instead it’s grouped as a north regional college. It’s not selective. Almost 70% of applicants are admitted, and most of the admitted class does not have impressive stats. .Admits being capable students and graduating is not a given. Many students do not graduate.
The Ithaca report explains their motivations I believe the report when it implies they are trying to change their predominantly white campus and increase diversity by a few percent, not an effort climb up in the USNWR rankings from regional north x to regional north x - small . And a good way to increase diversity in such a less selective college that admits most applicants scenario is to increase the number of qualified ethnically diverse applicants. A test optional policy can do this. Of course it’s also critical to insure that the test optional policy does not defeat other goals for the class, such as maintaining graduation rate and other measures of success. Ithaca’s analysis suggests that test scores add little in predictive power of such measures beyond the rest of the application used in Ithaca’s holistic admission process that considers much more than just GPA + scores.
Ithaca’s test optional policy appears to have met both of these goals. Following the policy change, ALANA (Asian, Latino, African, Native Ameircan) applications increased by ~23%, compared to ~10% increase among White applicants. Ithaca created the most diverse class in the college’s history, in spite of having a higher acceptance rate among White test optional applicants than ALANA test optional applicants. IPEDS lists an identical 4-year graduation rate for the current year and the year before going test optional.
Ithaca didn’t see a big shift to the “easy” majors with the test optional policy change. Prior to going test optional ~5% majored in STEM fields. In the most recent CDS, ~9% majored in STEM fields. Prior to going test optional, the majors with >10% enrollment were communication/journalism, visual and performing arts, health professions, and business… in that order. In the most recent CDS, the list of majors with >10% enrollment and popularity order was the same.
@Data10 - Thanks for the additional color on Ithaca College. I am well aware of the selectivity and admissions statistics for Ithaca College. Before I posted a word, I reviewed the publicly available data provided by the school here: https://www.ithaca.edu/ir/instdata/. In particular, the summaries here: https://www.ithaca.edu/ir/docs/factsinbrief/. A quick perusal of that data will show that Ithaca College had been waiving the testing data in a limited way for some years prior to the official announcement, and that the prevalence of SAT data absence rises monotonically with the numbers of Black and Hispanic student (Asians retain roughly the same representation throughout the years, although if one squints and judiciously chooses starting year one might discern a slight rising trend).
With regard to selectivity, I disagree with your characterization that it is not selective. Well, at least I disagree with your implication that Ithaca is not concerned with its image of selectivity.
Ithaca is ranked by USNWR as #8 out of 196 Regional Universities North. In other words, in the top 5% of the category.
In Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges (2015 - I don’t have access to later information), Ithaca is listed as Category 2 (“highly competitive”), the second highest of 5 general categories that range from “non-competitive” through “most competitive.”
People might be curious to know that as of the last few years, approximately 800 of Ithaca’s entering class of approximately 1800 no longer present SAT data. (No information is provided regarding ACT, although presumably very few in the applicant pool for a NYS school take the ACT.)
I have no problem with Ithaca’s marketing approach in going test-optional. What I have a problem with is the attempt to create a patina of legitimacy and rigor by using that report. The methodological flaws and variable confounds and conflations are so egregious that its conclusions should be viewed with extreme skepticism. My personal opinion is that it was conceived to justify an already-taken decision based on considerations of marketing and political correctness.
Just my opinion of course 
I’m happy to provide specific examples of the report’s many flaws if you are so inclined through PM.
I looked at the Bates presentation and it looks like the students who submitted their SATs had better outcomes than the students who didn’t, disproving Bates’ theory. They had slightly higher GPAs at Bates, more of them went to grad schools or got jobs. What Bates is doing is getting the kids who typically don’t score well (minorities) not to submit so their SAT average is higher when reporting to US News and other college sites that collect these stats. And they get more URMs to apply reaching their diversity goals. Marketing gimmick (i.e. putting a toy in a cereal box to get people to buy) may be too strong a word but it’s a marketing driven initiative.
Also NYU is on the list but they require a test, it doesn’t have to be SAT or ACT, but it has to be a subject test or ap test. Not really a test optional school.
^ Bowdoin will show the same dynamics as Bates. Not all preference applicants have low scores of course - there will be high scoring development, athletic and minority applicants. But for those who do score low, the offending data will just disappear down the memory hole, accompanied by the sounds of goal-sought shoddy statistical studies.
Re: selectivity of Ithaca College
https://www.ithaca.edu/news/releases/a-look-at-the-class-of-2021-at-ithaca-college-46465/ says that the new frosh in 2017 (class of 2021) had a mean HS GPA of 3.28. Those who submitted SAT scores had mean scores 607 V, 587 M, 583 W. 40% came from NY; NJ, MA, PA, CT were the next four states.
@CaliDad2020 - on the use of SAT + HSGPA, here is a useful study (by one of the big names in the literature) that purports to show that HSGPA is more correlated with SES and SAT less so:
“We demonstrate that typical analysis approaches confound within-high-school and between-high-school relationships between academic indicators and socioeconomic factors. When pooled within-school analyses are used, high school grades and class rank have larger correlations with family income and education than is evident in the results of typical analyses, and SAT scores have smaller associations with socioeconomic factors.”
https://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/liufall2013/files/2013/10/New_Perspectives.pdf
Testing has always been beneficial to the lower SES groups - that is why it was invented over 100 years ago. Sure, the deck has always been stacked against poorer kids - not least because they tend to have lower genotypic intelligence (because of the small but significant correlation between income and intelligence). Nevertheless, I’d rather take my chances with objective and transparent testing than with the whims of an edutocracy that under holistic admissions has still managed to retain more spots for the top 1% SES than for the entire lower 50%, as first linked upthread by @CaliDad2020: