<p>GPA is to me, a better indicator when coupled with difficult courses and a rigorous schools. Where the breakpoints are becomes the issue. As far as I am concerned, unless a school gives away 4.0s, a 4.0 anywhere is impressive (unweighted). But when one starts getting lower into the averages, the uncertainty creeps into the picture. And admissions and merit awrds do reflect that. Even perfect SATs are not going to get you much in the way of scholarship money if the GPA is below a 3.0, but above that, the market is there. Mainly because there is a smaller market for high SATS and the market is wide open for high GPAs. Not enough spots in the most selective schools for the top students. </p>
<p>My friends in Georgia found out that with the HOPE and other state scholarship programs, even top students have trouble getting into UGA and GT there. Not enough seats for all for all of those kids with great grades, but they still can’t bring up the test scores without buying some of the kids. Even so, they aren’t way up there. The fact of the matter is that high testers are a scarce resource and they do indicate potential and are heavy in effect on ratings. Also high scores at a school begets high scorers in the future as those kids who get high scores oftne want to be with other high scorers. There is herd mentality that comes to play too. </p>
<p>My sons’ private prep school does not weight GPAs and has a rigorous curriculum. Don’t know any 4.0s from there, but the average 2 part SAT1 scosre was 1370 , the one year I checked and remember. Their SAT2 scores are even higher per test, 700 is the average, and 4s are most often the AP test results. Those kids almost all go to college, more than 75% go to selective, well known for academic reputation schools and they tend to all graduate in 6 year or less. Very few do not finish college. In my son’s class from some years ago, I know of only 2 who did not get their degree. These kids tend to be vetted by test score and they do well test score wise, and tend to do well in college by a wide margin over the average. And so it is with a lot of such schools. And, yes, the students at such schools, private or public (there are public schools that test score screen too), tend to be successful in college. The brutal reality is that those kid who come from lower income famlies don’t do as well, test score wise AND in performance when they go to college.</p>
<p>If we could make up for 16-17 years of unequal opportunity with a test prep tutor, we’d be doing it. We can’t. Tutors are not the main reason high SES kids score well. </p>
<p>I’m saying this as a tutor, and an expensive one. We can’t make up for decades of disadvantage. The disparities start at birth or earlier. Look at the data about how many words working-class and upper-middle-class children hear before age three. The tests are biased toward high SES students, but so is college. They both reward decades of daily practice in language and critical thinking. Some homes offer a lot, others much less.</p>
<p>Even the College Board, which administers the SAT, acknowledges this. I believe their strongest claim in defense of the SAT is that HS GPA combined with the SAT is a better predictor of college success than HS GPA alone. And I’m not sure they even stand by that claim much beyond first-year college grades.</p>
<p>That’s right, the College Board has abandoned any claim that the SAT has validity beyond predicting first-year grades. The SAT grew out of early IQ tests, but as intelligence testing has lost favor, they’ve moved away from that theme. You can still see artifacts of this history in comparing the SAT to the ACT, though, notably in the prevalence of vocabulary on the verbal sections of the SAT. This is the #1 one reason that (IMHO), the SAT is less coachable than the ACT.</p>
<p>That did not stop people from trying to coach the SAT in the form of books like “1,000 SAT words” or some such.</p>
<p>The likely reason that colleges use the SAT and ACT is that they are lowest-common-denominator measures that can be used for all applicants, and that they can expose or deter high school grade inflation, at least on an aggregate scale. If high school course and grading standards were standardized across all high schools, there would not be any need for external standardized tests.</p>
<p>I agree that the test prep and tutoring claims are just conveniences to avoid much deeper and intractable issues. They probably do help middling students become middling + but not many are going from a 23 to a 33 ACT with any amount of test prep. But they might squeeze out a 26.</p>
<p>“If high school course and grading standards were standardized across all high schools, there would not be any need for external standardized tests.”</p>
<p>Countries with standardized high school curriculums (which is most high-achieving countries) still use standardized exams. China, UK, yada yada. Though most of those exams have a lot more to do with the high school material than ours do.</p>
<p>That hasn’t been my experience or those of most classmates with low GPA and higher than correlated SAT scores. IME, my college GPA is so much higher than my HS GPA that they’re near polar opposites. </p>
<p>Not to mention I found the workload and pacing of undergrad/grad courses at my LAC and two elite universities to be much more manageable or even easier compared to HS. </p>
<p>If anything, most of the college classmates/undergrads I knew who struggled with college academics, especially at top 30 LACs/universities tended to have high GPA and lower than correlated standardized scores. My impression is that their HSs had high grade inflation and/or weaker graduation requirements. </p>
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<p>Socially, they also have far less trouble with parental/societal buy-in that one’s scores and college acceptances are a way of separating out the really intelligent/quick studies from everyone else. </p>
<p>If anything, most still regard it as a good thing…even if taken to extremes to the point students have issues/suicides from high stress from such examinations/college application processes. </p>
<p>Moreover, it’s becoming less accepted among those of the new upper/upper-middle classes with kids who couldn’t turn in high enough scores for the first tier or two of Chinese colleges or those who feel the system is too inhumane and have the money to send them abroad for undergrad…like the US.</p>
<p>Following Hanna’s point, much catch-up test prep for lower SES kids is occurring in junior/senior year. It should start in 8th or 9th. There are kids getting this early direction and it shows in their big pictures.</p>
<p>Agree the GPA issue needs to be seen in context. The B kid at a less competitive hs simply isn’t striving to the extent a B at a more rigorous may be. Granted, my experience is with an elite. But one of the questions with kids who aren’t obvious top performers is: will they meet the peer bar in classes? That’s both style and substance- having the study goals/skills and the knowledge base. It’s a very real consideration.</p>
<p>So, cobrat, something beyond your hs gpa performance got you into that college. At this point, we can’t look back and guess what that was. Maybe you have an idea. But it should be included.</p>
<p>I also want to point out that not only does the lower performing kid in the article portend different college challenges, many of the top kids aren’t just sitting around between sports practice and their tutoring appointments. They can be fully scheduled, as well. Some with jobs or internships, maybe other efforts. The NYT tends to make all this look simple, for their own purposes.</p>
<p>I think you are greatly underestimating how difficult it is to live in a financially insecure household.</p>
<p>Furthermore, we are helping our kids get through this process: managing the Common App, making a reasonable list of colleges, visiting campuses to see what might work for our kids. A high school student without a college-educated parent, often (at least in NYC where huge numbers of students are in immigrant households even if they were born here) no parent who speaks English.</p>
<p>To say the guidance counselor will help is a joke in the high schools these students attend.</p>
<p>I am not underestimating what some kids can accomplish, despite.. We see it, even in tough family situations. I think some underestimate the drives it takes to succeed. I’m all for opportunity. But the goods have to be there. Or you don’t do the kid any favors.</p>
<p>The concept du jour on CC seems to be that disadvantage offers some special hook. But there has to be evidence of “promise,” along with that. Or you impact the chances a kid can manage, thrive and move forward. Right kid for the right educational setting. Wanting the best for someone needs to be eyes wide open, a genuine match, with the evidence at hand.</p>
<p>Because of the federal sequester and state budget cuts, many Phila. public high schools now have ONE GUIDANCE COUNSELOR FOR EVERY 3,000 STUDENTS. </p>
<p>How much guidance do you think they are able to provide on college choices? </p>
<p>At many urban public high schools, the guidance counselors have to spend much of their time on family problems, etc., and don’t have much time to spend on college counseling. When they have a student with a great deal of academic promise, the Counselor may not know about the process of admissions for highly competitive colleges, because they mainly deal with non-selective colleges. </p>
<p>Most of the students from my kids’ city high school who attended selective colleges had very well-educated and involved parents who knew the system.</p>
<p>I haven’t seen much evidence of that! Au contraire, most parents are saying that underprivileged students deserve to stay home and go to whatever public college or university is nearby. So are you saying that a disadvantaged student has to be a superstar, whereas all the students with parents to help and pay part of the cost of college can just be above average?</p>
<p>The fact of the matter is that very few schools meet full need for all or even most of their students, especially when living expenses are in the picture. Where do you think the money is going to come from to pay for living expenses when student go away to school? They are the responsibility of the parent unless a school feels adding that student to the university commuty is worth subsidzing out of school funds. There are funds availble for most students to be able to afford to go to college locally to a state school, and they are structured in a way so that the neediest get close to a full ride in that regard, and it is scaled with the grants going downward and the loan subsidies disappearing as family income increases. You want to go to sleep away college your parents have to pay for it , or you have to find somene to invest in that. Too many other things on the priority lists higher than that to ask government, state to pay for living expenses for students to go away to school…</p>
<p>And,yes, even if a student is well below average, if the money is there, if parents will pay, a school can be found. Don’t know how a very bad student will last there, but for that first year, a school can be found. </p>
<p>My SIL’s brother barely finished high school and his test scores were a couple of hundered points above the given, and yet he went away to school and they even let him come back for the second year with a .9 gpa. the first. Parents were paying, the college took the money. Maybe they would have let him come back a third year too, but the parents pulled the plug after paying for two years of him going away to school for a lot of things except for studying and working towards a degree.</p>
<p>I can only guess at some possibilities of not only being admitted…but getting a near-full ride college scholarship as well:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Academic reputation of High School attended.</p></li>
<li><p>Essay/writing skill level was higher than average with experiences from my old working-class NYC neighborhood to draw upon. </p></li>
<li><p>Standardized scores</p></li>
<li><p>Being male, Asian-American, and from a then low-income family. </p></li>
<li><p>The quality of my ECs including doing volunteering stints as SAT tutor. This is at the bottom as most classmates had far more ECs and had a higher quality of participation in them. Then again, being in a HS full of students who are highly intelligent, passionate about academics, and fully engaged in and out of the classroom whether through ECs and/or after-school jobs their greater impressiveness is a given IME.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Canadian universities like University of Toronto and McGill do not appear to require standardized testing for students in Canadian high schools:</p>
<p>You can almost always find an old SAT or ACT test prep book for a buck or two at a Friends of the Library sale or church basement book sale. Test prep classes mainly benefit those students too lazy to study on their own. Those unable or unwilling to study on their own very likely won’t do well in college and probably shouldn’t, absent extenuating circumstances, be there in the first place.</p>
<p>Not necessarily. Sometimes, they are unwilling to study because they felt they didn’t need to and were proven right by the results after taking the SATs cold. Plenty of my HS classmates were like that.</p>
<p>The ones who aren’t that strong as test takers with proven results who need to be prodded to study for the exam may not have the high level of self-discipline and maturity to self-study for the SAT. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have the self-discipline or have/will develop the maturity to do well in college. </p>
<p>Knew far too many HS/college classmates and undergrads who ended up excelling in college/grad school despite not having the self-discipline to study for the SATs…or any standardized exams for that matter. And most of them didn’t attend high schools like Bronx Science or TJSST…</p>
<p>Yea, my youngest son didn’t want to bother, either, but I insisted that he at least take 2 old practice tests for the ACT to ensure he didn’t run into one or two random oddball surprise problems. But getting a high score was never at question – the goal was to get a perfect score (which he did).</p>
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<p>My statement was probably a bit harsh, but there are a lot of students in the admit-almost-anyone-with-a-pulse colleges that really shouldn’t be there. Some recent high school graduates would benefit from a gap year or two, others should look into learning a trade or trying to turn a hobby into a business. Nowadays, everyone seems to head to college whether it makes sense or not; colleges lower standards to make their degrees near useless; and even low-pay companies like Starbucks now expect a degree from their applicants.</p>
<p>It’s a lousy situation for today’s youth when they have to invest 4 years and run up a huge debt tab simply to qualify for a job that pays two bucks an hour over minimum wage. Maybe we need to offer our young “basic college” (free online classes leading to a certificate) and “advanced college” for those seeking the well-paying jobs that can justify the expense involved.</p>