@homerdog Thanks. D21 is applying to an ED2 that gives merit aid. I was curious because an additional semester of IB courses positively impacts the GPA.
I don’t know how so many students have such high GPAs.
D21 and I just did the math, and even if a student had a perfect straight A record through the end of junior year at her school, they’d have:
4.0 freshman year
4.0 sophomore year*
4.8 junior year**
*The only honors course the school has is math, which D21 took both years but it’s not weighted.
**11th and 12th grade is all IB courses. Students are allowed 4 HL courses max and 2 SL (5+5+5+5+4.5+4.5=29/6=4.8).
For the straight A student, unless I’m doing something wrong, wouldn’t you add it up by semester:
4.0+4.0+4.0+4.0+4.8+4.8=25.6/6=4.26 cumulative GPA.
Even if a student broke the rules and took 6 HL classes, the max cumulative GPA to the end of junior year would be 4.31.
I thought D21 had a 4.5 weighted but she actually has a 4.05W and a 3.89UW. She’s maintained all As with the exception of a B+ in IB Physics and two A- in freshman and sophomore years.
Anyway, it made me wonder because she didn’t get any merit aid at Tulane. I just assumed other students had stronger records but a couple of others posted merit awards saying they’d had a few B’s and the rest A’s. I don’t understand how a student can have a 4.6 GPA without having straight A’s. What am I missing?
For the record, I’m more curious than anything. I have faith in the holistic admissions process of LACs.
For kids applying to a place like this, it helps. But as @rbc2018 said it doesn’t really do the top kids any favors. S16 got an A+ (4.2) in regular english as a junior and did frankly not much to earn it imho. D21 got a B+ in AP Lit (so 4.2) and it felt like a full time job. I will say that she also learned a ton more than he did, and that class (and fear of losing class rank and GPA) made her into the writer that she is today, which is partially why she had the success she did in ED. But as far as grading fairness, absolutely not.
I don’t know about LAC’s but I know U-Michigan recalculates GPAs by unweighting everything, taking out all non-core classes and then re-weighting core classes with their own formula. I think the UC schools also (at least for OOS IIRC) unweight everything too.
Having a 95 be the lowest A is brutal, but I have a kid in college at a large public University where the lowest A is a 94 so a lot of kids just aren’t used to that grading system and a high GPA is definitely earned. I have another one that goes where GPAs are deflated so it can be “deflating” to students as well. I remember the year before she took Linear Algebra class she saw that a 95 on one of the tests or something high like that was curved down to a B+! So the teacher felt the mid-term was too easy because so many did well that those who did well actually got penalized for doing so. Just brutal!
This is why the school report is so important. There is a high school just north of us that gives A+ and one just south of us that doesn’t give +/- but along with ours are all Top 15 in our state. So elite collges get plenty of apps from all 3 and need to figure out a way to compare a 4.9 to a 4.7 to a 4.1. As they may all be equal or not. Our school also gives the same for honors as AP but for those in remedial they get the same as regular courses so you can have a kid that has taken all remedial classes graduate at the top of the class and be valedictorian or have a 4.0 and that is not at all the same as someone who has taken more rigor having a 4.0 or quite frankly a 3.9. But it just is what it is. This is why I find the chance me’s on here sort of ridiculous because you don’t know what you’re really looking at.
It’s so tough all around and I would never want to be on the AO side of the table.
I’m not an expert but my understanding is that it is calculated automatically in two ways. You can qualify as top 9% through your high school but they also look at it statewide. In theory you could be short of top 9% at your school but still qualify when looking at the statewide numbers. I have no idea how they do that.
State/school grading scales and weightings are all over the board. Some places weight AP/IB as 6.0 and honors 5.0, others it’s 5.0 and 4.5, some don’t weight. Some use 10 point scale and 90 weights same as 100 in same course, others use 7 point or other scale. Some weight based on range, others on specific number grade (i.e. a 100 in AP is 6.0, 99 is 5.9, 98 is 5.8 and so on). Some places exclude required non-academic like PE or electives from weighted GPA, others don’t.
That’s why schools provide reports on how they calculate to colleges. There’s really no way to compare the WGPAs mentioned on this site without knowing scale and weights and if exclude any courses, which usually aren’t shared.
Our D has right around a 4.6 weighted GPA because all honors and AP classes can count for a 5.0. Regular level classes count an A as a 4.0. So, she has a couple of regular level class As which would be counted as a 4 and a few Bs in AP/honors classes that also count as a 4.0 but also a good number of As in AP/honors classes. Her gpa includes some classes that can’t be taken as honors too like some art classes. Really no one would get a perfect 5.0 weighted GPA because of those classes. If you just look at her actual grades (her As and Bs) and don’t weight them - just count As as 4.0 and Bs as 3.0, she has a 3.85.
Not sure how Tulane gives merit or how holistic their decisions are for merit. Our D did get almost max merit at Denver and a pretty good showing for merit at SCU too without scores.
I’m interested in the software, so I ask about it on tours and when they mention GPAs. I’ve asked people like Jeff Selingo about the software too. Nobody likes to talk about the software though! lol.
An example was at Georgia Tech they mentioned how sometimes their software struggles with classes that have unique names instead of the standard names. I asked a follow up question and they said they don’t see the original transcript unless there is an issue. That jived with what I’ve heard from other places.
This is how our school does it. Certainly classes cannot be taken at the Honors or AP level no matter what, so no one can ever have a 5.0. There are always 1 or 2 that have a 4.0 unweighted but for as long as I can remember, they’ve never been the same person with the highest weighted GPA so that shows that those kids may have all A’s but are not taking the most difficult rigor.
For one school we had to do the SRAR and enter all grades in ourselves. It was a royal pain in the neck but it’s done and then the school reweighted the GPA based on that. It made Honors only 1/2 point higher instead of a full point so the weighted GPA actually went down.
Although I’m very interested in the current line of conversation… I’m taking a break from your regularly scheduled programming…
HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO YOU EACH AND EVERY ONE. And thank you for keeping me sane through this wild ride. I’ve learned so much that has helped me support my D and I know I will continue to learn more. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays!
I’m sure a lot of schools have software that calculates their version of a GPA. I know schools like the UC’s and CSU’s calculate their own separate GPA’s and even SLO has their version different than any other CSU. UMich has their own too.
I never looked into LAC’s since neither kid had interest.
I think all schools recalculate, but they each do it differently. Some just drop the electives, and some do a complete overhaul. They’re all trying to get the GPA number to something they can compare/analyse, and when they have thousands of apps that means standardization.
I think we all cling to GPA a little too much. For an AO I assume they look at the number, and then what classes were taken to get an idea of the applicants brain power. If they have 7 minutes to look over the entire app, I can’t see them spending a lot of time on GPA. Classes taken sure, but not GPA.
But what about when AOs say they look at GPA and rigor “in context of the high school”? They know they can’t compare GPAs so any system isn’t quite perfect. An A isn’t an A isn’t an A. I think bigger schools that lean the most on GPA and test scores have less of a choice and have to recalculate to compare but, after two college searches where our kids got to know many AOs at LACs, we never once heard one say that they put grades in some system and recalculate. They all say they look “at the transcript”.
How they weigh the different high schools seems to be the hardest part to me. I do know that the larger LACs like Bowdoin know a lot about my kid’s HS here in Colorado. Even the coaches we talked to knew the school. But what about the SLACs? I can’t imagine how they deal with it. I wonder if there is a database or something similar to the Fiske Guide they thumb through?
I think they have to digitize the transcript because there are so many apps. Bowdoin gets almost 10k a year, and even someone manually entering transcripts would be Herculean. I’ve always assumed the transcript they look at is their version of it, and they can pull up a pdf of the original if they want to.
I think the computer algorithms are so sophisticated that the program imports, extrapolates, recalculates and sorts GPA’s for each app/transcript/high school/school district/county/state and then produces their desired result for them to spend 7 minutes with. And the same for essays, EC’s, etc.
Schools must have all the histories of almost every high school in the US. Enormous databases. And if there are changes in the HS’s methodology, then the head HS GC can inform the college of any changes to HS’s grading methodology.
I’m not going to say all unis, but can you imagine the data scientists at Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, CMU, GT, Cornell, UMich, Cal, UCLA, yada, yada, yada.
They probably spend a lot time refining, tweaking and info gathering every year to achieve the type of class they want by gender, location, ethnicity (I wonder how they do this one), financial status (depending on need aware vs. need blind), etc.
I’ve looked at the UC stats year over year, by high school, and the trends or lack thereof (consistency) can be quite obvious.
