Basically, high school grade distributions are not randomly distributed, but are effectively predictable from a set of attributes. So yes, it is true that, say, public and parochial and independent high schools have different grade distributions from each other; and it is also true that high schools in Salem, Massachusetts, Salem, Oregon; and Salem, North Carolina have different grade distributions; and it is also true that the grade distributions of high schools that draw from different social class populations have different grade distributions from each other; and so on.
However, each of these factors has a measurable effect, and so if it is known that a high school has characteristics Q1, Q2, Q3,…,Qn, then from that you can get a pretty good idea of the distribution of grades within it.
But, of course, under normal circumstances that doesn’t matter, because even colleges that care about class rank are smart enough to know how to leave it out of their calculations when it isn’t easily available—so in the end it’s all a bunch of angst over what’s usually nothing.
My son was accepted into the forensics program at WVU, also Bowling Green State University’s Forensics science program. BGSU openly admit that their program is based off of WVU’s program. (Plus there is an Ohio state crime lab on campus) My son spent a week at WVU Forensic science camp this summer and had an incredible experience. They have their own building dedicated to forensics science. The school is recruited heavily from the field. There are even grad students doing top-secret research with the FBI, that cannot even be discussed with the professors. LOL! For forensics, a Master’s degree will be required, so my advice is to keep the UG costs low. Also at WVU, the first two years of the program are heavy in science. The fun forensics stuff doesn’t start until Junior year. There are some difficult classes, like Microscopy and Organic Chemistry that can weed. They have a great little crime scene area set up with 3 houses and a garage. My son loved investigating the crime scenes the best, and the camp counselors would act like annoying people you would have to work around on a real crime scene. Also during junior and senior years, students can get called out in the middle of the night to investigate a crime scene. You need to follow them on Instagram. The funny thing about WVU, every time I think about forensic science and West Virginia, my mind goes directly to Silence of the Lambs. ROFLing
AOs are regional. Most schools will have an assigned person based on your location. Yale provided me with the biggest explanation. We went to an information session in my town. The AO that serves our town gave the presentation. He talked about specific high schools and how they grade and rank, and what it meant in the context of evaluating an application to Yale. I was really surprised at how much he actually knew about the independent schools in our area.
I know this is a broken record, but unsolicited college emails are out of control. Our son used an email address for college stuff that also forwards the emails to my wife and I (he has a different email that is private). Months ago he was getting ~50 college emails a day. Now it’s averaging closer to ~100 a day (I am systemically removing them to a folder averaging blocks of time before permanent deletion). That’s an insane amount of college spam. And a disproportionate amount of it is from colleges that literally email every single day and occasionally multiple times a day.
There should be a happy medium between a student agreeing to receive emails from colleges on their standardized tests and being bombarded without restraint by colleges. Not to mention, these days the colleges are buying student names who didn’t even agree to it on the test forms. There’s no shame and no integrity – these institutions are basically used car lots at this point. We saw this cycle with our older kids too but it wasn’t this bad – it’s definitely amped up.
My daughter created a new email account for college apps, and did not release it to College Board. This definitely reduced the spam, but didn’t stop it entirely. As you say, colleges are surely getting contacts through other means. UChicago and Northwestern were particularly persistent, despite no indication of interest on her part. Quite telling!
My D23 also created a new email account for college apps and is only using it to interact with the colleges she is interesting in applying to. No one else has it. So far she’s only receiving emails from those schools, but her regular email address (which she used to sign up for College Board) probably gets 20-30 emails a day from random colleges, some we have never heard of.
The strategy that worked well with D19 is not working with S23.
In both cases we created a college-specific email. It was fine for the amount of emails D19 got, but S23 is getting several dozen a day. The emails from the colleges he’s actually applied are getting lost in the deluge.
Recently I saw an even better strategy - it’s too late now, of course: Create a college-specific email for College Board/ACT. And create a separate email for the colleges you actually apply to. Don’t give that to College Board.
So that way your “important” emails go to a separate account.
This only works if Common App/Coalition/whatever school aren’t also selling your info. I’m not sure on that one. And like I said, too late for us and it’s the youngest kid, so I guess I’ll never know if it works.
So - question - if FAFSA doesn’t consider a college student independent if we don’t claim them on our taxes, then shouldn’t we go ahead and include them in # of household and # in college? My 21 yo son claims himself as independent since we do not fund his college or living expenses (we do however pay for his cell phone, health insurance & car insurance - go figure)…doesn’t it make sense to go ahead and include him as part of household and also with the # in college?
My son’s high school does a weekly update and had a blurb about the National Merit Semi-Finalists but did not mention College Board recognition like NHMS (which my son received.) Not sure if they will recognize those awards at a later time or just don’t highlight those awards.
Our school has a weekly blurb but consciously avoids mentioning individual achievements there. They are hyper sensitive to not creating implied pressure for others by acknowledging the achievements of some.
There’s a few different things to look at, mostly available through the National Center for Education Statistics (and most of what isn’t uses their data anyway). A solid chunk of it is freely available and searchable using their “DataLab” application, but some of the data, which unfortunately includes most of the stuff relating to grades, is proprietary and only available to researchers with a license for it. (Privacy reasons, mainly—you have to show a bona fide reason for accessing certain types of data, and also pay an IMO overly high fee for it.)
The main NCES datasets with information on this are the various longitudinal studies, particularly the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (which is what most of the recent work looking at the correlation between HS and college grades is based on). In addition, the National Assessment of Educational Progress conducts periodic high school transcript studies, most usually in association with the longitudinal studies archived at NCES but they also did one in 2019. When I look at their site though, it appears you can only freely get fully aggregated data online, not broken down by school type.
But I’ve learned about these datasets and what they include/how they can be used because my department has shared an office suite with my university’s education faculty the past few years, and they conduct research using the licensed datasets—and while I haven’t gotten to play with the data itself (that would be very much against The Rules) I certainly have learned a good amount about what’s in there and how they’re used.
For fall 2022, they offered the B-K (full-ride) scholarship to about 400 students out of 56,000 applicants. That’s less than 1%, so can’t really be counted upon. They look at more than stats.
