Got some private school material lately and noticed that some schools don’t release class rank or individual GPA to colleges. How will the college know how good/bad a kid is then? Just based on the counsel’s letter?
Thanks
My kids’ HS doesn’t rank nor does it calculate a GPA. It even has its own grading system.
What it does do is send a copy of the student’s transcript and a school profile which shows a grade distribution for different classes/subjects.
The school is well known and does well with its college matriculation.
ah that makes sense. thank you so much!
My daughter went to a scool (but didn’t graduate from that school) that doesn’t have grades or rank. The teachers wrote letters to explain the work, and the students had portfolios if they wanted to submit them.
My kids school has an unusual grading scale and only releases relative rank(top 5%, 10%, etc.). The kids get into good colleges.
No college uses the GPA to compare students to other applicants because there are 1000 different ways to calc GPA-so not sending GPA makes no difference. Schools serve the school profile which shows how that school equates grades to a numeric scale. That profile also shows a grade distribution chart so colleges can see where grades approximately fall across the class. Those profiles can usually also be found on the high schools website-so you can see this yourself.
As far as I know, this is more common than not with schools with a fairly large percentage of students who expect to go to colleges that are very- to ultra-selective. It’s not as effective as one might imagine. The colleges that are most popular with students at those schools doubtless see enough applications year-in and year-out that they are perfectly capable of estimating class rank with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
Where it maybe can make a difference, I think, is at the early admission stage. The private school my kids attended for many years had this policy, and its college counselors tried to make certain that the top students were not competing with one another for Early Decision or (Single Choice) Early Action colleges.In the class between my children, there were four students who were constantly competing and consistently got very high grades. Three of them were admitted ED or SCEA to three different colleges; the fourth was rejected EA at Princeton, but then accepted at Harvard RD. I strongly suspected that the counselors’ recommendations that year identified each of the four as the top student in the class, since they could be pretty certain that no college was going to read applications from more than one of them.
California State Universities plug applicants’ GPAs into a formula that they then use to rank applicants for admission. However, these GPAs are recalculated by their own method, rather than taken from what the high school calculates.
Surprisingly, some schools, like Georgia Tech and Alabama, use weighted GPA off the high school transcript, perhaps advantaging applicants from high schools that have a very exaggerated weighted GPA (that gives 5.something or 6.something weighted GPAs).
@ucbalumnus , it is not all that surprising when the state of Georgia uses a standardized weighting system in all public high schools to calculate GPA for the state sponsored HOPE scholarships. That makes it fairly easy for Georgia Tech to compare in-state students.
@PrincetonRealtor , if you are looking at this because you are considering private schools, consider it a good thing. It encourages kids to stay true to what they want to do rather than gaming the system simply for rank; it allows a school to fill itself with really talented kids and still do right by them; it forces the colleges to look at the applicants as individuals, not as numbers.
My son’s school did not calculate GPA for colleges nor did it calculate rank. His classmates were not viewed as competitors, and they all ended up at great schools.
At the school I referred to in post #3, there are no grades to plug in. The students are evaluated by portfolio from K-12. The only statistic that a college can receive is an ACT score. Somehow the colleges manage to review the applications and make admission decisions. Many of the students apply to and are accepted by Humboldt, so even the California state system can handle the ‘no gpa’ issue.
D1 was not accepted to our state school’s honors program because her school didn’t rank even though she had over 4.0 UW GPA with high test scores, because the school used a program automatic admitted students based on ranking. After I spoke with the adcom I asked her GC to write a letter to the school so she could be admitted to honors as well as getting merit aid.
Many private schools use the SSAT for entrance and have a floor. I understand the lack of rank, but not having grades is just less information for a college adcom to base its decisions on. We had our kids at a middle school that did minimal traditional testing and gave parents evaluations instead of grades, and it did a real disservice to the students who went on to traditional high schools- including most private ones- and early colleges/ dual enrollment. The real world intrudes rather quickly and coddling the kids is inappropriate after 6th grade or so.
In theory, narrative evaluations are a much more detailed version of grades, or can be thought of as getting a recommendation letter from every teacher (not just specific ones that the student picks). In practice, admissions readers at the next level of school that the student applies to may not have the time to read all of the applicant’s narrative evaluations or determine how they match up with the schools intended standards for admission. In larger classes and schools, narrative evaluations that convey significantly more detail than grades may be much more time consuming for instructors to write.
UCSC used to use narrative evaluations, later added a student option to receive letter grades along with narrative evaluations, later made letter grades the default along with narrative evaluations, and now mainly uses traditional letter grades (instructors have the option to also give narrative evaluations).
https://planning.ucsc.edu/irps/stratpln/WASC94/a/sec2.htm
http://senate.ucsc.edu/committees/cep-committee-on-educational-policy/policies-guidelines/undergraduate-education-policies/NESguidelinesoct2010.pdf
http://admissions.ucsc.edu/apply/parents-and-guardians/prospective-students/grading.html
Even some colleges use a portfolio system rather than grades and ranking. It can be done at a small school, but not would be more difficult at a larger school. In the one my daughter attended, there were only 25 students per grade level, except for the middle school which had 32. One of the requirements was that every senior had to apply for 3 colleges, 3 scholarships and 3 grants. It was one of the things I liked best about the school. They spent a big chunk of time working on the college applications and essays. They didn’t seem to have much trouble getting their kids into colleges
If the high school does not provide a class rank, the admissions office will do everything possible to estimate a class rank by using other information provided in the school profile. If it’s truly impossible to estimate a class rank, and the school is not a traditional feeder school or one of the top schools in the country, then those students will be at a definite disadvantage at highly selective colleges, which will have no way to put their GPA into context. Refusing to provide class rank sounds like a benefit for students, but it’s more beneficial to the high school personnel who don’t have to calculate rank and deal with the inevitable fallout that such rank calculations create.
If you know that your child has the highest GPA in the class at a school that does not rank, make sure that that information appears somewhere on the application, preferably in the guidance counselor letter.
My daughter went to one school 9-10 grades with 0-100 grading. Then she went to another and did an IB Diploma for 11-12 grades which is 0-7. Never knew what her 4.0 scale GPA was…colleges figure it out. No rank because the schools were too small. The only time there was an issue was for our State Flagship which awards scholarships based on GPAs , but a quick email sorted that out. So send your transcript and the college will figure it out.
@ProdigalMom - My son goes to a private, college prep school that does not rank but does put students into percentiles (top 5%, 10% etc.). The school is one of the best in this region but not necessarily the best in the country. I’m not even sure how you would compare all the private schools in the country to one another.
The kids do fine in elite college admissions.
My Ds school was well known to the Ivies. They neither calculated GPA or did class rank. They were very successful in getting students into top schools such as the Ivies, Stanford, Michigan, WASHUSL, Emory, etc. For those private schools that don’t rank, most are known by their reputation and caliber of student. For high schools less known to these schools, then what is very important is not just that the student has good grades, but that the GC checks the box that they have taken the most rigorous classes that the high school has to offer. Having a 4.0 taking basket weaving will not outpace a student with a 3.8 in a rigorous STEM program. I recruit for Yale at inner city schools (one of which I attended over 30 years ago) and that is what I tell my students.