Sorry this may ramble across a few different topics, but the more I learn, the more I feel as though I do not know.
GPA: On this front, I am learning that nothing is consistent. Our children go to a pretty good public high school (ranked in the top 30 out of 200) in CT (one of the more rigorous states to get an education in). I’ve been noticing that our HS uses an unusual weight for honors and AP. While many HS will give a 5.0 for for an A in an AP class, our school goes with a 4.0, and then at the end of the year, they will tack on a cumulative 0.07 to your final GPA. This means, if you take 10 AP classes, you get an extra 0.7 on your GPA just for having “shown up” for the class. So a person with a perfect B average, would have a 3.0 + 0.7 = 3.7 weighted GPA. At our school, the valedictorian is usually around a 4.9-5.0, and this is likely due to taking something like 8 AP and 8 Honors classes, adding about 1.0 to the GPA.
Formulas: I realize now that most colleges apply their own formula. I presume they have a HS ranking of their own with a weight factor, then maybe toss out Gym/Band/HomeEc/WoodShop classes and just look at the cores, non-weighted, and then also apply their own honors/AP multipliers. I do think that some public large state schools might just look at the weighted GPA, which I think hurts our town since we go with a lower AP multiplier than many other towns and states.
Straight As: Is it true that top schools essentially all require straight As to even look at a student (excluding kids with a special talent like sports, music, art portfolio)? I keep hearing about how top UC schools and Ivies require you have straight As and a 1500+ SAT, and then from there they actually look at you. Reason I am asking is because straight As seems a bit of a reach, at least at our schools. The AP and honors professors literally take pride in tripping up the kids. Many tests include lots of questions about things that were never covered nor in the textbooks, and they also like to ask trick questions, strangely worded questions. As a result, it’s very common for kids who studied their brains out to get 87 or 91 test grades. Sometimes there are days where an entire AP class will “bomb” a test and the high score in the class is something like a 77. They do not curve, and put the blame squarely on the kids in those cases even though it may have been up to the kids to try to wildly guess what was going to be on the test. They also aren’t using “standard AP tests”, if those exist, they write their own tests up.
Top Schools: We’ve already ruled out many of the Ivy and Ivy equivalents, mainly because our daughter is more of an A and B student. In her core classes, like AP US Hist, AP Comp Sci, Honors Chem, Honors Latin, etc, she is usually between an 85 and a 94 for grades. This puts her non-weighted GPA in the 3.5 zone, and after 4 years of taking rigorous classes, she looks to be “on pace” to “accumulate” around .8 to 1.0 GPA points, so something like a weighted 4.2 to 4.4. Again, however, this is based on our school. It seems that so many kids (when I read around online) easily breeze through straight As, so I assume she’s not going to be considered for anything at that level.
Some of the top schools she has as a reach school right now are Northeastern, RPI, WPI, etc. Her dream ideal would be Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, etc, but not sure it’s even worth applying.
