Note: this doesn’t personally apply to me
So I’ve heard that getting straight A’s in AP classes but low AP scores can indicate grade inflation, but what about getting maybe C’s or D’s in AP classes, but scoring a 5?
I don’t think adcoms would view that any more favorably, because mastery of a course implies a correlation between grades in a course and the AP score. If anything, I could see two impressions coming out of that: A, the course is very hard at the school; or B, the student just happens to be a good test taker. Neither really sit well with me, though, unless there’s an outside factor/variable that affected the in-seat grade.
It just means potentially that the student was lazy during the school year and crammed for the test and did well.
Grades are more important than test scores as grades reflect a student’s performance throughout a whole year while a test score measures a student’s performance for those 3 hours.
Class rank and GPA distribution are the main ways to indicate grade inflation or deflation in high schools.
@ibscholar Why would this option not sit well with you? (or do you mean that from a non college admissions standpoint: e.g. why is the school creating such an overly difficult course)
@iwannabe_Brown Your latter explanation, haha. It doesn’t sit well with me mainly because it doesn’t make sense a school would make it so hard that a failing grade is a good grade.