<p>I think it is important to differentiate between GPA as a shorthand view of high school performance, which is what the simple 3.5 figure represents, and the much more complicated assessment that a holistic admissions process demands: the context of high school, of classes taken and not taken, of upward trend vs. downward trend, of class rank, etc. Is the 3.5 (or whatever) a constant across all classes, or an average brought down by a single subject (could be teacher trouble, could be difficulty mastering)? From all I’ve heard, schools that use a holistic process look at these things, rather than simply the GPA itself. That said, the GPA needs to be above a (undefined, unfortunately) threshold to be competitive, and the more holistic (or prestigious) the school, the higher that threshold is likely to be. </p>
<p>The simple GPA score is, IMHO, more important for school rankings than for individual application decisions, but like the SAT range, it gives an indication of how competitive the individual needs to be to have a chance of getting in. </p>
<p>One school that used to have the reputation of being slightly easier on the low-GPA-high-test-score student is U of Chicago, although that may have changed since it started zooming up the USNews charts.</p>
<p>My point is not that GPA is not very important. My point is if you are an admissions person looking at two applicants. One from a school which is national noted as being very challenging and having students selected for their academic excellence with a lower GPA but much higher SAT scores than another student from a standard high school. I would have to question is the higher GPA student better prepared to succeed in our school.</p>
<p>As a practical matter, pick up US News & WR and look at the % in top 10% class rank vs average SAT scores. It doesn’t always work well for state universities, but for privates, I think it gives a reasonably good sense of which schools value test scores over class rank.</p>
<p>rugby1 - yes, totally agree with your last point. And this is why there is no straight answer when kids ask CC “here is my GPA and here are my test scores, will I get in…”</p>
<p>Do universities ever use de-facto cutoff grades, though? If your sophomore and junior GPAs are stellar but the overall is brought down by rather useless 9th/middle school grades could they possibly just discard your application out of hand? How sincere is the “holistic admissions” statement every university subscribes to nowadays?</p>