<p>3 Woots for hijacking this thread! And my state is University of Hawaii</p>
<p>LOL I definitely just made a pathetic effort to stay on topic.
And yay for pacific islanders :D</p>
<p>Public, ~2100 students, lots of Asians, more math/science people than usual, fairly competitive, good SAT scores, ~20 valedictorians per class.</p>
<p>My counselor, even though she has ~700 students to take care of, is actually really nice and is pretty lenient about schedule changes (for academic purposes only, of course) and taking courses at the community college. For very special schedule changes and other such things, though, our vice principal is the person to go to. (I had a very difficult schedule change that involved putting me in two classes with only one spot open and changing another person’s schedule around. I spent many hours planning it, but I believe it was beneficial overall.)</p>
<p>^lol at 20 valedictorians. Man, I wish my counselor was like that. I tried to arrange taking chemistry as a sophomore and I couldn’t. I mean a lot of people from other schools are done with chemistry as sophomores. Stupid bureaucracy.</p>
<p>20 valedictorians?
and the average SAT score for my school is around 1500, only because they believe that the SAT is the same thing as the ACT, minus one section.
I thought my school was average, until I joined CC. now I’m definitely sure we’re beyond mediocre.</p>
<p>^Your school is probably closer to average than you think; CC just ends up having a lot of people with good schools due to its academic focus.</p>
<p>Our school doesn’t distinguish between A-/A/A+ in GPA calculation, and we use UW GPA for everything so that explains it. (It also means that missing an A- by 0.1% makes you lose valedictorianship, even if, say, you’ve gotten A+ for every other class. Stupid chemistry… <em>grumble grumble</em> Er, I don’t get A+ in every other class, FYI.)</p>
<p>^^I loled. Well just this week, I was talking to my friend about the recent PSAT we took and somehow we arrived at the topic of SAT IIs. Now keep in mind, he is regarded as one of the top students at our school. He basically said the SAT II was just like the SAT I, except with a science section added in. His brother and sister are at Stanford and UCLA respectively.</p>
<p>@energize, your school uses the same grading scale as mine. Is this the grading scale that colleges convert to as well?</p>
<p>Colleges look at your grades in the context of your school, so if you’re at my school, for example, that valedictorian with all non-honors/AP classes is worse than the 3.97 student with as many AP/honors classes as possible (thankfully :P).</p>
<p>LOL poor kid. tell him to join CC 
And I have no clue what an A+, A- so on and so forth are. Our school’s grading scale is</p>
<p>A 105-93
B 92-85
C 84-75
D 74-70
F 69 and below</p>
<p>^Wow that scale is harsh. Ours is 90-100 A, 80-89 B, 70-79 C, 60-69 D, anything lower F.</p>
<p>^^No, but I mean don’t colleges need to convert grades on a 100 point scale to a 4.0 scale? When they do, do they just go by 90-100 = A, 80-89 = B, and so forth. What scale do they use besides individual ranking within the high school you attend?</p>
<p>Our transcripts (and probably a lot of other ones) don’t have numerical grades on them; just the letter grade the teacher submits. This helps because in most classes,</p>
<p>A- = 90-92
A = 93-97 or 93+ (depending on whether the teacher wants to give out A+s, which my English and math teachers last year did not <em>more grumbling</em>)
A+ = 98+</p>
<p>but in AP Physics, A = 80+, and in AP Chemistry, A = 85+ (if you tutor for the school’s tutoring program, which almost everyone does). A few teachers, including these, don’t differentiate between A-/A/A+ on their reports, so everything from 90-100+ shows up as A on the transcript. Most other teachers do give out A-s, etc. and so people get A- on their transcript with a 90.</p>
<p>I think colleges look at the distribution of grades and maybe a grading scale if it’s officially used (both of which should be in a school profile that the school sends to the college) to figure out how you do within your school. It’s kind of hard to compare grades to people in other schools due to the differences. (An inner city ghetto school is not going to have comparable grading to Phillips Exeter or Stuy, etc.)</p>
<p>I understand now, but how would your grades in say your AP Physics class appear to an adcom? If you got an 80% you would get an A by your teacher’s standards, but what would it appear to adcoms if all they are sent is your school’s official grading scale? I ask this because in my Alg II class, our teacher made it so that a 78% was a B, but by our official school grading system, a 78% is a C. Would colleges view that as a B or C?</p>
<p>Also, off topic, but what other kind of info does your school send the school? The average courseload and course sequences. You know, to show how much in advance the student in question is. Or the average SAT scores for the school? Just wondering.</p>
<p>Our school puts whatever grade (A, A-, etc.) our teacher submits on our transcript. Try to figure out what went on your transcript, and that’s what colleges will see.</p>
<p>Whew. I was just asking because last year I let my math grade slip at the end of the quarter from a 83 to a 79 because I thought “meh a B is a B”. My teacher put a B on my transcript, so at least its better than getting a C.</p>
<p>I go to a pretty sports obsessed school over here in the south. 60% of the student body participates in school sports. We usually send 9 or 10 kids to ivies every year, our faculty is amazing, and we ALL 32 AP courses offered at our school. 50% of people in my school take at least 2 APs in their high school years.</p>
<p>Wow, guys, I don’t feel like I’m the only one with a crappy school anymore! Some of you, on the other hand, seem to have AMAZING schools.</p>
<p>My school’s a smallish (~750 students) public high school in New York. One of the top schools in the county, but the county is one of the top counties for education in the country. The school offers a good size number of APs (16) for its size, and has a large proportion of honors classes as well. We usually send 7-10 kids to Ivies, with a bunch to top LACs as well. Worst thing is the homogeneity as well as it being a little grade and career-focused. Best thing is the teachers. Right now, as a junior taking 4 APs, I can honestly say every single one of my AP teachers is incredible and my learning experience is significantly enhanced because of them.</p>
<p>My school is very large, well over 3000 students and is in an urban area. We’re right across from the mall in the city.</p>
<p>Over 50% of our school is below the poverty line, and we’re broke.</p>
<p>In my county, you have the option to apply to High Schools specialty programs… so I picked the IB School. It’s pretty much separated between the IB and Regular kids.</p>
<p>About 900 IB kids in this school… and we beat the world average for the IB Diploma. </p>
<p>We offer IB MAth HL/SL, Studies, IB Comp Sci SL/HL, IB Chem HL, IB physics SL, IB Bio HL, IB History of the Americas HL, IB Anthro SL, IB Human Geo SL, IB Visual Arts SL/HL, IB Music SL, IB Environmental Systems SL, IB Spanish A2 SL/HL, IB Spanish/French B SL/HL, IB Latin SL, and IB English.
We offer another ****load of courses as well.</p>
<p>Our IB students almost all go to schools such as UVA, Vtech, George Mason, etc.</p>
<p>We might send 1-5 to ivies every year. Last year was Dartmouth. This year… not sure.</p>
<p>This year is our first graduating class AKA my school is in it’s second year.</p>
<p>2000 students, 25 APs. We are at the edge of the rich-ass mofos of suburban atlanta, and to the north of us are the rednecks, to put it kindly. Gives us an interesting mix…</p>
<p>Uhhh 82% white, 10% asian, 5% black, 3% other (ME!!!)</p>
<p>I am going to assume that probably 40% of our graduating class is going to UGA, and the other 40% to a school in Georgia. That’s what it was like at the school I attended before the creation of our new one. That school has IB, so it’s robbed some of our brightest, hehe</p>
<p>My school is an suburban/urban public school in NJ. Our town has some pretty rich people, and then some pretty poor people. I guess I would fall into the lower income people in the school. But overall, the district is great, we offer over 20 AP classes to students (Oddly, we offer AP Calc AB and BC but not AP Physics B and C, only C). My high school has 2000+ people but it only has 3 grades (9th grade is still in the “middle school”). So we have a little over 700 people in my grade. </p>
<p>We have a lot of chances to do sports (we even have a bowling team which seems kind of ridiculous). We have a lot of clubs too, but some of them are very dumb (there’s an Anime Club and an “Asian Club” where people do nothing but talk about TV and life. I just don’t see the point of it). The counselors at our school barely know the students though and really only talk to the troublemakers. We aren’t considered a good school though, which I thought was odd until I realized that the “clique” I was in (the honors people) was only a small part of the school. But overall, the school district is still very nice.</p>
<p>As for who we sent to Top Schools… I don’t know. The Valedictorian last year was accepted into MIT and other top schools but went to Rutgers because of money problems. It was a bit sad. But I’m only a sophomore at the moment so maybe when we get to my graduating year we’ll have a lot of people going to Top Tier schools.</p>