One would think that this school has at least one administrator who understands that correlation does not imply causation. 
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And prep and wealthy suburban high schools will hand out “A’s” like they hand out turkey sandwiches in the lunch line.
People respond to incentives. If you create an incentive for Principals and Superintendents to inflate grades, they will inflate grades. Not that complicated.
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I and others have provided nearly a dozen specific prep school profiles where grades are roughly distributed 25% A (or less), 45%B+ to A-, and 30% B and lower. Happy to entertain specific examples to the contrary.
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I expect the pace of grade inflation will accelerate nearly everywhere. Few high schools can afford not to.
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I disagree as elite prep schools can’t afford to dilute their brands. Elite colleges won’t somehow “create” additional spots for incremental high GPA students. Elite colleges will still only want the top echelon of candidates and demand the prep schools differentiate.
If the schools artificially and undeservedly inflate grades, colleges will recognize the diminished quality of the students, the impossibility of identifying the strongest academically, and consequently admit fewer from the school in question.
Perhaps some public schools will seek to appease parents but prep schools can ill afford to artificially inflate as evidenced by the numerous grade distributions provided up thread.
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I’m not focusing on a few uber elite prep schools (or a handful of their public equivalents). Those few schools are so well known to the colleges that they may not be incentivized in the samy way. However, they represent such a tiny fraction of all the high schools in the US.
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We agree. Sorry I thought you were responding to @CTDad-classof2022 who specifically mentioned “prep and wealthy public’s”
True, but they also represent an oversized share of those matriculating to highly selective colleges, so their grading policies may nonetheless be significant to admissions at these colleges.
Interesting (to me at least) that there are conflicting views on who will benefit from this impending “grade inflation.”
- On the one hand, @CTDad-classof2022 believes that “prep and wealthy suburban high schools” will boost their admissions by “hand[ing] out ‘A’s’ like they hand out turkey sandwiches in the lunch line.”
- On the other hand, @1NJParent claims that while the “elite” schools may not have the same incentive to inflate grades, grade inflation will accelerate “nearly everywhere” because “few schools can afford not to.” (Please correct me I’m wrong, but I presume this means that applicants from schools who don’t “inflate” will be at a disadvantage in admissions.)
With the exception of @1NJParent’s carve-out for “elite” schools, the presumption behind both these positions seems to be that AOs view grade point average as standardized across all schools, so that a 3.9 at school X is given the exact same weight as a 3.9 at school Y.
But all else being equal, do students with for example 3.8 gpa’s and a 40% class rank really have an advantage over students with a 3.6 gpa who are in the top 5% of their class? I do not think so, but would be curious if there is any actual data supporting the presumption.
My understanding is that gpa is viewed in the context of the school, the rigor, the options, the relative class rating, etc., so I am having trouble understanding how “grade inflation” will boost admissions chances of students at any particular school. I guess I can see how AO’s might not catch on in the extreme short term, but over time it seems like the students will be in about the same relative position with or without grade inflation.
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I would like my “Tour Card”! It’s not fair that I have to take a test and qualify. 
Actually, it might make golf less boring to watch on TV.
- Before you get mad at me for my golfing privilege, I taught myself and was motivated to get out of the swamp. We were one of the few families with furniture inside the house. My golf experience was working in the locker room and bathrooms cleaning. But, I knew that if I worked really hard in school and scored high on my SAT there was a way out. I was first gen to go to college and had that privilege by earning a scholarship thanks to 2 sports, high GPA and high test scores. I also worked in the industry and was often told to use the service entrance based on my appearance. The point is about meritocracy, or not.
Now you know where I stand on the issue. On another thread, someone posted that CA schools are considering being GPA optional? OK then the university admissions must be focusing on future acceptances based upon a lottery system with appropriate representation from key demographic categories.
The problem is for our kids. Most of our kids have been told (by parents, teachers, AO’s, CA’s) that college acceptance is largely based on a system of meritocracy. Study hard, get good grades, take tough courses, excel in sports, do good works, get high test scores, write stellar essays, etc. I guess the joke is on them.
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I think you have hit (perhaps inadvertently) on the issue - which is "What does each schools counts as ‘merit’? Many test advocates truly believe that testing and test scores point towards greater ‘merit’ than other measurements.
Those who aren’t as strong proponents of testing and test scores believe there are many ways to show merit.
I think most of us would agree that students applying to BFA and theatre programs are going to show their skills and talents through portfolios and auditions, and standardized test scores probably aren’t going to add a lot of value to those chosen.
I think many of us would agree that recruited athletes are going to have to show a minimum level of academic preparedness (and that minimum changes in relationship to the schools they are targeting) along with superior level of athletic prowess, which definitely indicates what those schools look at as ‘merit’ - test scores again not being very strong indicators in these cases.
There are lots of ways to measure merit, each of them as arbitrary as the next - depending upon what the institution cares about. I am not opposed to testing and test scores - I’ve never thought Georgetown (for example) should have to go test optional on any level and the fact they previously required 3 subject tests in addition to the SAT and/or ACT scores seemed their right and privilege as an institution. I am sure they lost applicants who didn’t want to provide that amount of testing, and Georgetown was ok with that. Cool! Not every school is for every student.
I don’t understand the sturm und drang when it comes to schools deciding that they will no longer require applicants to submit test scores. Yes, it is (as far as I am concerned) an equally arbitrary choice to not ask for or require test scores as to require them, but it should be the schools choice to do so - and I do think they are giving important information about what that institution values when they offer test optional and test blind admissions.
If parents or students feel those school going test optional or test blind are doing so “for the wrong reasons”, they can choose not to apply to those schools and make their beliefs known with the power of their pocketbooks. Again, not sure why anyone gets upset - seems like a good reason to know the school as an institution isn’t a good fit if you disagree so vehemently with their admission policies and values. Don’t like how they run their admission process? Don’t apply. Simple.
I don’t eat meat; that doesn’t make steakhouses terrible - it just means those aren’t good restaurants for me.
There are some clothing brands that don’t fit my body, they are good brands but they are meant for a different body type (I have a long torso, so LL Bean for example cuts their shirts/sweaters too short for me). I am not asking for the brand to change how they design clothes, I buy the clothes that are designed to fit my body (Athleta makes great stuff for long torso, go Athleta!). Again, problem solved.
You think test scores are meaningful and should be a big part of the admission process - there are plenty of schools that agree with you! Apply to those. If you choose to apply to schools that have chosen to go test blind or test optional, realize they value different things than you do so may have different results in admission that you would if you were in charge.
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It’s nice to see someone discussing test optional admission data (per title of this thread), rather than feelings about test optional. That said 60% accepted does not sound right, even for ED. Do you have a link to the source?
I posted some specific numbers earlier in thread. A quote from the post is below. I’ll look up some more later. Note that the pattern was ~1.5x higher admit rate for test submitter than test optional. So a 60% admit rate for test optional at Williams, would suggest a near 100% admit rate for test submitter, which seems unlikely. Perhaps I misunderstood the statement, and instead it means 60% of the admitted ED group did not submit tests vs 40% did submit tests? Even so, 60% of admits test optional is higher than any of the other colleges listed below.
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There are multiple avenues to earn a “Tour Card,” and not all of them entail passing a mandatory Q-school type test. Likewise there are (now) multiple avenues to college admissions, and not all involve submitting standardized test scores.
Under test optional and/or test blind admissions, a first generation college student from an underrepresented demographic with an excellent academic record who is recruitable in two sports would still have an excellent chance at admission, financial aid, and perhaps even scholarships.
Do you have a link? I am curious as to what “gpa optional” would even mean or how it would work?
If students are being told that admissions into any particular school is a meritocracy, then those students are unfortunately being mislead. But this is no more or less true with or without TO/TB policies.
A typical HS compares itself to other local/regional HS’s (not a few uber elite HS’s). Its school profile isn’t going to be dramatically different from the others, so its usefulness is very limited. Also, fewer and fewer schools rank their students, not to mention weighted GPAs aren’t good measures anyway. Course rigor depends on the teacher and the school itself, with no universal standard (unless, of course, it’s an AP course that requires all its students to take the corresponding standardized AP exam). To compete with its peers, that HS is highly incentivizes to artificially raise its students’ grades. So are the parents. How many times have we heard parents complaining their kids’ schools, and especially their teachers, were giving their kids lower grades than other schools/teachers?
How do AOs tell a 4.0 student in suburban school A from another 4.0 student who took similar set of courses in suburban school B on course rigor, relative class rating/position, or whatever, if many students from both of these schools have 4.0 averages? When grading scales are compressed, good students are no longer distinguishable by their grades. The exact same thing happened with test scores. At some point in the near future, some opponents of standardized testing will be here advocating that we shouldn’t be using grades for college admissions.
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@1NJParent While schools have moved away from ranking students individually, most school profiles (the profile that GCs send in with student applications) will put GPA into perspective.
If 40% of the school gets a 4.0, it will be apparent in the school profile sent with the application. If 5% of the school gets a 4.0, that will also be in the school profile. So while the student isn’t ranked numerically, where their GPA falls into other people’s GPA is ranked. It therefore isn’t possible to hide a mediocre student with an artificially high GPA…it will be clear the GPA is artificially high for many many students.
Here is an example of a high school profile that would be sent by the GCs.
https://d86.hinsdale86.org/domain/111
Here’s an example that gives the weighting systems (without overall ranking) which allows college admission to see the grades in relationship to rigor
https://www.chclc.org/domain/770
Edited to Add: The two students in your example wouldn’t be judged in relationship of those two schools, but rather in relationship to their individual achievement to what their own school offered.
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First of all, I’d argue GPAs aren’t good measures to “rank” students. Second, the effect of grade inflation will make the school profiles much less relevant, as too many students will have GPAs at the top (or near the top) of the grading scales.
First, don’t argue because this isn’t a debate site 
Second, when I read those school profiles, it becomes very clear how easy it is to place a student’s GPA into school context, whether the school ranks students or not.
At Hinsdale, a school where 96.8% of students are college bound, you need a (weighted) 5.7222 - 5.9773 to be in the top 10% of student GPAs. To break into the top 25%, you need a (weighted) 5.2703. That is a fairly clear distinction - and way outside the 4.0 ranking so many assume schools are dealing with.
Same school’s unweighted top decile - 4.9623 - 5.0000 - which says pretty clearly that rigor has a large determination in being able to create distinctions among a very strong cohort of students. To be in Top 25% unweighted you need a minimum 4.7568 out of 5.0000.
This is a wealthy, well resourced public school. Everyone is basically college bound, and yet it seems pretty clear that there is indeed a top 10% easily found within its ranks.
It is going to be the same with less well resourced schools. They won’t have a plethora of what any of us would consider a 4.0 - there will again be distinctions made between the strongest students, even with the strongest student cohort.
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What grading scale a school uses doesn’t matter (I only use 4.0 as an illustration). If a school uses a weighted GPA scale with a maximum of 6.0, with enough grade inflation, it’s conceivable that many students could be at or near 6.0. If grades become much more important in college admissions, more students will receive higher grades, and the school profile will look different from what it is now.
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I agree the grading scale chosen doesn’t matter, but Hinsdale has gone out 4 decimal places to show ranking within rigor, allowing clear distinctions to be made within a strong population.
Many students may show mastery (and deserve an A), you can still determine which students showed the top 10% of mastery if that is important to college admissions.
It seems clear that almost the entire school at Hinsdale could be accepted to a school accepting 70% or more of applicants.
It seems clear that most of that school could get accepted to schools with 50% acceptance rates.
I am sure Hinsdale does very well with schools that sub 30% acceptance rate, but somehow I don’t think they are blowing it out of the water and causing other students at other schools to not be accepted. As the acceptance rate of schools drops, the fine gradations of what they are looking for increases. Hinsdale’s school profile allows that fine gradation to be measured extremely easily, much like those top private and boarding schools didn’t actually have lots and lots of students bunched up at the tippy top.
If anyone is really worried about a school where everyone gets a 4.0 and there is no way to figure out what those 4.0s mean, please share the data that supports that worry. Because so far, I haven’t seen any.
Do you really want colleges to distinguish students from a high school based on the number of decimal places? I wouldn’t. Besides, GPAs, especially weighted GPAs, are known to be easily manipulatable (and they have been).
I agree if GPAs get that compressed that they would be hard to interpret. The question is, will that happen? You seem to be assuming it will because you believe TO causes GPA to be weighed heavier (not sure there is evidence for that, @Data10? vs ECs, LORs, or other factors?) and therefore the administrators and parents will pressure teachers to grade easier? The teachers I know don’t respond to pressure like that - is that really a known thing?
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