What did she choose?
Thank you! This information will help me avoid major headaches, especially being out of state and having no prior Galveston familiarity!
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Communications ,bs
Industrial Distribution, bs
I just messaged you (before I saw this).
@Aggiemomof6 , when the pandemic started in spring of 2020, students were given an option to either do remote or in person, as a family we decided that our son would go in person since he had to go school anyway for his soccer practice and games. After the first semester, we knew cheating was rampant and he told us his ranking is going to slip because virtual learners were moving up in rank, we told him colleges would take that into consideration, I mean how could they not ? But we were wrong and as long as you were top 10 , colleges could care less how you played the GPA game.
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YES! Which is why I don’t understand why college look at rank! They have to know this is happening. It was happening outside of the virtual learning as well…as been happening for years. Our principal knows about the tutor handing out previous work and tests as well. Utterly frustrating. It is also frustrating when StudentA from a small little town is top 10 because the other students don’t really care… but in a competitive HS where half the kids want top 10, then being ranked 40% is equal to the top 10% in another school! So many rank frustrations!!
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@AnnKiVe @ALN cheating has been going on since before the pandemic. My Aggie graduated high school in 2019, and it was alive & well then. It was common knowledge who the cheaters were. I can only hope they have failed out of their top college by now 
That’s harsh, but I’m making a point. Online or in person, there will always be cheaters…it’s not a new thing.
UT 6% and TAMU 10% is voted on by the state legislature. There is absolutely No Way for any college admissions team to give leeway or determine if someone cheated or not. Just like when someone fudges their resume when applying for jobs or scholarships, you go by what is submitted. But college admissions also looks at gpa, test scores, leadership and extra curriculars…and those can’t be fudged (well, I guess ec’s could), so there are plenty of other ways to show you’re a strong student.
Frustrating…yes! But sadly no real way to get around it. There was a huge cheating scandal at A&M, I think it was fall 2020, so during pandemic. It involved a large number of business MINOR students in a Finance class (I emphasize MINOR because they don’t take any Mays major classes, this class was a watered down FINC for minors). It involved Chegg-a company that provides textbooks, test, etc. Professor nailed them, with hard evidence. Personally I was glad. Lots of unhappy parents, but the evidence was concrete enough it stood. It’s always nice when the slackers & losers get caught.
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The top 10% rule is frustrating and certainly does not help my kids, but I understand why they do it. Students do not usually have a say on what town they live in or what school they attend. Much of that boils down to a parents job or choices or finances, mostly circumstances out of a students control. So the state has the top 10% rule so all kids in the state have a shot at attending.
Some kids do not have the financial means for standardized test tutoring or private schools or even have parents that give a flip. This gives any student a chance to just be measured by their own peer group. If they are indeed capable, they will go on to graduate college with a degree from A&M , UT or the other state schools. Kids that do not get in initially can PSA or transfer etc. The university feels anyone that really wants an A&M degree and puts in the work, can earn one. The paths are just different. The state won’t ever go to just letting the universities freshman classes be filled by mainly kids from 6A schools in prosperous areas. They want diversity.
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And those are the kids that will drop out during the first year making way for all the PSA and other qualified transfer kids to move up to CS. It is still frustrating though, and all the remote learning has made the cheating much worse.
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Hang in there! Same boat as you with 1330 and 26% at a highly ranked school and had some health issues freshman year that affected grades. Can’t stress too much about what is out of our control. Sending you good vibes!
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I understand the top 10%, but did their school not allow them to remove class rank if they were out of the Top 10?
No…no choice to remove rank if out of top 10!
I meant, “Yes” school did not allow removal of class rank
Awesome! I recommend the Facebook group posted above and also their Instagram (@aggiesbythesea) since it gives a lot of useful information on TAMU Galveston
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My son is in the same boat. Our district shows rank on all transcripts regardless of whether the student is top 10% or not. It is a major issue when you come from a school where 23% of the student population were national merit scholars during the last round. It is tough. My son is smart, but not at that level. Then A&M still “compares you to your peers” during a holistic review. Maybe we should have played the GPA game, had him cheat (like most of his high school), sent him to a lesser high school, but then he would have been a worse student (and person) for it. His highly competitive high school pushed him and made him work hard. Then he gets punished for it in the end when he applies to state schools. Beyond irritating.
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@heather97 . I share your sentiments. We transferred our son to a very competitive HS and did not know how to play the GPA game. If we’d just stick to the school we were zoned to, he’d easily be top 5. Hopefully graduating from a highly competitive HS where getting an A required hard work will pay off in the long run.
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Thank you so much! This is such helpful info!
Cheating just delay the pain for the cheaters, and for STEM majors TAMU can see a fixed percentage of cheaters GPA free falling even starting from Freshmen year and they have a process to root them out. The grading policy in TAMU is very old school, most STEM classes have 3 two-hour mid terms and a final that makes 70% of the grade. It will be even harder to for Junior and Senior to cheat as class size is smaller.
TAMU top 20% students still doing way way better.
This past fall semester as TAMU decided to make ETAM tougher, “entry level” classes like Calculus I (M151) saw scores ranged from 16 to 100. (Yes that’s not typo 16). A good portion of top students get 100 all the way, while some students obviously cheated even on the virtual MPE test and they couldn’t catch up and fell far behind in the class. A historically easy CHEM107 with a professor usually gave more than half of students A saw 19 out of 44 students Qdrop in one session.
At the end of the day, it is what the students do and really learn in college that matters.
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100% agree with this. My freshman Aggie is seeing this now in Math 151 and other classes as well. Students Q dropped left and right around her the first semester and several are already failing this semester. It’s just tough for her watching her boyfriend wait for a decision knowing he may get nothing at all or PSA. He was offered waitlist and TEAM and chose both. He has solid stats with friends with lesser stats getting acceptances. Someone commented earlier that admissions stated those who select Blinn TEAM only have a better chance because they are showing their desire to take any path to A&M. That would be terribly disappointing if that’s the case. Can someone expand on the notion that people that meet the admissions criteria will get an offer? How do they decide who gets admitted from the waitlist, who gets Blinn TEAM, and who gets PSA? What is the purpose of the waitlist if they aren’t waiting for students to turn down acceptances? What are they waiting on then? I’ve also seen several posts stating major doesn’t play into the decision (except for Engineering). How does that work?
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Totally agree with your point of view.
I am just curious how can you tell those getting 16 in M151 were cheating the MPE?