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<p>Good point, Im just saying depending on the students financial situation different schools fit differently.</p>
<p>Another example of fit. DS visited a school that was especially strong in his expected field of study. He would have been among the stronger candidates, and all other elements seemed to be in place. The school had the added bonus of being in a gorgeous location and having a very laid-back culture. DS looked at it and loved it, but on the way home he commented that he didnât think heâd get any work done there. On paper it had all the elements he was looking for but they added up to a school culture that would have been wrong for him. He applied ED elsewhere.</p>
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<p>I would think UCB would be following state guidelines in admissions, it is not the same as a private university such as MIT, free to consider what it wants in admission, so outcomes can be understandably different. However, your point is well taken. Unfortunately, we are focusing on the exception - a student who did not take AP courses because he did not have the opportunity rather than the kids who have the opportunity but did not take them. </p>
<p>In sonâs case, nine hs grades transferred from a Hisp middle sch with a 4.0 GPA. They received a C+ equivalency, that predicted AP failure & need for alt schooling. He refused alt schooling & took APs. He made NatAP Scholar & nmsf, so predictions were a bit off. However, the cuts in grades were permanent so damage to his high school GPA & class rank was permanent. This does not begin to address the problems a student can face if the embarassed counselor (who was insisting alt schooling) trys to cover up the mistake by manipulating grades to defend the district policy on grade equivalencies.</p>
<p>Son ended up in the top 2% as a Nat AP Scholar and NMSF at his school but his GPA had him pinned as an alternative school student.</p>
<p>What school district is this?</p>
<p>ucbalumnus, We are in TX, a state that also has a top 10% rule. In the case of UT Austin, it is actually top 7% rule. The only top private university in the state is Rice. Although, the UT Engineering Program is probably more highly ranked than the one at Rice.</p>
<p>However, it does seem like your specific high school district is deliberately making it difficult for students from your middle school district to transfer in. Would it be a scandal the local media would be interested in?</p>
<p>When I went to middle and high school, no middle school grades counted in your high school GPA, even though some courses may have placed you in more advanced courses as a high school frosh. Admission to the state universities in California was also mostly GPA-based, but GPA was (and still is) calculated as specified by the universities, not by the high schools.</p>
<p>It appears that Texas uses class rank exclusively in lieu of GPA, and allows high schools to do the ranking however they please, rather than requiring some sort of standardized means of ranking, which leaves the door open for the type of shenanigans that you encountered at the high school district.</p>
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<p>Quite right. However, the trend in Texas seems to be the other way, use of mid sch grades in HS GPA is increasing not decreasing. I have spoken to quite a few parents who tell me the same is happening at their districts too.</p>
<p>Yes, many Texas districts do this. I never knew it was something ânewâ. My middle school courses that were for high school credit counted towards my high school GPA.</p>
<p>Niquii, the problem is that many districts are taking advantage of a system that requires state universities to use class rank. They are taking advantage of the fact that middle schools in poor neighborhoods do not and cannot afford to offer honor level high school courses. These schools spend most of their resources offering remedial and regular middle school courses. The most advanced courses offered are usually academic level high school courses. To protect a HS GPA from getting dinged, these courses are usually offered on a pass / fail basis. </p>
<p>An unscrupulous district that wants to discourage such students from coming in can take advantage of this situation and treat a top graduate from such a mid school in the same way as a local student who who had a choice of taking honor level courses and who knew and whose teachers knew that the grade would end up on the HS Transcript, but decided to take academic level courses. This way the district creates a false equivalency between a top student at one district and someone who is a B student or lower at another.</p>
<p>Any school with measurable frozen precipitation was a poor fit for me.</p>
<p>"⊠getting the best education âŠ"</p>
<p>A standard question for my Dâs was âwhat are you going to do on weekends?â Life outside the classroom was an important consideration for us, but YMMV.</p>
<p>I think the term fit is aptâŠif qualified. IMHO, and this may seem ridiculously obvious, but fit is about âwhat do they need to DO at college?â In the case of our S, he wanted a relatively esoteric course of study, video game design within a computer science degree, but not at a tech-only school that doesnât offer good humanities and a real college experience. That really narrowed it down, and while he applied to Ivies and other âtop-tierâ schools, only two of them really had what - I was going to type âwantedâ but really itâs âneeded.â And in those cases, in a year where it turned out schools were more focused than ever on foreign students who can pay full sticker price, despite being a NMF he didnât get into any of those. And yet, he found his fit anyway (itâs cliched but we truly are thrilled) because he did get into one that really REALLY wanted him, and thankfully and it was one we could also afford.</p>
<p>For some kids, the fit that they really need to do is find the mental space to decide what it is they really want to do with the rest of their lives - theyâre not read to DO yet. In that case itâs about what they need socially and intellectually. Do they like to be in large groups or are they more interested in smaller social circles? Are they a âbig cityâ person or a âsmall townâ person?</p>
<p>If, looking at it honestly, what your kid most wants to DO at school is have a good time and then get a decent job, you may be looking more at a state flagship where they can socialize and pursue non-academic activities more but also where, in that state, theyâll come out with a well-connected network they can plug into.</p>
<p>If what they need to DO is gain some perspective on the world then maybe a school that has a more robust foreign study program is where the fit is.</p>
<p>If what they need to DO is get right with their God so they can become what they consider a more complete adult, then an overtly religiously-oriented school is their fit (I have a niece who fits that bill).</p>
<p>So you need to help them objectively identify their <prioritized> goals. There will be a big basket of Things They Want To Do but there will be very few in the dealbreaker category, those things that, if a school doesnât have it, thereâs no reason to even consider it. Thatâs how you know what to focus on, thatâs where the true fit is.</prioritized></p>
<p>The point is that educators in our country have found fair and equitable ways to resolve transfer issues. For example, a 4 yr college does not say to a CC transfer student, we are going to turn your A into a B because your community college course standards were lower than ours. What impacts a GPA is how that student does at the 4 year college. If the student was weak she earns lower grades at the 4 year college. This is partly the reason why universities require transfer students to take at least 2 years of coursework at a university before being allowed to graduate. Universities such as MIT will actually not give grades in freshman year to any student for this very reason, so students do not take advantage of a better h-s history. Graduate schools and employers want a college GPA to reflect the potential to work after graduating not an opinion on how what the student did before coming to that institution.</p>
<p>What the colleges donât do is turn CC As into Bs, pass/ fail grades into letter grades using internal grades, then manipulate college grades by shoving transfers into inappropriate upper level courses or speaking to professors to not teach them to further some political agenda to keep out Hispanics and other minorities that attend the local CC. The only reason I can speak about this issue is because my son happened to take enough AP courses to become a National AP Scholar and did well enough to</p>
<p>become a National Merit semifinalist. </p>
<p>Most of the time these poor Hispanic kids are assigned low equivalencies and they end up transferring to the local Alternative school without much fuss. If the kid tries to stay at the regular school the high school manipulates the grades by threatening them, speaking to a few key teachers or placing the kid in inappropriate courses such as APCS in freshman yr and makes them look like C+ students incapable of passing AP Exams. In the end they break down rather than stay and take AP Exams so regulators can compare their real skills with other kids in the school. In my sonâs case we discovered something startling, because he refused to back down and took all his AP Exams etc that clearly show the equivalencies and predictions were all false.(but the destruction of the GPA was quite real)</p>
<p>You should go to the local media and name the school or district that practices this.</p>
<p>[Pump</a> Up the Volume (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=âhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_Up_the_Volume_(film)]Pumpâ>Pump Up the Volume (film) - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>One of my favorite movies was Pump Up the Volume with Christian Slater (1990). In it, the students uncover that the Principal has been finding phony excuses to expel the students with poor standardized test scores, so that her schoolâs averages look better.</p>
<p>^That was a good movie. Same idea, but in this case the Principal was looking for phony excuses to keep out all students, including high scoring ones, if they were from a specific group of middle schools in the same town with 90% non white / 70% economically disadvantaged students. (Apparently, because it helps the local real estate prices).</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus, I am unsure the local media is unaware of these issues. It is a pretty common well understood problem.</p>
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<p>Perhaps it needs additional media publicity, preferably right before the local school board elections. If it does not get exposed in the open, nothing will ever be done to stop it (see example of sorority rush at University of Alabama being subject to meddling by racist alumni, and perhaps more racism that that).</p>