<p>FWIW, my daughter does not have a 4.2 GPA and could not possibly have that, as she only has 1 semester of honors or AP classes that qualify for weighting by UC standards. She probably has a 3.9 unweighted and very slightly more weighted. </p>
<p>She is ELC in a class of about 160 students, meaning she would have to be among the top 6 in her class. Because of the structure of her high school and extra required courses that can not be honors or APs, plus the limited number of of APs/Honors offered, it would be very difficult for kids to get much above a 4.1, and virtually impossible to get a 4.2 or above. My daughter probably is her class salatutorian (though of course that remains to be determined).</p>
<p>I don't know if it really has to do with the quality of the high school -- my daughter is at a public high school that is one of the top two in the district -- but the focus of the school is on arts, not APs. My son went to a different high school that was probably less academic - certainly average test scores were weaker and there were hardly any kids considering private colleges - but he had a UC GPA of about 4.2 and he was not ELC... he wasn't even in the top 10% of his high school. </p>
<p>I think the whole point of ELC is to enable the UC system to evaluate students in the context of the particular high school they attend, because AP's are very limited at the vast majority of public schools -- and even at a school with a lot of APs, grading standards can be very different from one high school to the next.</p>