No, top 10% for CH. They have gone deeper in some high performing schools. If you’re in NC, I know similar kids currently studying CS at UNCC and UNCW. I know they aren’t the ranking you were looking for, but they offer solid programs.
The AOs just take all the A grades and assign 4 points, B grades=3 points and so on. Core courses only, denominator is number of courses.
AOs are tasked with understanding grading systems at the schools in their territories. Some schools assign As to anything 90% above, some at 93%, etc. It is not a perfect system by any means.
I would not worry too much about that. I collaborated with approximately 50 admissions officers from approximately 45 different competitive colleges and they all claimed their schools recalculated similarly to the way I outlined.
But even with that system, you have the same issue that Olive is talking about…in some schools an A- is a 90, in others an A- is 93. Many schools do not make adjustments for that.
How do you take % acceptance from out of state? For example, Appalachian State acceptance rate is 77%, but only takes 14% from out of state.
I would just let the percentage be the driver, since almost all high schools use percentages.
The only way you can know acceptance rate split out by in and out of state is if the school publishes it, or you call them and they tell you. Most will tell you, IME.
Many transcripts don’t have the percentage data of each grade in each class, so you don’t know if the student’s A- is 90, or 92.9. Schools aren’t making estimates for these percentages when they aren’t there, IME
good point, but I thought the idea is for OP to better understand which colleges he/she is qualified for. He/she knows his/her percentages and I would use that as a driver - is what I am suggesting.
Yep; bringing in info from your other threads.
Yes that is what it means. UGA does this along with many other schools.
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I will second what Tigerwife said about NC being somewhat skewed due to education levels in certain areas. For example, Raleigh/Wake County is top 5 in US for most educated (based on % population with 4 yr degree or higher). There absolutely are schools where well over 10% are capable of straight As and plenty of kids score in top 10% on standardized tests, many in the top 5+%. I have heard of families moving out of the county because it’s so competitive academically. Also, as she noted NC doesn’t ± so 90 is 4.0. Wake is T20 in US for public school district size and is the largest single county feeder into UNC.
One of mine is at UNC and is very close to stats presented. 4.0 UW, 4.3 W, 9 APs, just squeaked into top 10%, 33 ACT (36 Reading and English). The drag on W is that at many schools non-core subjects (arts, foreign language, other electives) often do not have honors and/or AP options, but are required courses. Also a number of schools do not allow or limit students on taking AP before 11th grade, so can only squeeze in so many. NC also has a policy that there needs to be distribution of students from around the state and smaller county students may only have access to a few AP classes to up their W GPA. I think they more tend to take early college classes. NC has a large community college program.
Hope that helps give context to what seem like strange results.
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Top 10% of standardized tests is 1350, and in aggregate, having so many getting top 1% grades in their school’s most rigorous math classes but gettin only in the top 10% or lower on math SATs indicates serious grade inflation.
From UNC’s CDS, almost 50% of the students got below 700 on their Math SATs, and 10.4% got below 600. Almost 40% got below 30 on their Math ACTs, and 13% got below 24.
That means that at least 43% of the students at UNC got 4.0 on math, which is the top 1% of all grades in the USA, but scored only in the top 10% on math SAT. Furthermore, 8% scored only in the top 25% on math SAT or ACT, but received the highest grade possible in the math classes.
It is true that, individually, a student can get top grades in class and do badly on standardized tests, so I will never point to an individual student and claim that their SAT should reflect their grades. And, I know that kids from poor families often score much lower than wealthier kids of the same academic level.
However, in aggregate, AND for a wealthy schools feeding into a wealthy student body (60% in the top 20%, 3.8% from the bottom 20%), this points to grade inflation.
PS. The truth is, though, that a student who would “normally” get a GPA of 3.87 honestly, and an SAT score of 1380, would be able to deal with anything that almost any college would throw at them. So I’m not saying that these kids are not qualified. They just aren’t the superhumans that their GPAs would indicate.
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I have never looked at grade distributions, but am not sure what you mean by “4.0 on math, which is top 1% of all grades in USA”. Are you saying only 1% of students in USA get all As in math? That seems low given grades are supposed to reflect demonstration of subject matter mastery. Also, keep in mind that “most rigorous math classes” varies area to area.
UNC because of NC admission ‘rules’ is going to be skewed. As I noted they are required to have a distribution of students from across the state. Each county in the state is assigned as either Tier 1, 2 or 3 (Tier 1 is most distressed). There is going to be a wide variety in academics between a Wake (Tier 3) vs Tier 1 rural areas. UNC cannot just take the highest stat kids across the board from total applicant pool because would end up with vast majority being from Tier 3. UNC could fill entire class just from qualified students from the counties Tigerwife mentioned.
There are many kids with high test scores from say Wake that do not get in, but students from rural areas with lower test scores that do. I strongly suspect UNC looks nothing like a normal distribution for lack of a better way to put it. I found information from 2018 noting 40% of first years were from rural counties, 25% were URM and 20% first gen. Obviously, there is going to be some overlap in those pools and then some URM and first gens come from Tier 3 counties. I suspect it is somewhere in those groups that you are more likely to find those students with 4.0 but below 30 on ACT and that Math 4.0 may not include AP Calc. A 28-29 Math ACT is still 90th+ percentile though.
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Sorry, that 1% should have been top 1% of GPAs. However, getting A’s on every math class is still top percentiles.
In fact, the majority of NC students ARE from Tier 3 counties - 57.7% in 2020. Of the NC students, 30.0% were from Tier 2 counties, and 12.3% from Tier 1 counties.
Let us take Tier 1 Hoke county, with about 2,500 high school students, so maybe 650 graduating seniors. Now, Wake county has around 11,000 graduating seniors, of which some 781 matriculated to UNC, so about 7%. Of Hoke county’s 650 students, the number was only 4, so about 0.6%, or less than 1/10 of Wake’s, proportionally.
Since yield was about 43%, that would mean that UNC was accepting at least 15% of the students graduating from Wake, but barely 1.3% of the students who graduate from Hoke county.
Or let’s look at Cumberland County. Their school district has around 51,000 students, compared to Wake’s 161,000 and Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s 148,000. Wake, the wealthiest, sent 781 students, and Mecklenburg, not so wealthy, but still wealthy, sent 504. Cumberland, much poorer, and a Tier 1, with 1/3 the students, sent 61 students, or less than 1/10th proportionally than Wake, and 1/8th proportionally of the students that came from Mecklenburg.
If, indeed, UNC was, like UT Austin, accepting the highest performing students from each high school, there would be fewer students from wealthy urban counties, and more from poor and rural counties. Instead, you are getting students from the top 20% from counties like Wake, but barely the top 1%-2% from poor counties.
So are you saying, essentially, that more than 15% of Wake county students are qualified, because that’s how many are being accepted (though acceptance rate is likely higher than 40%)?
So NOT EVEN the paltry 1%-2% of the students per county from Tier 1 counties are qualified to attend UNC, as compared to 15% or more from Wake County schools? So more than 15% of the students at Wake county high schools “deserve” 4.0 GPAs, but not even 1%-2% of the students in Tier 1 high schools would deserve a 4.0 GPA?
Are you also implying that all of the 10% of UNC students who have 4.0 averages but below 600 math SATs are from Tier 1 counties? That basically, not even 1% of the students in Tier 1 counties are able to get more than a 600 on Math SATs?
Woah, woah, no that is not what I was trying to say.
I think all the students at UNC are qualified to be there. However, the distribution of test scores and academic opportunities vary from a Tier 3 to Tier 1, and those are just the facts. They are different worlds. I have been part of both of them. I am not arguing against NC’s policy was just explaining why they made the policy and how it may skew some stats.
You seem to be basing some of your numbers on the assumption that similar percentages of students from various counties apply to UNC and I do not believe that is the case or that yield is necessarily consistent.
Your original point was that the combination of 4.0 GPA UW, 4.39 W and test scores indicated the 4.0 UW was inflated and that 4.39 seemed low. You also noted that certain groups tend to test lower even if they have strong GPA. I think that may be part of what is happening with UNC.
For example, the mean composite ACT score for Wake is 20.2 vs 17.6 for Hoke and 17.5 for Cumberland (which btw is where Ft. Bragg is located); state mean is 18.4. Some of the big high schools in Wake (3,000 kids) have mean composite ACT of >24. Some of the charters are in the 28 range and my guess is that the privates at that range (public district market share is only 80%). There isn’t a large single high school in Cumberland that reaches 20 (only couple small early college type). So, given 42% come from Tier 1 and 2, that may explain why test results look low compared to GPA. Across the board, they do not have same kind of access to test prep or same focus on ACT/SAT scores and no, I do not think that means they are less qualified, but it would account for higher than may be expected % of below 30 results with a 4.0. Personally, I was too busy working in high school to earn money to pay toward college to worry about extensive test prep. I pretty much took them cold and only once. I suspect it is not that different for certain kids today.
So if a HS doesn’t give letter grades but gives percentages for each course on the transcript, do colleges assign a GPA “point” system to each percentage? For instance, if a B+ (87-89%) is a 3.3, and an A- (90-92) is a 3.67, is 88 a 3.5(ish), or do they still call it a 3.3? Or is a 92 a 3.9 since a 93 is 4.0? I’m just wondering how colleges calculate percentages into a GPA.
It depends on the college. Some do not re-calculate like UVA . Instead UVA evaluates how many classes out of the highest level classes offered have you taken [12/16, etc). UGA recalculates on a four point scale with 90 to 100 being an A and adding points for AP or IB. UGA gives no rigor addition for honors. Florida does the same but also adds .5 for honors. Clemson also gives points for honors. Every school uses their own method.
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From my experience, it gets moved to a letter grade or my gpa calcs - depending how they standardize. Note some of this is “the official way it is done in the office” while other is more admissions officer dependent. Big state schools might make it more formulaic, like @VirginiaBelle stated - but it comes to about about the same. Exactness does not really matter 99% of the time IMO.
Determine unweighted grades and decide on whether the rigor was there - thats it.
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