@michaeluwill and @VirginiaBelle, thanks for clarifying. It’s an interesting discussion. I had a lot of anxiety about the degree to which colleges would hairsplit D20’s grades (i.e., would a 90 be much better than an 89?). In GPA terms, the gulf between a B+ and an A- is big–basically a 3.3 or 3.7, but at D’s school, you thought about each percentage point because it could bring your overall average (which was considered your GPA) up or down. So an 87 average felt different from an 89, even though both are technically B+ range.
They are different, but not as different as the appearance of an A- vs. a B+ - for example.
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An 88 hurts you at UGA for sure. The only B my son made was an 88 in honors 9th grade history but getting 3 points for that instead of 4 was a bummer! My nephew had 3 or 4 88/89s and didn’t get in. Thankful my son did!
That was sort of my impression, too, @VirginiaBelle. When I would look at Naviance, it seemed that for many colleges, you could almost draw a line and see admissions drop off precipitously at 88/87, with more waitlists at 89. Not always, and certainly there were exceptions (and depending on the school, you needed to be in solid mid-90s average territory). But I felt enormous relief that D was in the low 90s and wished that someone had told me how important one or two percentage points could be–and how hard it is to raise your GPA after freshman year.
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Do others have percentages on their transcripts? Our HS has only the letter grade. They switched an A from 93 to 90 several years ago, but the transcripts look identical.
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Our transcripts only have grades on a 100 point scale. The grading system is noted as below.
Our transcripts have the unweighted numerical grade plus a grading scale which is 90-100 =4.0 etc. No plus or minus. They also have the weighted GPA by their calculation but that is used to determine cum laude, val and sal, etc.
Yes, ours does.
My kiddo will literally say things like OMG my grade dropped from a 98 to 97.
I know on at least some college applications she had to type in each class and number grade off her transcript, but the drop down menu let you select different type of grades available for those that report in a different format.
In our high school, you have a number grade while you are taking the course, but once you are done it goes on the transcript as A, A-, B+, etc. The numbers do not show up on the transcript. The school report says an A is 93-100, A- is 90-93, etc.
• Grading Scale
A+ = 98-100
A = 94-97 A- = 90-93
B+ = 87-89 B = 84-86 B- = 80-83
C+ = 78-79 C = 76-77 C- = 74-75
D+ = 73 D = 71-72 D- = 70
F = 69 and below
• GPA
The grades at six, twelve, and eighteen weeks are continuous and cumulative.
determine your grade point average, the following value will be attached to the grade scale:
A+ = 4.33 A = 4.00 A- = 3.67
B+ = 3.33 B = 3.00 B- = 2.67
C+ = 2.33 C = 2.00 C- = 1.67
D+ = 1.33 F = 0 D = 1.00
D- = .67
I think most HS transcripts don’t show a percentage. My kids’ HS shows only letter grades, and teachers have flexibility to define the scale how they see fit. Obviously less than ideal. And this plays out across tens of thousands of HSs across the country.
There is tremendous variability in how colleges recalculate GPA, and not all do. Bottom line, if you want to know how, and if, a college recalculates GPA look on their website. If it’s not there, contact them and ask.
That proves my point.
there were 781 students at UNC from Wake county, at 43% yield, that would indicate that around 1,600 were accepted.
The the 50th percentile countrywide for ACTs is 20. So Wake county has the distribution of ACT scores of the county.
The top 5% of all ACT scores are 31 or higher. There were around 11,000 seniors graduating in Wake County, so 5% of that is 550. The top 10% is 29 or higher, meaning that there were 1,100 of these in Wake County.
Since there were around 1,600 students were accepted from Wake county, that means that around 500 of them had ACT scores lower than 29, and 950 or so had Scores of 30 or 31.
There is no reason to assume that the students who decided to attend UNC are those with the highest ACT scores, so we can assume that these proportion hold with the students attending UNC.
That would mean that, of the 781 students from Wake, 268 had ACT scores that were 31 and higher, while 513 had ACT scores of 30 or lower. Of these, 244 or so had ACT scores of 29 or lower.
Of those 513, at least 451 had 4.0 GPAs.
My points:
More than half of the 4.0 students from the wealthiest county in NC have test scores that, if they were here on CC, we would assume that they had test anxiety or grade inflation. Since it goes beyond belief that almost 60% of the students with the highest GPAs in any county suffer from test anxiety, I think that the assumption of grade inflation at the wealthier schools in NC is pretty much upheld.
Since no poor county demonstrates this large a discrepancy between the number attending UNC with 4.0 GPAs and the number expected to have test scores in the top percentiles, we can conclude that this is, indeed an issue of wealthy high schools.
This is also supported by actual published research - the study which I cited earlier about higher grade inflation at wealthier schools was actually done using data from North Carolina.
Finally, the fact that Hoke county and Cumberland county have ACT means of 17.4 does NOT “prove” that students there are being sent to UNC with GPAs of 4.0, and SATs if under 30.
In fact, an ACT curve with a mean of 17.5 has a top 1.5% at 30.1. That means that the percent of students that are expected to have ACTs higher than 30 in Cumberland county is 60. They sent 61, which is well within the margin of error.
The number expected in Hoke county to have ACT scores higher than 30 is 10. They sent 4 to UNC.
So the numbers of students that these counties are sending to UNC correlated very well with the number who have ACT scores in the top 5% nationwide. If their GPAs are 4.0, they do not have inflated grades.
As far as I am concerned, that entirely debunks any claim that the poor counties are the one who are sending the large numbers of high GPA/Low test score students to UNC.
My D’s HS showed both percentage and letter grade. The grading scale was non traditional where a 92.44 was a B+ So I think it made sense to have the percentage along with the grade. Also honors and AP courses were weighed the same and just a slight weighting bump.
I totally disagree with your ACT score analysis. The kids getting in in Charlotte are 34 plus from the private schools. Plus high rigor. Plus all As or close. The Val of a prominent private school did not get in several years ago. I assume the same in Wake. Disregard the ACT percentages which include kids with no interest in college. A strong student will be 32 plus in most cases.
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Trust me Wake County kids would be over the moon if the majority could get in with a 30 or lower, but that’s not how it works.
It’s not logical that the county where the 80% public school students outscore state averages on every standardized test and much of the other 20% are in schools that have even stronger profiles than the public schools, and that has one of most educated populations in the US, would be the source of lower than average scores at UNC and counter to known achievement gaps.
You seem to be making a lot of assumptions in your analysis that everything works on a single normal distribution and that percentage of applicants, acceptances and yields are constant county to county and school to school. That’s not how it works in reality.
You said 60 from Cumberland were expected to score 30+. Is that in total student population? How do you know those are the ones at UNC?
Just stepping back logically, if there wasn’t a difference in test scores and weighted GPA distribution in the pools of students between the Tier 3 and Tier 1/2 counties, they wouldn’t have made a policy to consider tier in the first place. What is the point of the policy if not to account for highest stat applicants disproportionately coming from Tier 3 counties.
Are there stats somewhere on number of applicants, acceptance rates, yields and student stats by county and school?
My question is what is GPA trying to measure anyway and what constitutes inflation vs not?
Very few from Wake with less than a 30 are getting in unless they have a hook. Frankly, many who don’t have top stats don’t even bother applying because they figure they don’t really have a chance. My D’s friend didn’t apply for this reason and she had a 30. There is a reason you can read through CC threads on UNC and kids will call out if they got in from Wake or Mecklenburg and other kids post things like “accepted with a 29, probably because I’m from Tyrrell County.” There’s a reason some families move out of Tier 3 counties to give their kids a better shot at UNC. That just wouldn’t be a thing if UNC was taking a bunch of Tier 3 kids with under 30 ACT scores.
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State average for North Carolina are below average for the country, and those can also be seen in the lower cutoff for the National Merit Semifinalists - NC is on the lower side, compared to, say, Illinois. So outperforming an underperforming state does not make a school district into a high performing school district.
Moreover, it doesn’t outperform the state by very much. Average ACT for the state of North Carolina is 19, versus 20.2 for Wake County.
On a national level, Wake is not a super high performing school district. For that you would have to look at the smaller high school districts like, say, Adlei Stevenson or New Trier in IL, high school districts with 4,500 students each, and average ACT scores of 28.
Neither of these two schools, though, is handing out 4.0 GPAs to 15% of the school.
My kid’s HS, a decent sized public high school/district (single school district like many in Illinois, 3,400 students). It is a middle class and very highly educated part of Chicagoland. They had an average ACT of 24.5 when they last tested (2017).
The top 10% of the grades was 3.84.
The top 25% by ACT was 31 and higher.
Fewer than 5% got a 4.0 GPA (No Vals, just students who got 4.0 with the highest weighting, about 35 that year of 920 seniors).
That is what a decent school looks like when it doesn’t have grade inflation:
ACT average of 24, 25% with ACTs above 30, and 5% with GPAs of 4.0.
A great school is like IMSA: ACT average of 32, 25% with ACTs of 35 or 36, and, yep, they probably do have at least 20% with GPAs of 4.0, but they have other academics to support this.
So when you tell me that a County with an average ACT of 20.2, so likely 5%-7% with ACTs of 31 and higher, but have as many as 15% with GPAs of 4.0, I think that the grade inflation is pretty clear.
When a college which has 80% of their students from a single state, has 92% with GPAs of over 4.0, but only 50% with ACTs (or their SAT equivalents) of 31 and over, the entire state has grade inflation.
Actually, that’s EXACTLY how it works in reality. A very large sample of a normal distributions= tends to have the same distribution as the normal distribution of the population from which it was sampled. 11,000 counts as a very large sample. In fact, using these very same assumptions, I was able to correctly calculate the percent of students who did not meet a benchmark, based only on the average score for that subject. Normal distribution, standard deviation of 5.8.
It may be wrong by a few percent, but not by much.
I don’t, but I also don’t know that the 550 from Wake are also at UNC, so in fact, there could even be more students from Wake who have inflated GPAs.
What I did was use the same assumptions for all of the counties. If anything, I skewed towards wealthy counties. A high achieving wealthy student is much more likely to be applying, and attending, and more “prestigious” OOS and/or private colleges than a high achieving poor student. So an 32 ACT, 4.0 GPA student from Cumberland who is accepted to UNC is more likely to attend UNC than a wealthy student who likely applied and was accepted to another couple of schools, and can afford others.
The Tiers are for economic development. As for your claim that there is a “policy to consider Tier”, do you have a basis for that? They di not have it on their CDS, nor do they say anything at all about considering Tier in the descriptions of admission processes.
There is a difference in test scores - a BIG difference. 5% of NC got higher than 30 ACT, awhile Cumberland, say, has fewer than 1/3 of that, maybe even 1/5 of that.
Grades supposedly measure mastery over the material. Grades are, however, neither objective nor standardized.
Now, while standardized tests are fairly problematic, in aggregate, they give a very rough estimate of the mastery that a school or a district’s students have. Studies, specifically studies of high schools on North Carolina (the study I cited was of high schools in North Carolina), as well as what I showed earlier demonstrate that there are many many more students getting high grades in school than are getting high scores on testing.
The study I cited specifically demonstrated that this type of grade inflation was more common and more severe in affluent high schools in North Carolina than in poor ones.
That study demonstrated that, over the past decades, the average GPAs of the high schools have gone up in the past decades, but the test scores have remained the same. The increase in average GPA was far higher in affluent NC high schools than in poor NC high schools.
So it doesn’t matter what a person “thinks” or “believes”. What matters are the facts, and these are demonstrated in that study.
BTW, a single student with a 4.0 and an ACT of 28 does not show anything but issues with testing by the students. 100 students like that in a graduating class of 500 show grade inflation. If the school is affluent, and they can afford better prep, better conditions, and 25% of the students with accommodations, that means that there is a LOT of grade inflation.
Evidence? Over 50% of the student who were accepted to UNC had ACTs of 30 or under, and I am pretty sure that those students are not the OOS students who are being accepted at a rate of less than 18% (the 18% also include OOS legacies with acceptance rates of 42%).
[quote=“GetCollege19, post:55, topic:3504663”]
Frankly, many who don’t have top stats don’t even bother applying because they figure they don’t really have a chance. My D’s friend didn’t apply for this reason and she had a 30. [/quote]
Only about 45% of all high school graduates in NC even think of going to college. That is around 48,000 students, and around 21,000 applied to UNC, but of these a bunch were likely not graduating seniors.
So about 40% of all graduating seniors in NC apply to UNC, and I do not see that high-stats kids would not be among these.
Maybe a few don’t, but most do.
In fact, with an admission rate of about 40%, most high stats kids should be accepted.
Oh, wait a minute. How are the AOs supposed to choose which students to accept, if all of them have 4.0 GPAs?
I mean, they accepted 40% of the applicants, and 92% at least had 4.0 GPAs. Yet they were rejecting students with 4.0 GPAs. that means that more than 36% of the applicants had As, or 18% of all NC students.
Based on the students attending the school and the counties they come from, there is only proof of 1.5%-2% of Tier 1 kids getting 4.0 GPAs, while at least 16% of Wake County kids got 4.0 GPAs.
But I’m sure that you’re right, and all of the grade inflation in UNC students is from Tier 1 county schools.
Again, I do not see any evidence. All I see is “some anonymous dude posted on CC”, or “my friend’s kid ‘knows’”.
Added:
“Grade inflation” only exists if there is an agreed upon definition of what an A means. In states where there is no state-wide standard, it is less important. So most colleges work on the assumption that an A in a high school which has 25% with 4.0 GPAs, but an ACT average 0f 24, does not say as much as an A in a high schools with an average ACT score of 24, from which 5% get 4.0s, or a high school with a 24 ACT average, from which 1% have 4.0 GPAs.
I will now actually discard almost everything I wrote on this thread except for the very first posts.
Why?, because, as I wrote in that very first post, I do not believe that those 4.0 GPAs presented by UNC are unweighted.
Not only UNC has these crazy discrepancies, but some other NC colleges as well (but not all). UNC Greensboro is an example of such a one
Greensboro have only 25% of their students reporting being in the top 1/2, yet they also report 27.8% having a GPA of 4.0.
I cannot believe that a single high school in North Carolina, wealthy or poor, has kids with UW GPAs of 4.0 in the bottom 1/2 of their graduating class, but Greensboro reports that some 65-70 of such students, not to mention the 450 kids who supposedly had 4.0s, but were only in the top 50%-top 25% range.
Moreover, UNC Charlotte had an acceptance rate of 65% and their unweighted mean GPA was 3.49, while that of Greensboro, with an 82% acceptance rate, was 3.67. That only makes sense if that 3.67 was weighted, and the grades on the grade distribution were also weighted.
Similarly, NCSU has an acceptance rate of 45%, and an unweighted GPA of 3.81, 18.7% with 4.0 GPAs, a weighted GPA of around 4.28, and 47% in the top 10% of their classes (70% reporting), and 48% with ACTs of 30 or higher.
So UNC has 57% with ACTs of 30 or higher, a weighted average of 4.39, but, supposedly, 92% with GPAs of 4.0.
Since NCSU has the same proportion of NC students, the weighting should be similar. The student pool is also the same, so the percent of 4.0 students who are in the top 10% should be similar. So if NCSU has about 40% of their students in the top 10%, mostly from NC, with 4.0 GPAs, UNC shouldn’t really have that many more than 30%, and definitely not 92%.
So, no, UNCCH does not have 92% of their students with unweighted 4.0 GPAs.
It makes for a lovely story of droves of poor kids from bad schools and inflated GPAs pushing out the superstars of wealthy schools, where 20% are 4.0 students, but it is not true.
Of course, I do have to put to rest the alternative story of teachers at wealthy schools handing out A’s like candy canes on Christmas, but that was never really more than hyperbole anyway, to be perfectly honest.
You mean Chapel Hill, of course.
Most kids who had 34 ACTs were getting in, including kids from poor schools, from wealthy public schools, and home schooled kids. Unless you are trying to claim that all (or most of ) the applicants from private schools who attend UNC have ACTs scores of 34, which is highly unlikely, or perhaps that all or most of the students with ACT scores of 34 and above are from private schools, which is even more unlikely…
In any case, I would guess that almost every students in the more high performing private high schools in NC are applying to UNC, whether they have ACT scores of 34, 31, 28, 24, or 18.
As is presented in UNC’s CDS, 43% of the students who matriculated to UNC had ACT scores of 29 or less, and more than 50% has ACTs of 30 or less. Likely no more than 40% have ACT scores of 32 and higher. So that would mean that most students who attend UNC are not strong students?
If you take the best private high school in NC, the Cary academy, more than half of their students have ACT scores below 32 (their mid 50% range is 28-33), so would you claim that half of their student body are not strong?
No. I mean the kids getting in to UNC Chapel Hill from Charlotte. You are making lots of assumptions without knowing facts. Most kids in fact do not apply to UNC Chapel Hill because most do not get in. You need to be in the top of your class in Charlotte/Wake if at a private school with excellent scores to have a reasonable chance and even then no guarantee.
By your own stats, 25 percent of the class at Cary Academy have a 33 or higher on the ACT. I am not sure why that is so difficult to grasp. I have two boys who have taken the ACT. Both got a 35. I don’t think it is that rare in strong students and if anything just supports their strong grades.
For OP’s sake, I am done debating about this after this post.
You are ignoring achievement gaps and differences in population demographics. Given achievement gaps, test score distributions of different demographic populations are not the same. You are also ignoring that all students in NC are required to take ACT, which is not true for all states. NC results (100% participation rate) will look different than a state where only college bound kids take it (33% participation rate for IL) and different than the national 49% participation data, which is a blend of 5% to 100% participation states.
I am familiar with your general area. Have friends there. It’s different than here.
“…normal distribution of the population from which it was sampled…” define “the population” because the population of Wake County NC is demographically very different than the population of New Tier. Unlike New Tier, it is not homogenous.
New Trier, IL district is 20k households, 85% white, 9% Asian, and 1% black and 3% Hispanic with a median family income of $182k with only 2% living below the poverty line. Wake County is 420,000 households, 60% white (drops to 53% under 18 and 45% in WCPSS), 20% black, 10% Hispanic, 7% Asian, with median family income of $80k with 15% poverty rate for children. However, 10% (42k) had incomes over $150k. WCPSS is 33% on F&R, 15% foreign born and 150 different languages spoken by students. Those are not the same statistical populations. You are welcome to look up ACT scores by race and SES if you do not believe me that they differ and that you cannot analyze a non-homogenous group as if it is homogenous.
3,400 is not decent sized by NC standards because almost all districts are county level here. Hopefully, you can appreciate that if all the districts in Cook County merged into one district that is a different distribution then just New Trier, but that it would not mean that suddenly the same number of New Trier students are not getting 30+ ACT scores.
I never said the Wake County public school system (WCPSS) was a “superior high performing school district.” Had to laugh. Trust me I am one of the last people you would catch saying that.
What I said was within Wake County, a county of 1M+ people that is one of the most educated in the country, there were a number of 32+, 4.0 (measured as 90+% mastery of standard curriculum) capable students. As I repeatedly stated, the public school district (WCPSS) only accounts for 80% of the students. The 20.2 ACT only applies to WCPSS, reflects ALL Juniors in WCPSS including the ones that will drop out the next month, and excludes the 20% in private/charter/homeschooled. WCPSS has a few large high schools (where the high school population of just one is the size of your entire district) that have >24 ACT.
At least in the area I live in people just are not that interested in paying $300k somewhere else when they can get UNC for $80k. There is one family that sent their kid to Duke and people think they are nuts for doing it.
Here’s the link to where they talk about prioritizing rural and low-income admits:
Frankly, if GPA measure is supposed to be mastery of standard curriculum, it seems strange to me that students who score in top 10 percentile of standardized tests would not also have demonstrated 90+% mastery of subject matter in their classes provided they are actually applying themselves throughout their courses (studying, turning in assignments on time, etc.).
So, we will just have to agree to disagree on what is likely behind UNC’s stats.
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Sorry, it was not clear what you were saying - “getting in in Charlotte” was confusing.
As for acceptance rates to UNCCH of Cary Academy students, in the 3 years 2017-2019, roughly 330 students graduated from Cary. Of these, 85 matriculated to UNC, or about 26% of the graduating students.
So, if fewer than 50% apply, their acceptance rates are anything from 100% to 50%, all much higher than those of anywhere else in the state, so “most don’t get in” does not describe the reality. Alternatively, more than 50% apply, and “most don’t apply” doesn’t describe the reality.
Furthermore, if 26% matriculated to UNCCH, it is almost certain that more were accepted. Some 90+ matriculated to colleges which have lower acceptance rates for NC residents than UNCCH, including various Ivies, Duke, Stanford, MIT, etc. How many of these students were also accepted to UNCCH? Likely a good number.
So your perception that “most aren’t applying because most don’t get in” does not match reality.
I also was writing about the Wake Public school System, not private schools.
Since we have started repeating ourselves, I agree.
Since I figure that this is personal for you, I apologize if I implied anything negative about your own kids.
Just an aside - not all high school districts are the size of one to three schools. Chicago Public Schools has 370,000 students. Now THAT is a monster school district. Its magnet schools are, in general, also better the private schools in the area (except the Lab School).
PS. It is probably not too difficult to figure out what part of Chicagoland I’m talking about.