Same issue, UVA also wants to draw from all over the state
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NoVa is super competitive. My daughter was denied this year EA. 4.5, 8 Apâs. 38/470 (Top 8%) High rigor. 21 A+ and 5 Aâs. Last year, UVA took 31 kids from our HS.
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Unfortunately thatâs what comes with being in a populated area for a state school. We run into the same issue in Georgia for both UGA and Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech is worse because itâs less than 18,000 undergrads so difficult to spread that across a state with a population of 11 million.
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UVA specifically says that they do NOT have quotas from certain high schools or areas, and they donât discriminate based on where a student is from. Meaning, no, the NOVA kids are not at a disadvantage.
Tech, on the other hand, specifically cites âgeographic locationâ as a âvery importantâ criteria, which leads me to believe that they DO discriminate based on where a student is from in Virginia, and therefore students at top high schools in affluent areas may be penalized.
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Is it true that nova schools allow students to retake tests until they get the grade they want? Maybe colleges recognize that those kidsâ grades are inflated vs those from other areas/states.
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That ended years ago once they realized many of the kids were taking advantage of it. I think it only lasted one year about 7-8 years ago. Some do allow retakes but cap your max at 80%.
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Some classes allow one retake with a max new score of 80%. But your point is valid in that, not all grades are the same when comparing against other schools.
The funny thing is now, some teachers at my kidsâ school build the retake into their plan, so they make the test as hard as possible, so like the average grade is 60%, and then plan for the kids to retake it.
So, to some degree I think it makes sense to compare kids to their immediate peers and not across the entire applicant pool.
Iâll add to the other 2 comments here (I donât know anything specific to NOVA schools) but that whole dynamic is the reason why admissions advisors/counselors for the colleges have specific territories - so they get to know the dynamic. When one person posts here that they got in with a 3.9GPA and someone else posts that they couldnât get in with a 4.3 and how it âmakes no senseâ. Thereâs a lot of factors at play.
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Even within NOVA school systems differ. Loudoun County Public Schools no longer require midterm or final exams. The teachers have the choice to administer them, but they will no longer count for 20 percent of a studentâs final grade. Itâs making it very challenging to compare high school GPAs alone, thatâs why so many college admissions offices are in chaos as they are trying to navigate a new playing field since test-optional and the huge increases in applications.
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Youâre exactly right. I have a senior in public school that offers every AP class there is and anyone can take them starting freshman year. Hardly anyone takes a âregular class,â everyone is taking at least honors. I have two boys in private and they were allowed to take one honors class their sophomore year and theyâre taking one or two honors classes next year. No APs. My one son wants take AP Comp Sci but there arenât 10 kids in the school willing to take it because it is so hard apparently so they will not offer it due to lack of interest. On the other hand, literally everyone takes AP Comp Sci at my DDâs public school and she got an A and doesnât understand it at all and everyone gets As. The college counselor at her school said that there is grade inflation and Iâm sure all the college admission reps know this is happening. Also, there are no re-takes at the private school but there are some teachers at the public who still occasionally do it, especially post-covid. I stopped stressing about the lack of honors and APs at my boysâ school because colleges are only comparing you to the kids at your school, not against the local public school.
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Yes! You canât compare GPAs across students at different schools. It isnât apples to apples. Even with unweighted GPAs, a kid with a 3.7 unweighted and 10 AP courses is going to have a very different looking transcript/rigor than a kid with a 4.0 with a mix of standard and honors classes. And if the kid with no APs had no offerings available at their school, thatâs a very different situation than one who had 15 available and took none or just 1-2. Some schools give a .5 pt boost to APs and some a 1 pt boost. Some schools limit the number of APs kids can take, and others donât. A GPA alone says nothing without the context of how the school calculates it, the available course offerings, and what the transcript shows in terms of course choice and rigor.
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NoVa kids are not being penalized. Unless you believe that kids in NoVa are naturally more intelligent or hard working or deserving than kids in other parts of the state. Just because their GPA is higher because their high school offers more APâs and affluent parents have the resources to pump up their test scores doesnât make them more deserving or more likely to do well at Tech. Admissions puts a studentâs stats in context based on where they went to high school and other factors.
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These were actually my sonâs identical stats last year. We were told by an AO that when kids have these stats they have to go ED to not be waitlisted but that he would definitely be offered a spot off the waitlist. We found this unfair and he declined the offer of waitlist. Kids who work this hard should be able to compare offers and not be forced into ED by VT.
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Penalized may be too strong of a word, but there is little debating regional implications in college admissions. Many colleges explicitly state it as an admissions criterion. They will not have quotas per se, but in seeking an incoming class that draws from across the state/country/globe, what falls above/below the acceptance line can vary by region. Even if a school does not explicitly state region as a admissions criterion (e.g., UVA), if they consider class rank (or similar), that means competing against others within-school and results in the same (i.e., requiring higher âstatsâ than elsewhere to get accepted). That is not to say that a student from an underrepresented region is any less intelligent or less likely to succeed, but they very well may be less academically accomplished entering college (often through little/no fault of their own⊠e.g., few AP courses offered at their HS and no nearby CC for DE).
That is the definition of yield protection right there - I am surprised they confirmed it so willingly.
I emailed her today. My daughter talked to the rep when they visited the school in the fall and was assured she was likely to get in. Itâs so sad. She knows someone who has much lower stats who got into engineering. So that is very hard. I am feeling some negative feelings towards my alma mater.
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Does anyone know OOS admit rate from last year?
Is this just in-state data?
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