Hm. I think all ACT and SAT scores are sent to your high school. For us, they show up in the website we used to look up our students’ grades so high schools must be receiving that info. Plus, they show up on Naviance. Our kids don’t do anything extra like report their scores to their GCs.
@RockyPA so no deciles at all? That is less helpful for AOs unless they are comparing students from your school to each other. Also, I think that GCs are supposed to say which decile a student falls into in their recommendation. I believe it is a question on that form. I suppose your school could refuse to answer that. For schools that have a reputation, they can lean on that but a lesser known schools need detailed profiles to help their best students.
For well-known high schools with a profile like ours, I think an AO can make a decision without a score. They can see that 90% of our kids go to four year college, that the sports/academic teams are highly competitive, that we offer all kinds of rigor, and you can see the classes, the grades, and the decile of the student for both weighted and unweighted GPA. That, along with everything else in an app, is a ton of info.
Our highly competitive public school doesn’t rank, and only shows mid 50% wGPA range on the school profile, no deciles. The rest of the profile is well detailed.
Even if AOs are familiar with many of the schools in their territories, they just don’t know them all in detail…I think the reputation of schools is an important part of their evaluations whether explicitly or not.
Even before TO, nothing was ever more important than student academics (transcript, classes, school). And I agree, comparing two transcripts can be challenging (but most times they are not truly compared) and rank adds another data point that will help. I love “the rest.” All the other stuff that makes a student special. I realize that will add a hair of ambiguity but I would vote 50% academics and 50% who you are. Students get to show that in so many ways and nothing would make me happier if that filled the test void when it someday goes away.
If grades play an even more central role in assessing a student’s academic preparedness, wouldn’t grade inflation become even a bigger problem as all high schools want to send their students to better colleges? Isn’t there a moral hazard?
Bowdoin has gone on the record that they evaluate for 50% head and 50% heart. Seems like they do a good job of that from the kids we know there and the students S19 has met.
My daughter graduated, but she had a chance to read the notes that were written about her application. There were 2 pages, and none of the comments focused on her transcript etc. She attended a strong, public university.
They wrote about an outside leadership position, one of her essays, a letter written by the director of the outside leadership position, and a comment that she wrote about her high school.
I think attention to these details will grow if TO, once it it established that the student fits in academically.
IMO that school is hurting the chances of the kids below the top 10% then, which is why over 50% of HSs report no rank now. If you look at the history behind some schools (of the competitive type, who have stopped ranking over the last 10 years or so), the data seem pretty clear that this ‘penalty’ exists at schools that rank (at least that’s what my kids’ HS (competitive, large public) admin and BOE concluded 10 years ago when the dropped any form of rank).
Grade inflation is inevitable, but I think you can tell when it happens. My daughter got a 3.8 unweighted gpa and took a pretty hard schedule. A friend got a 4.0, took 4 years of AP and college classes and took 7 AP tests and got all 5’s. She got an academic scholarship to U Miami and we are happy. He got into Penn’s combined program - Wharton and and Engineering. There was no confusion who was stronger and both families are happy and got what they earned.
We have a local private school that has been somewhat effective at getting kids into better colleges supporting extra time on standardized tests for kids who have questionable needs - and keeping things easy with higher than deserved grades. So, I have seen this happen but it is extremely rare from where I sit. I think most teachers and administrators won’t give an A when an A is not deserved. I still contend that there will be something about that students academics that will unveil the real story. And of course, it is not a high grades contest, there will be other pieces to the “getting in” puzzle.
While USNWR’s student selectivity portion of college rankings historically has been mostly SAT/ACT scores, the remainder is percentage of frosh in the top 10% of their high school class rank (for national universities and LACs; top 25% for regionals). So perhaps some of the ranking climber colleges are very sensitive to the top 10% threshold.
Maybe something we haven’t discussed yet in terms of grades is the quality of teachers. Schools that can attract better teachers, I believe, have a better chance of reflecting accurate grades.
In my experience, fantastic teachers are more organized, have a better grasp on their subject, give meaningful homework, and use assessments that are challenging but fair. In short, the kids are more prepared, know what to expect, and either rise to the occasion or don’t. Teachers in this category also work hard to understand the MATH behind their grades. They don’t mistakenly have a quiz count for 50% of a quarter grade because they didn’t take the time to work out the point values assigned to it. The grades that a fantastic teacher will report are by-and-large a pretty good representation of the students’ grasp of the material.
Less-than-fantastic teachers at our high school overload the kids with busy-work, are scattered in their organization, and use assessments that often take the kids by surprise content-wise. They don’t take the time to understand the math behind assessment and homework values. I’ve seen grades from these types of teachers fluctuate widely.
I’ve also found (in our experience) that great teachers want to accurately reflect student achievement. They are less likely to boost a student’s grade who doesn’t deserve it. They also won’t let one off-day kill the grade of a kid who is smart and hard-working.
Teacher quality can have a large impact on grades and GPA.
Will this COVID-19-based disruption of standardized testing do anything to shake the effective duopoly of the SAT/ACT for US college entrance exams?
It would not be surprising if there were colleges that wanted to have some standardized testing for admission, but are not satisfied with the SAT/ACT for that purpose, but feel that requiring some non-SAT/ACT test would just cause them to lose applicants who would not bother (as in “why apply to college X when it means studying another large amount of time [based on the current norm of intensive test preparation] for the standardized test that only college X requires?”).
Yes, the proportion of USNWR rankings for top 10% of class in national universities is 2%. Unfortunately schools can’t control whether an applicant’s school ranks or not, it would be interesting to know if a student with a rank is perceived better than one without at schools who are working the USNWR rankings…I doubt it though. I haven’t even heard Tulane AOs say that and they are definitely rank climbers.
Perhaps more interesting would be whether students at top 9.9% have a significantly better chance of admission at those colleges than those at top 10.1%. It would be like new college graduates finding significantly different employer interest in interviewing them at 3.01 GPA versus 2.99 GPA (many employers use 3.0 GPA as one of the pre-screens for interviewing new college graduates).
In terms of which colleges are ranking climbers (or at least trying to do so, perhaps not necessarily successfully), probably more than the few who were most obvious about it or which have said that about themselves.