<p>BTW - I requested my kids’ school profile. It didn’t match up to the standards that were put forth on CC. I made a pest of myself and offered to spearhead changing it, and got nowhere because the head GC went on maternity leave and the other GC’s didn’t see the point, so I bit the bullet and figured that’s what it was.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, kids from the school are going to Yale, Stanford, U of Chicago, NU, Wellesley, Notre Dame, and a few other elite schools. I’ve come to the conclusion that while it’s best to have a better profile, all else being equal, the schools get that different school districts are at different levels of sophistication on this one.</p>
<p>No matter how outraged pizzagirl might be that schools would take the time to recalculate GPA, this topic has been reported on in numerous venues.</p>
<p>For $25 (free if you are a NACAC member), you can download the 2010 report to see how many are doing recalculations currently. I think I’d rather go out to dinner ;).</p>
<p>I’m with Pizzagirl. It’s just not worth worrying about that much. My older son got dinged because other languages in his school had honors classes at more beginning levels. He got dinged because scheduling issues kept him out of honors Physics. My younger son got a boost because orchestra was put in the academic classes that count for GPA. (I still figured that colleges would see that his real academic GPA wasn’t really what the school computed it as.) Both kids got dinged because our school doesn’t give AP courses as much weighting as most schools on CC do. The both benefited from the fact that our school does rank students. They both ended up at colleges that challenge and stretch them. </p>
<p>I don’t really think colleges spend a huge amount of time with this stuff. Older son - top 2% of his class, 5s on the APs, mostly A+s (except English), stellar SAT scores. Obviously a top student and I’m sure he got full marks in the academic catergory. Younger son with lots more B’s, top 5% of the class, 5s on the APs, and very good, but not stellar APs was probably put one notch below older brother in that category.</p>
<p>Of course some colleges take the time to actually do redo the calculations, but I don’t think they all do. Even if they redo the GPA calculations (and S1 turns into a B+ student), I have to believe the ranking helped him. </p>
<p>We anticipated that we would have to assume there was a range as to how the GPAs could be interpreted. S2 was a B+ to A- student. No biggie. He just needed to choose safeties with the more pessimistic interpretations.</p>
No, they don’t want to sit there and determine whether one school includes gym, band etc. in the GPA and another weights by changing a 4.0 to a 5.0 for AP while yet another increases a course grade by 20% for an Honors course. </p>
<p>This is why, instead, some of them, recalculate GPA using only core academic courses (or whatever that U wants to include) and weight grades however they want to weight them.</p>
<p>And, no, I don’t have any idea how much manpower it takes to do this.</p>
<p>I just know that they have self-reported that they do it.</p>
<p>Doesn’t matter whether I like it or not. But those interested in how college admissions work might as well know how it works, instead of how we <em>think</em> it should work.</p>
<p>Think about it. Think about having someone data-entry the grades from a transcript into a database – the checking necessary (because you can imagine what would happen if something was calculated incorrectly) – not to mention having to decipher the transcript to see if a given course was really a core course or not, given the exotic names some might have. You would need a full time staff of data processors to do this for 30,000 kids. And funny how in the discussions that elite schools themselves provide about their processes (including books and things like the Amherst and Tufts peek-under-the-tents), you never hear about these data processors nor do you ever hear that “well, Johnny’s GPA was 4.5, but we recalculated it and it was 3.8 on core courses.” They look holistically and they can tell whether Johnny was a good student who took advantage of what his school had to offer, or not. They don’t need to break it down to 3.83 vs 3.81.</p>
<p>If there is any recalculating going on, it’d occur before the committee meets for final decisions. There’s certainly a certain amount of processing of the apps. Many schools superscore test results, in a few cases even superscoring across the SAT/ACT barrier. Many (all? most? some?) schools write up each applicant’s stats on a college-specific card or form, the better to have all the relevant data in one handy-dandy format. The UCs recalculate GPA, though that must be easier to do when the students are self-reporting grades on an electronic submission. So, it wouldn’t be impossible for a college to recalculate grades onto some standard scale.</p>
<p>In the end, it would just be another piece of data.</p>
<p>You think it’s unnecessary. You think it would take too much time. But they do it.</p>
<p>Anecdotal ridicule about distinguishing between a 3.83 and a 3.81 or the inability of a school to figure out which are core courses… You might like the way it sounds to debunk the “myth”, but it simply doesn’t change the fact that they look at these things and some do recalculations. Others (most? all?) have some way of figuring out what are the core courses. Maybe you couldn’t do it, maybe you wouldn’t agree with <em>how</em> they do it, but the Admissions offices report that they do this.
</p>
<p>And, yes, I doubt that their purpose is to distinguish between the 3.83 and the 3.81 GPA student.</p>
Exactly. There is a lot of preparatory work before the meeting where pizzagirl’s “squint” at the GPA and holistic evaluation goes on. Some undoubtedly done by clerical folks, some done by the Admissions readers themselves as they review their assigned applications.</p>
<p>While schools often do look holistically and take into accout rigor for those schools that don’t weight, the big disadvantage is with schools that don’t weight but do rank kids (on an unweighted basis. In those situation, top students who take exceptionally rigourous classes with tougher grading often fall much lower in rank than those who take easy schedules and many fall outside the top 10%. You can recalcualte a GPA but a colelge can’t recalculate class ranking. My son almost lost a scholarship becuase of this, but we were able to get the schhol to rerank him on a weighted basis. His rank jumped from like top 12% to top 5%. Because school (and school rankings like USNWR) look heavily at the top 10% mark, if a kid falls outside that, I think it’s a disadvantage at many school as it will hurt their USNWR rankings.</p>
<p>I have to agree with Pizzagirl. It doesn’t make sense for schools who pride themselves on holistic admissions policies to manually recalculate the grades of 30,000 applicants. Maybe they do so in the later stages of the process for those 500-1000 borderline applicants that could end up accepted/waitlisted/rejected. There’s no point in doing this for the very weakest candidates or the very stellar ones that are certain admits.</p>
<p>The schools in my district actually calculate the GPA’s differently. My school calculates the grades for all of your classes together. Other schools calculate your GPA using your core subjects only. I never thought how confusing that could be for the admission officers out there.</p>
<p>I maintain it’s not that difficult to eyeball a transcript, take note of the rigor of classes and assess the As and Bs. Unless it’s a school that has an auto admit system based on GPA etc or awards scholarships solely on GPA it probably doesn’t make all that much difference if the school weights or doesn’t weight. Our school does not weight but in the spring calculates all the senior GPAs utilizing a formula that takes into consideration the state mandated ACT and the GPA and the (published list) of rigorous classes to award senior honors. Most of the time on many of these forum threads the kids (and parents) don’t specify if the reported GPA is weighted or unweighted. It’s fairly obvious when a GPA is reported higher than a 4.0.</p>
<p>Both the HS D attended and S’s HS weight grades. However, even if they didn’t I would have had them take the most challenging classes that they were capable of taking and not worry about whether someone else has a higher GPA with easier classes.</p>
<p>FWIW, when D was a senior, our school district was embroiled in a heated battle over our grade scale and weighting. I called the admission offices at the schools where she was applying (anonymously, but it would not have affected her anyway) to see whether it made a difference. They basically told me that they see so many grade scales/weighting etc. that they just look at the grades in the core subject and the strength of schedule.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that the applications from your child’s school is being read by the regional admissions person. </p>
<p>There may be one regional admissions person reading all of the applications from students from Iowa, while there may be 3 or more admissions people reading applications from NYS (NYC, Long Island, Westchester, Upstate). </p>
<p>IF some of the same schools are sending applications to the same colleges, the regional admissions person is probably already familiar with the grad requirements, rigor and course offerings of the schools in his/her territory. The more information that a school can give a college, the better position that school is going to be in. I know that I have changed high schools and one of the first things I did was update my contact list and let admissions counselors that I knew personally know of my move. Second, I looked at the school profile (I have worked in 2 high schools were there were no profile and I created one) adn began gathering information to update the profile. My profiles are always working documents that get updated each year.</p>
<p>GCs/College Counselors that do a good job of developing relationships with and reaching out to their regional admissions people at the schools where their students are known to apply are at an advantage, because a relationship is built. The counselor can call the rep or the rep can call the counselor for clarification.</p>
<p>sybbie, it has often been noted that you are a gem amongst GCs. :)</p>
<p>Our HS is one of those that doesn’t weight grades at all, and officially does not rank, yet does declare a val and sal and apparently does provide decile information if required. Obviously this is grossly unfair to students who take a more rigorous schedule and who are applying to schools where class rank determines merit aid or the like. Parents I know who have had several children with schedules of varying rigor have told me that a) their child in honors/AP classes had a lot more work, starting freshman year, and b) the honors/AP kid was to some degree ripped off, in their opinion, when it came to in-school honors like being declared in the “top 10,” getting into NHS jr year, and so forth.</p>
<p>Some schools simply don’t care how grades are calculated. But it can make a huge difference. </p>
<p>Indiana University gives a generous $9000 scholarship to students (in state or OOS) with a 3.8 or better. No recalculation. They use what the school reports.</p>
<p>“I maintain it’s not that difficult to eyeball a transcript, take note of the rigor of classes and assess the As and Bs.”</p>
<p>…especially when that’s your job and you’ve looked at thousands of transcripts. </p>
<p>I’m the OP, and this topic is really hitting home right now as I have 2 kids agonizing over their choices for next year. Am I right in concluding that the really top schools (like top 10-15 in US News rankings) pretty much require lots of honors/AP courses, and the less competitive schools probably don’t care one way or another? It’s the ones in between (roughly 15-45 in US News ranking) that I’m most curious about…does anybody have an opinion of how schools in the general tier of selectivity like Michigan, Wake Forest, and Bucknell might view honors/AP classes? Also, are URMs generally given a little slack regarding this?</p>
<p>If you are the sort of person who enjoys challenging classes and stimulating discussions with other similarly-minded kids, then maybe a college whose admission process uses unweighted GPA (i.e., values As in regular classes over Bs in AP/honor’s classes) isn’t a good fit for you.</p>
<p>My D’s highschool does not weight honors/ap classes. I think their grading scale is tough as an A is 93-100. They also rank and right now my D is ranked #1/197 along with 4 other kids who have maintained 4.0 through highschool. This doesn’t mean a 4.0 will make you valedvictorian though. How they determine val. is a formula that takes into account gpa with act score. I think that makes it fair. Common sense would tell you the kid who took lots of honors/ap classes is going to score higher on standardized tests so it decreases the chance that someone who had a far less rigorous schedule but still maintained a 4.0 could be val. over someone with a 3.9 and a 33 act.</p>
<p>Next year will be the first year they implement this. For 2011 they went by the highest GPA and there were 8 valedvictorians…kinda silly.</p>