Grade inflation is also a possibility
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Serious Grade Inflation during covid both my kids (good students, and bright) got unweighted 4.0s and never opened a book. It was ridiculous. My older one had rude awakening in college last fall- He was like- my finals are almost 1/3 of my grades, I really have to study.
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Even without COVID-19-related issues, many students find that they need to adjust their study habits when they go from high school to college, where fewer higher stakes exams and assignments or projects are used for grading in college in comparison to the daily homework and frequent quizzes (with extra credit opportunities) used for grading in high school.
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Well, grade inflation aside at many schools, parents are figuring out how to outdo the system.
Just to give you an example, at my kid’s rising senior/college prep night at the HS, the head counselor said that kids should take academic level classes in years 1-2, a couple of honors classes in year 3 and if they do well, take maybe 1 AP class or 2 as a senior. Now, getting an unweighted 4.0 using that strategy is very easy.
However, the reality for competitive applicants is that many start to dual enroll in ninth grade, take at least 1 AP (World History – the only one that is allowed), and have already taken SAT to gain admission to community college. These kids also refuse to take any non honors classes except PE and what might be absolutely necessary (Spanish 1/2 type classes). I know many students that self-study for APs.
Now, this is happening at a run of the mill public HS in NC that has over 60% reduced lunch kids. Needless to say, the ones doing these are not likely those kids but imagine now more competitive schools across USA.
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This rings true for our son. He was accepted to two top 10 engineering schools, but he opted to attend a top 30 school because he thought it was a better fit, and they offered much more support for students (one of the top 10 schools has a reputation for not being very student friendly). Our son is ADHD with some anxiety issues, and going to a high-stress school where he would have been in the bottom 50% of incoming freshman (based on SATs) might have been a recipe for failure. Conversely, he is in the top 20% of incoming freshman at the school he chose, and they offer lots of support with tutors, navigators, advisors, etc.
The icing on the cake was that the school he chose awarded him a merit package equal to 50% of tuition. Not coincidentally, the merit package brought the cost of his school in-line with our flagship state school to which he also applied.
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Not all 4.0 are the same especially when applying to Top 100 or so National Universities or LAC.
Your Rigor will be evaluated and while each University has their own way of accomplishing this, they all want to see that you are challenging yourself and taking challenging classes throughout your HS years. You also will be evaluated against your classmates in term of Rigor ( The GC recommendation will show where your rigor is compared to the rest of your class and also what advance classes your HS offers.)
Schools want to see if you are taking the most challenging classes available to you based on your previous year academic history.
Now we move on to the applicant pool as a whole where you will be competing with students who took AP/IB/AICE/DE classes staring in 9th Grade and have similar GPA’s.
I take it you are in NC based on your Avatar.
So lets look at NC State
https://admissions.ncsu.edu/apply/fast-facts/
Weighted GPA 4.17-4.48 for accepted students.
With only 2 AP’s in 4 years even with straight A’s you will be below the bottom 25% in acceptances. ( IE: 7 classes a year on a 4.0 scale with .5 for Honors and 1 point added for AP with straight A’s with 2 honors in 11th and 2 AP in 12 weighted GPA 4.107)
But wait unweighted GPA 3.75-3.97 you are above the 75%.
This shows NC States sees right thru that strategy of taking easy classes for 3 years to get A’s and then adding an AP or 2.
Rigor is being factored in with the bottom 25% unweighted/weighted 3.75/4.17 GPA and top 75% 3.97/4.48 GPA
However, his strategy should work well at less selective schools that may only care you got A’s in the classes you attempted
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While the overall cycle seemed really rough all around, D22’s school (and D22 herself) had better results than anyone expected. School is a newish (15yrs old) very progressive private high school in a major west coast city. College admissions have always been good but modest, this is not the school that you send your kid to for a guaranteed T20 result - there are others in our city that do that very well. But this year was a banner year for her school, multiple admits at schools that they’d never had any (or at least more than one) admissions before including Stanford (2), Brown(2), UCB (7), NE (5) Columbia (3), UCLA (4), NYU (5) UVA, and many many admits at top LACs. Senior class size of 90 people. This is a school that emphasizes mindfulness and character. No AP classes. Strict limit on number of honors classes. Would guess that 85% went test optional. Heavy emphasis on project based learning and multi disciplinary immersive courses. My D22 got into her dream school ED, she was on the mid-low end of their average GPA but she was an excellent fit and spent a lot of effort to demonstrate that. She was TO, no sports, no leadership, but had two very time-heavy and substantive academic research and social Justice fellowships that really transformed her. Her essays were excellent. Anyway, my big takeaway in the context of D’s school is that holistic admissions really played a role in T50 decisions, and that maybe, in this post-pandemic world, schools were looking for kids that were a little outside the mainstream and that had engaged in deeper thinking during the pandemic, rather than the high achieving all-arounders that used to be the gold standard.
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The results this year maybe satisfying for few but not for all, has definitely been a very unpredictable year for my daughter and many others I know. My daughter also checked all the boxes that we thought would place her in her dream school however she didn’t get into any of her top choices/T20. she did get into several T30 schools and is going to one of those.
That was the whole point of my post. An inflated GPA, particularly uw is not hard to achieve and should not be correlated to eventual outcomes.
Also, the major caveat to your analyses is that engineering applicants skew the curve. It is also my understanding that many colleges will recalculate GPA, particularly more selective ones. So, YMMV.
Yes I completely agree, and we saw lots of really Disappointing results among family and friends. I was honestly surprised at the results from D’s school, we had all been conditioned to expect the worst and fall in love with the safeties etc. Frankly I think the college counselors at the school were pretty stunned. Congrats to your daughter hopefully she’s be very happy with her school.
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Very happy for your D and others in the school. My daughter is very happy where she ended up going but for me its way too far. We are on the east coast and she is going to the west coast.
A school with 90 seniors with those admits is very good, but I wouldn’t generalize that high achievers are still not the gold standard, depending on your definition of high achievers. A typical high achieving high school in the bay area of 300 seniors will have around 30-40 admits each at UCB and UCLA. To be fair, the UCs don’t practice holistic admission, as others have pointed out and this hs has done well with private more holistic colleges.
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They do, in that each applicant is evaluated holistically in admissions reading.
However, the criteria used mostly focus on academic achievement with some consideration of starting circumstances and other (extracurricular) achievement: How applications are reviewed | UC Admissions . Factors like legacy, development, and race/ethnicity are not considered. “Crafting a class” is not done beyond recruited athletes (a very small percentage due to the large size of each campus) and admission by division or major.