<p>They reject people with 3.8 GPAs and ridiculous SATs but accept people with 3.3 GPAs. Their average high school GPA is 3.72, which is not great.</p>
<p>Maybe they value things other than high GPAs, which any robot can attain.</p>
<p>I don’t know???Maybe the 3.3 is a legacy? Colleges consider more than just sat and gpa, especially JHU.</p>
<p>Selective private schools like JHU have different enrollment demographics than most public universities. More than 30%of JHU students attended private high schools. At the private school my S2 attended (especially in the IB program), a 3.72 GPA would be considered very high.</p>
<p>Here are average HS GPAs reported by Princeton Review for some very selective private schools:</p>
<p>Reed (3.9)
Princeton (3.89)
Penn (3.89)
Emory (3.84)
Bowdoin (3.8)
Whitman (3.8)
Chicago (3.79)
Vassar (3.77)
Johns Hopkins (3.72)
Vanderbilt (3.7)
Colgate (3.62)
NYU (3.6)
Oberlin (3.6)</p>
<p>In contrast, according to Princeton Review the average GPA for UC San Diego was 3.98, higher than any of the selective schools above. Yet PR gives UCSD an admissions selectivity rating of 97, equal to Oberlin’s.</p>
<p>Average SAT scores at UCSD are significantly lower than at any of the private schools above (Oberlin CR 640-740; UCSD CR 540-670). 37% of UCSD students do not speak English as their native language. The university draws students from a mostly local applicant pool. The private schools above draw from a national applicant pool … and not all high schools in America have the steep grade inflation that may be occurring in many California public schools.</p>
<p>Because HS grading systems vary so greatly from school to school, I don’t think you can read too much into average HS GPAs. Rank is probably more meaningful. And I think the key reason why SAT/ACT scores are given so much weight is because they are uniform across all high schools.</p>
<p>Also, colleges have holistic admissions, and care about things other than just grades and SAT scores. The accepted 3.3 GPA student probably had some hook.</p>
<p>^I’m never sure what rank tells you, except where a student stacks up against students at his or her school.</p>
<p>As an example, nationally my daughter ranks in the 99th percentile on all her standardized tests. However, if you only look at the test scores from her public high school (which is very good) she is only about 50th percentile. Her school doesn’t rank, but if it did we estimate she’d be rank 100-150 out of appx 300.</p>
<p>So if she’s applying to a school along with 10 of her classmates who are higher ranked, the college knows she isn’t quite at the level they are at. But what does her rank tell you about how she compares to students at most other high schools in the US? Nothing.</p>
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<p>I think you’ll find that most selective schools with an acceptance rate < 20% will reject many applicants that are close to being statistically perfect, that is with SAT > 2300 and at the top of the class. </p>
<p>Likewise, to maintain a balanced class colleges will admit hooked applicants and people who have strong non-academic accomplishments. </p>
<p>I doubt Hopkins is any different from other top 15 schools in this respect.</p>
<p>Only about 6% of enrolled JHU students had GPAs below 3.25. As with anything else, it can be very misleading to try to generalize from anecdotes or personal experience. If the OP is from a distant state, his acquaintances may be getting a little bump for geographic diversity.</p>
<p>Think D1. Think lacrosse. Think xx chromosomes. Hopkins is not need-blind in admissions.</p>
<p>btw tk, PR’s numbers are bogus; it is likely a weighted gpa, which Reed is (purposely?) mis-reporting. (Kinda ironic ain’t it.)</p>
<p>Look at Reed’s common data set, for example. Only 70% of matriculants are in the top 10% of a HS class, in contrast to The Hop at ~80%, 85% at Vandy, and 99% at P’ton.</p>
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<p>PR’s numbers are whatever the colleges say they are. PR doesn’t have access to each school’s data base. They can only ask the college to report what they consider to be their average GPA, however the college chooses to calculate it.</p>
<p>An unweighted 3.3 GPA might look very different as a weighted GPA if the course load included lots of honors and AP classes.</p>
<p>That same person who got rejected by Johns Hopkins got accepted by Duke, Rice, Berkeley, and Harvey Mudd. So now Johns Hopkins is now better than all of those? I don’t think so.</p>
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<p>Probably a little bit weaker than Duke (like 2 or 3 places, not a big difference), but I think most people regard it as better than or equal to Rice, Berkeley, and Harvey Mudd. For schools that are of a similar caliber, it’s not uncommon to see admission decisions that don’t exactly reflect small differences in selectivity and academic strength. </p>
<p>Also Heidegger is awesome.</p>
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<p>Perhaps true, but Garbage In-Garbage Out. If Reed gives PR a bogus number (weighted, for example, when the directions clearly say uw), and PR prints it, it is still a bogus number…</p>
<p>We see all sorts of attempts on CC to explain the vagaries of college admissions. It is rather futile when it gets down to individual cases like the one Heidegger cited. When you look at average scores, GPA/rank, and admit rates, the overall pattern appears to be that JHU is about as selective as Berkeley or Rice, a bit less selective than Duke, and a bit more selective than UVa or UCSD.
(<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/687793-selectivity-ranking-national-us-lacs-combined-usnews-method.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/687793-selectivity-ranking-national-us-lacs-combined-usnews-method.html</a>)</p>
<p>However, there will always be outliers who don’t fit the prevailing pattern (especially among borderline applicants applying to peer schools). Maybe Heidegger’s acquaintance submitted his worst essay to Hopkins. Who knows?</p>
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<p>The CDS instructions state, “report information for those students from whom you collected high school rank information” and “report information only for those students from whom you collected high school GPA”. Only 38% of 2010-11 enrolled Reed students submitted rank information. 85% submitted GPA, but the CDS instructions for calculating GPA and rank appear to be very limited (unless colleges see instructions that are not contained in the published CDS). </p>
<p>So is Reed mis-reporting its numbers? Purposely? Or is it simply reporting the numbers it has available, using somebody’s best judgement of how they should be processed absent clear instructions from the CDS?</p>
<p>btw: two years ago, Reed reported that only 59% of its matriculants were in the top decile of their graduating class. It sure does lead one to question the validity of that 3.9, does it not?</p>
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<p>Do you really believe that Reed has two admissions pools that radically different: those that submit a class rank and those that do not? </p>
<p>But in any event, do the math. How does even 30% reporting rank with ~60% top decile yield a total class mean of 3.9? It is even statistically possible?</p>
<p>I don’t see why HS average GPA matters so much or why we care what Reed reported. HS grades can be pretty arbitrary outside of AP classes. </p>
<p>@bluebayou, maybe they changed UW gpa to weighted GPA?</p>
<p>Different kinds of schools in different regions have different demographics and performance patterns. Reed has racked up high average SATs for many years. It would not surprise me if it attracts students with GPAs that are high relative to some peer schools. Then why is the class rank lower? Yes, it does look a little odd … though I would not leap to the conclusion that Reed deliberately mis-reports inflated numbers. </p>
<p>But let’s not compare Reed to Princeton, or to the UCs. Compare it to Whitman (another selective LAC in the Pacific NW). According to Whitman’s CDS, 62% of its students ranked in the top decile (with 61% of students reporting rank). PR reports Whitman’s GPA as 3.8. Is it plausible that Reed’s average GPA is .1 higher than Whitman’s? I think it is (this seems consistent with the test score differences, anyway).</p>
<p>“If Reed gives PR a bogus number (weighted, for example, when the directions clearly say uw) …”</p>
<p>For the record, where are these “directions” given? </p>
<p>Weighted is the only reasonable measure, and Reed says their GPA numbers are weighted, e.g.:
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