@slimmy You write a mythical 5.2 GPA student.
Back in my day (the stone ages/1980’s) the top GPA was a 4.0. Getting a 4.0 was somewhat rare, but every school had 1 or 2, sometimes 4 or 5. Almost anybody who had a 4.0 also took honors or if available AP classes – that is just what you did back then. We had “tracks”, and if you got all A’s, well, you were moved up to the highest track. The top 5-10 students in the class occasionally went to an Ivy or an elite LAC, but more likely went to the local public school with a full ride merit scholarship.
Using weighted scores is distorting, because that means every school is on a different scoring system. When scores are on different scales, they can neither be compared nor averaged. As a researcher who understands statistics, I can tell you that when I see a rating over 4.0 as a GPA, my initial thought is “wow, that is a meaningless number” rather than, “wow, that is impressive”. I have never seen a single cogent explanation as to how weighting grades, such as adding one or two points for a course that is taught with a single minded purpose of passing an AP test, leads to a more accurate prediction of a college performance. compared to just using unweighted grades. Furthermore, there is such grade inflation in at most high schools, that even an unweighted 4.0 might indicate a hard-working, yet intellectually average, student. (This comes from direct experience, having taught at the college level extensively.) For example, I had one grad student who came in to our program with a 4.0 in high school and college – never had a B in his life. He just could not learn statistics. I had to run all the stats for his masters thesis. In other academic areas he was mediocre. Not by any means a brilliant student, not a creative thinker, actually, not quick at all, but he sure was tenacious.
Let’s add discussion of the SATs. The SATs were “recentered” in the 1990’s, because the test was bottom heavy (too few students were receiving high scores.) Then, the entire test was reconfigured a number of times. At this juncture, SATs have been watered down and inflated such that they are considerably easier then they were in the 1980’s. Now, 1% of test takers score over a 1500 in a single sitting. If we add in superscores, we have (I speculate) over 2%, perhaps 3% with these scores over 1500. Some of those students are very good test takers, some are super-prepared, and some are truly brilliant. Some took the test multiple times to achieve an ideal score. So, how to distinguish them? CMU wants the innovators and thinkers – not the grinds who take 300 practice tests. But how to find them? This is the challenge for the adcoms – and no, taking your suggestion of doubling down on high test scores and high grades will not cut it. THIS is the reason for holistic admissions. Because the grinds who study their SAT book every night are not going to be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow. Someday they are just going to be better paid grinds in a 9-5 job – like my 4.0 student mentioned above.
Finally, with your “1390 SAT female taking the space of the [deserving] 1550 male” statement, you are just inventing straw data to support your argument. I guess this is a common tactic in today’s media, and so you are emulating what you see. So learn this lesson – Made up numbers do not magically turn into data. Please point me to the actual data that demonstrates any single woman or group of women with a 1390 SAT took the “space” of a male (or group of males) with a 1590. I would like to see that… as I have read the common data set with some scrutiny and I cannot find any data to indicate that the quality of students has degraded since the university started to push towards gender equity.
You may think that if only you were female you might have gotten into a better college. But, given your argument style, that is probably incorrect. Your “entitled” attitude probably would have leaked out onto the essays, and you still would have had denials.