[addendum to Superb Student essay]
I never mentioned high school grades as a metric used by Ivy League admissions committees to pick out the strongest applicants. This reflects the new world of post-2010 elite college admission. “The importance of the transcript” used to be a theme in older advice columns. It still occasionally appears, as in this 2016 Atlantic magazine piece; but today it marks the writer as not up to speed on how elite college admissions have changed. With a few exceptions, top grades don’t help the applicant much.
The reason: grade inflation is rampant. It particularly affects non-elite public schools, certainly in California. This example comes from a medium-sized (2000+ students) suburban school in coastal California, one whose overall demographics reflect the state as a whole. This high school has a good reputation, with a decent national ranking, and offers over 20 Advanced Placement courses. It’s a good school, by any number of measures. My twins got a good education there.
Here’s how I became aware that grade inflation might be a problem. By the sophomore year, it was apparent that my daughter was a strong student; or so it seemed. After her junior year, she was ranked 9th in her class of 550, she had some decent PSAT scores, and she got 4s or 5s on the five AP tests taken to that point. She had yet to receive even an A-minus in high school, much less a B. The dream of attending an elite college began to take root.
She upped her game in Fall of senior year, taking five more AP classes, out of the six in which she enrolled, on track to graduate with eleven Honors/AP classes in all. That’s an important number, because this high school, like most California public schools, uses weighted GPA to determine class rank. An A grade in an AP class counts as 5.0 in the calculations, rather than 4.0, as it would in a regular class. On the other hand, in California high schools, contrary to the practice of most colleges, an A-minus counts the same as A, equal to 4.0 in both cases; likewise B+ = B = B- = 3.0, and so forth.
My daughter had a terrific Fall semester: not only did she get As in all six courses, she got an A+ in every AP class, including calculus and microeconomics. Wow! We felt very proud.
Unfortunately, this performance caused her class rank to drop from 9th to 10th. How could that be? Simple: someone who had been tied with her for 9th place at the end of junior year, pushed ahead by taking six AP classes that Fall. In this high school, students who take multiple AP courses per term almost always get As in every single one—grade inflation. Class rank becomes a counting game: how many AP classes did you manage to jam in? Eleven AP classes left my daughter clinging to a spot in the top 10; fifteen or sixteen AP classes were required to earn the top-ranked spot (in 2016, that is; just wait until next year).
That’s grade inflation: eleven AP classes, and an unweighted GPA of 4.0—never an A-minus—barely gets you into the top ten in a class of over 500.
It’s not just this high school. If you look at admission statistics for the top UC campuses—Berkeley and UCLA—you’ll see that the 75th percentile for unweighted GPA is 4.0. Translation: one-fourth the entering class, about 1600 students each, got all As in high school.
*True, these are California GPAs, counting only grades 10-12, and scoring an A-minus same as an A; but still.
It’s my understanding that grade inflation is less of a problem at elite private high schools, and at some high end public schools (e.g., Palo Alto). The admission chances of a student at these schools may be improved by high GPA; it’s one more way students at public high schools are disadvantaged in the race to gain admission to elite colleges.
Grade inflation hurt my daughter’s chances, I believe. She’s got grit, drive, and great work habits. She might have got mostly As even absent grade inflation, and distinguished herself thereby. But as it is, her grades, no matter how high, could not distinguish her.
It’s gotten so bad, that if a local parent tells me his child is doing well as a sophomore, getting mostly As and Bs, I have to freeze my face and bite my tongue. It’s all I can do not to hiss: “with those pitiful grades he’ll be lucky to make it into any four year college.” Today it takes all As, and a dozen AP courses, even to be credible at a wellranked school. Pity.