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GPA is problematic because not all high schools have access to the elite courses that push a GPA beyond 4.0 and many top schools look for an admission barrier a

by TimPC 4y ago

GPA is problematic because not all high schools have access to the elite courses that push a GPA beyond 4.0 and many top schools look for an admission barrier around 4.5 (some with exceptions for valedictorians only).

tssva 4y ago
These days to avoid this problem most schools normalize GPA's before looking at them for admission.
solveit 4y ago
This points to the real problem with GPA. The institution assigning GPAs to students have a strong incentive to inflate GPAs. If colleges only looked at GPAs, high schools would inevitably give in to the temptation to give away perfect scores like candy, and students from schools retaining some shred of dignity would suffer for it. Standardized exams, for all their faults, are standardized, and don't have this problem.
- trinovantes 4y ago
  We don't have SAT in Canada and mostly rely on high school grades. Most universities/colleges adjust student GPAs on a per high school basis based on alumni performance in their first year courses. I personally prefer the GPA system as it measures your performance over your final 2 years of high school rather than having your future determined by one test.
  - JamesianP 4y ago
    You can retake the test as many times as you want. Some schools average them, others will take the highest. The whole point of creating the test(s) in the first place were to deal with variability of GPA's between schools, so it's a bit useless to say "just adjust GPA's between schools instead". In the US now we have federal school testing to try and normalize schools better. But before that many schools were graduate students that were illiterate (actually some still are, but I hope it's gotten better..). The US is 10x the population of Canada so image the difficulty for a liberal arts school in the northeast looking at a student from some rural 500-person school they've never heard of from the southwest.
    - trinovantes 4y ago
      Adjusting GPA between schools is one approach to deal with grade inflation between schools. SAT is just another approach with its own tradeoffs. I've simply listed why I prefer the former over the latter approach. Canada's population is smaller but we also have many obscure rural schools. Non-prestigious universities don't have much data but they also don't have much choice in top applicants so it doesn't really matter. Over time, they can build up decently accurate profiles of high schools for majority of applicants.
      - JamesianP 4y ago
        They do a regression that includes both GPA and SAT. That is mathematically an adjustment of grades, where the adjustment is the SAT term. Then, as articles such as this one show, this correction correlates well with success at the university. So ultimately it becomes the same correction you want.
        trinovantes 4y ago
        It would be interesting to see a study that compares SAT scores vs alumni performance to see which one has a better correlation with success to use for said adjustment
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      It's been many decades since I took the SAT (3x, at ages 11, 12, and 16), but I seem to recall that I had a choice of which schools to share my SAT results with, such that a school that only ever saw my age 16 SAT test couldn't possibly average in the other two scores.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    It creates bad outcomes where students retake classes in the summers as a profession and game the system. It also puts you at a disadvantage if you come from an immigrant area or poor area where your 90% will not count as highly as someone with 60% from the richest areas with a trackwork of success. It really punishes anyone not rich and locks them out of elite universities and pushes most of the poor out of average universities. A single test where everyone can study and pass seems more fair than basing it on things that can be impossible to change like where you grew up
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - trinovantes 4y ago
      Said test can also bias against the poor depending on how it's created. It can ask questions based on subtleties that only private schools/tutors have the time to cover or on life experiences that only upper middle class realistically have experienced. Neither system is perfect but I think the purely SAT approach creates too much unnecessary stress for high school students when there are other proxies for determining future success.
  - hardware2win 4y ago
    Tests are fair Grades can be easily biased
  - yardie 4y ago
    > your future determined by one test. There is nothing stopping you from taking the SATs multiple times. It's encouraged because you most likely will go up a few points the 2nd pass. I've taken it twice myself, 3 times if you include the PSAT. And I also took the ACT, only once. GPAs you can only screw up once. If you fail even one class it's impossible to climb back to the top.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > If colleges only looked at GPAs, high schools would inevitably give in to the temptation to give away perfect scores like candy, and students from schools retaining some shred of dignity would suffer for it. All three of these things are already happening. For example, the Cal State University system has purely objective admissions for most campuses. That's good! But while they technically consider SAT scores, the last time I looked the difference in admissions points between a minimum SAT score and a maximum SAT score was roughly equal to the difference between a 2.0 GPA and a 3.0.
- TuringNYC 4y ago
  > This points to the real problem with GPA. The institution assigning GPAs to students have a strong incentive to inflate GPAs. I think it is even worse -- the inflation is not universal. At Cornell (undergrad), most engineering classes set the mean to B- or C+. You had to go 1SD higher to get to A- and near 2SD to get A+. Imagine how shocked I was to hear my friends at Princeton had a mean set to A-. Consider the pressure this puts on some students and not others, esp when you're all applying to the same graduate programs. Is a Cornell B+ worth more than a Princeton A-? Statistically yes, but in reality no one is harmonizing the distributions. There is also the issue of fancy private prep schools which have 10 or 15 "Valedictorians" which many of us public school students were shocked to learn when we arrived at college. You'd meet multiple people claiming to be valedictorian from the same school's graduating class until you learn that private prep schools stretch the meaning of valedictorian. Some reason life lessons: pay enough and you get to bend the rules. Some reason life lessons: more elite, less pressure.
scarmig 4y ago
Another reason GPA is problematic: it's sexist. Male students face structural barriers when it comes to college acceptance, to the point where a woman is ~50% more likely to get a college admission. Male students tend to both score higher on average on the SATs and have a higher variance. Deemphasizing SATs in favor of GPA (which itself is a discriminatory measure-- teachers systemically show bias against boys when it comes to grades, particularly boys of color) is exacerbating the structural barriers boys face when it comes to attending university.
- kbelder 4y ago
  It might not be sexist; it might be that boys deserve lower GPAs because they tend to be worse at classwork. I say that as a boy who was worse at classwork.
  - sahila 4y ago
    If it's as you say systemic that boys do worse at classwork, then continuing to use that (a la GPAs) as an admissions criteria _is_ sexist. It would be akin to having a pull-up competition determining admissions knowing full well boys perform better than girls.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - celtain 4y ago
      But classwork is what you'll have to do in college anyway. It's not the admissions criteria that's the problem, it's the format of undergraduate higher education itself. A pull-up competition is a perfectly valid test if the job/program requires exactly that kind of upper body strength.
      - lupire 4y ago
        The #1 difference between college and HS curriculum is that colleges have far far less classwork.
olliej 4y ago
Seriously, schools in Palo Alto or Stanford itself, producing GPA>4 only means that they’re cooking the numbers by giving some courses a greater than 4 average. I think the correct thing is to require schools to publish their minimum and maximum grades, and then everyone can just scale that range as appropriate - because why should some kid going to Stanford get to report a 4.0 GPA when they’ve got low grades, but a kid at CSUEB has to report something lower because they’re a state school that can’t invent new grades? From my personal experience, my GPA when I graduated was 8.7 or something, which at least makes it clear that I’m not on the same scale as you might normally think - whereas a 3.9 from Stanford might seem really good but is bolstered by courses with >4 scores. An extreme would be if you heard someone from my school talk about a 3.9GPA, which if IIRC would imply an average grade in the region of 60% (and yes you could in principle go negative, but that would get you on the “let’s talk about whether uni is right for you” list with the uni admin)
- dieselgate 4y ago
  Is that a typo or did you actually have an 8.7 gpa? I don’t understand how that’d be possible
  - olliej 4y ago
    Which is entirely the point I was making - having anything based on GPA requires that the GPA have an agreed range, and a bunch of private universities in the US have decided to give students >4.0 GPAs - now if you see someone with a "4.5 GPA" you immediately know they're cooking the books, but a person can also have a 3.9 GPA with a bunch of bad grades countered by a few >4 grades. My university's GPA was (IIRC) -2..9 or something where 9=A+, 8=A, 7=A-, etc but that wasn't used in any externally facing mechanism, because a GPA as a single score is not useful outside of the school administration. Single average GPAs aren't remotely robust enough to warrant any kind of external value, and they actively discourage any course experimentation because if you are wanting to do anything GPA gated you cannot risk anything that you don't already know you'll get a high grade in.
    - dieselgate 4y ago
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> GPA is problematic because not all high schools have access to the elite courses that push a GPA beyond 4.0 and many top schools look for an admission barrier around 4.5 FYI, they rate according to the school's scale. This knowledge is shared. You don't think they'd notice if every single candidate from specific schools never got higher than a 4.0? :)
- Spooky23 4y ago
  They also weight schools differently. Shitty high schools + good scores let you avoid all of those cello lessons.
- listenallyall 4y ago
  There are thousands of high schools, and for each college, most applications come from a relatively small group (usually based on geography, while for elite schools, a set of top "feeders"). So to answer your question, no, most colleges are only familiar with the scale of a small percentage of schools.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
listenallyall 4y ago
I'd say the GPA is problematic because it's often a "weakest link" measure rather than focusing on strengths that a person can leverage for success. By that I mean, a GPA can easily be dragged down by a lack of interest in one or two mandatory subjects. A student can be a brilliant scientist who aces those classes but simply isn't very interested in world history or Catcher in the Rye or conjugating verbs in a foreign language. Or the opposite -- loves English and History and Arts but simply has no aptitude for geometry or physics. So these individuals graduate with 3.2 while others who are ok but not excellent at anything manage a 3.8.
atdrummond 4y ago
Admissions departments re-norm GPAs and many of the best high schools do not engage in grade weighting.
empyrrhicist 4y ago
Also, grade inflation is real and not uniformly distributed.

by TimPC 4y ago

tssva 4y ago

These days to avoid this problem most schools normalize GPA's before looking at them for admission.

solveit 4y ago

This points to the real problem with GPA. The institution assigning GPAs to students have a strong incentive to inflate GPAs. If colleges only looked at GPAs, high schools would inevitably give in to the temptation to give away perfect scores like candy, and students from schools retaining some shred of dignity would suffer for it. Standardized exams, for all their faults, are standardized, and don't have this problem.

trinovantes 4y ago
We don't have SAT in Canada and mostly rely on high school grades. Most universities/colleges adjust student GPAs on a per high school basis based on alumni performance in their first year courses. I personally prefer the GPA system as it measures your performance over your final 2 years of high school rather than having your future determined by one test.
- JamesianP 4y ago
  You can retake the test as many times as you want. Some schools average them, others will take the highest. The whole point of creating the test(s) in the first place were to deal with variability of GPA's between schools, so it's a bit useless to say "just adjust GPA's between schools instead". In the US now we have federal school testing to try and normalize schools better. But before that many schools were graduate students that were illiterate (actually some still are, but I hope it's gotten better..). The US is 10x the population of Canada so image the difficulty for a liberal arts school in the northeast looking at a student from some rural 500-person school they've never heard of from the southwest.
  - trinovantes 4y ago
    Adjusting GPA between schools is one approach to deal with grade inflation between schools. SAT is just another approach with its own tradeoffs. I've simply listed why I prefer the former over the latter approach. Canada's population is smaller but we also have many obscure rural schools. Non-prestigious universities don't have much data but they also don't have much choice in top applicants so it doesn't really matter. Over time, they can build up decently accurate profiles of high schools for majority of applicants.
    - JamesianP 4y ago
      They do a regression that includes both GPA and SAT. That is mathematically an adjustment of grades, where the adjustment is the SAT term. Then, as articles such as this one show, this correction correlates well with success at the university. So ultimately it becomes the same correction you want.
      - trinovantes 4y ago
        It would be interesting to see a study that compares SAT scores vs alumni performance to see which one has a better correlation with success to use for said adjustment
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    It's been many decades since I took the SAT (3x, at ages 11, 12, and 16), but I seem to recall that I had a choice of which schools to share my SAT results with, such that a school that only ever saw my age 16 SAT test couldn't possibly average in the other two scores.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  It creates bad outcomes where students retake classes in the summers as a profession and game the system. It also puts you at a disadvantage if you come from an immigrant area or poor area where your 90% will not count as highly as someone with 60% from the richest areas with a trackwork of success. It really punishes anyone not rich and locks them out of elite universities and pushes most of the poor out of average universities. A single test where everyone can study and pass seems more fair than basing it on things that can be impossible to change like where you grew up
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - trinovantes 4y ago
    Said test can also bias against the poor depending on how it's created. It can ask questions based on subtleties that only private schools/tutors have the time to cover or on life experiences that only upper middle class realistically have experienced. Neither system is perfect but I think the purely SAT approach creates too much unnecessary stress for high school students when there are other proxies for determining future success.
- hardware2win 4y ago
  Tests are fair Grades can be easily biased
- yardie 4y ago
  > your future determined by one test. There is nothing stopping you from taking the SATs multiple times. It's encouraged because you most likely will go up a few points the 2nd pass. I've taken it twice myself, 3 times if you include the PSAT. And I also took the ACT, only once. GPAs you can only screw up once. If you fail even one class it's impossible to climb back to the top.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> If colleges only looked at GPAs, high schools would inevitably give in to the temptation to give away perfect scores like candy, and students from schools retaining some shred of dignity would suffer for it. All three of these things are already happening. For example, the Cal State University system has purely objective admissions for most campuses. That's good! But while they technically consider SAT scores, the last time I looked the difference in admissions points between a minimum SAT score and a maximum SAT score was roughly equal to the difference between a 2.0 GPA and a 3.0.
TuringNYC 4y ago
> This points to the real problem with GPA. The institution assigning GPAs to students have a strong incentive to inflate GPAs. I think it is even worse -- the inflation is not universal. At Cornell (undergrad), most engineering classes set the mean to B- or C+. You had to go 1SD higher to get to A- and near 2SD to get A+. Imagine how shocked I was to hear my friends at Princeton had a mean set to A-. Consider the pressure this puts on some students and not others, esp when you're all applying to the same graduate programs. Is a Cornell B+ worth more than a Princeton A-? Statistically yes, but in reality no one is harmonizing the distributions. There is also the issue of fancy private prep schools which have 10 or 15 "Valedictorians" which many of us public school students were shocked to learn when we arrived at college. You'd meet multiple people claiming to be valedictorian from the same school's graduating class until you learn that private prep schools stretch the meaning of valedictorian. Some reason life lessons: pay enough and you get to bend the rules. Some reason life lessons: more elite, less pressure.

scarmig 4y ago

Another reason GPA is problematic: it's sexist. Male students face structural barriers when it comes to college acceptance, to the point where a woman is ~50% more likely to get a college admission. Male students tend to both score higher on average on the SATs and have a higher variance. Deemphasizing SATs in favor of GPA (which itself is a discriminatory measure-- teachers systemically show bias against boys when it comes to grades, particularly boys of color) is exacerbating the structural barriers boys face when it comes to attending university.

kbelder 4y ago
It might not be sexist; it might be that boys deserve lower GPAs because they tend to be worse at classwork. I say that as a boy who was worse at classwork.
- sahila 4y ago
  If it's as you say systemic that boys do worse at classwork, then continuing to use that (a la GPAs) as an admissions criteria _is_ sexist. It would be akin to having a pull-up competition determining admissions knowing full well boys perform better than girls.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - celtain 4y ago
    But classwork is what you'll have to do in college anyway. It's not the admissions criteria that's the problem, it's the format of undergraduate higher education itself. A pull-up competition is a perfectly valid test if the job/program requires exactly that kind of upper body strength.
    - lupire 4y ago
      The #1 difference between college and HS curriculum is that colleges have far far less classwork.

olliej 4y ago

Seriously, schools in Palo Alto or Stanford itself, producing GPA>4 only means that they’re cooking the numbers by giving some courses a greater than 4 average. I think the correct thing is to require schools to publish their minimum and maximum grades, and then everyone can just scale that range as appropriate - because why should some kid going to Stanford get to report a 4.0 GPA when they’ve got low grades, but a kid at CSUEB has to report something lower because they’re a state school that can’t invent new grades? From my personal experience, my GPA when I graduated was 8.7 or something, which at least makes it clear that I’m not on the same scale as you might normally think - whereas a 3.9 from Stanford might seem really good but is bolstered by courses with >4 scores. An extreme would be if you heard someone from my school talk about a 3.9GPA, which if IIRC would imply an average grade in the region of 60% (and yes you could in principle go negative, but that would get you on the “let’s talk about whether uni is right for you” list with the uni admin)

dieselgate 4y ago
Is that a typo or did you actually have an 8.7 gpa? I don’t understand how that’d be possible
- olliej 4y ago
  Which is entirely the point I was making - having anything based on GPA requires that the GPA have an agreed range, and a bunch of private universities in the US have decided to give students >4.0 GPAs - now if you see someone with a "4.5 GPA" you immediately know they're cooking the books, but a person can also have a 3.9 GPA with a bunch of bad grades countered by a few >4 grades. My university's GPA was (IIRC) -2..9 or something where 9=A+, 8=A, 7=A-, etc but that wasn't used in any externally facing mechanism, because a GPA as a single score is not useful outside of the school administration. Single average GPAs aren't remotely robust enough to warrant any kind of external value, and they actively discourage any course experimentation because if you are wanting to do anything GPA gated you cannot risk anything that you don't already know you'll get a high grade in.
  - dieselgate 4y ago

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> GPA is problematic because not all high schools have access to the elite courses that push a GPA beyond 4.0 and many top schools look for an admission barrier around 4.5 FYI, they rate according to the school's scale. This knowledge is shared. You don't think they'd notice if every single candidate from specific schools never got higher than a 4.0? :)

Spooky23 4y ago
They also weight schools differently. Shitty high schools + good scores let you avoid all of those cello lessons.
listenallyall 4y ago
There are thousands of high schools, and for each college, most applications come from a relatively small group (usually based on geography, while for elite schools, a set of top "feeders"). So to answer your question, no, most colleges are only familiar with the scale of a small percentage of schools.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

listenallyall 4y ago

I'd say the GPA is problematic because it's often a "weakest link" measure rather than focusing on strengths that a person can leverage for success. By that I mean, a GPA can easily be dragged down by a lack of interest in one or two mandatory subjects. A student can be a brilliant scientist who aces those classes but simply isn't very interested in world history or Catcher in the Rye or conjugating verbs in a foreign language. Or the opposite -- loves English and History and Arts but simply has no aptitude for geometry or physics. So these individuals graduate with 3.2 while others who are ok but not excellent at anything manage a 3.8.

atdrummond 4y ago

Admissions departments re-norm GPAs and many of the best high schools do not engage in grade weighting.

empyrrhicist 4y ago

Also, grade inflation is real and not uniformly distributed.