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Re: Concerned about grades (longish)



Much has changed after all, as ME reminds me! The only HS std. test I remember was the CEEB one and I don't remember taking it! After acceptance to UCSBC (now UCSB), All took the Thurston, and I
got ~ 98/99 percentile in the Eng. and ! ~65 in the math. The Phys dept. expected me to flunk out (of Phys.). I got the top grade in the final (of ~50) in intro phys. (Halliday and R.) and C's in
Frosh. Eng.. So much for Thurstone for prediction. (I did get a B in UD Chaucer, which Gore "flunked" at Harvard.)

Out here one can "earn" > 4.0 by taking adv. placement courses. This is extremely discriminating as the "poorer" districts don't offer them. The politicians are making noises about correcting this.

I cannot understand a grading scheme (or granting) that results in so many getting all A's. It's like a crime against nature (and the CLT). No having ME's son's problem is the only "up side" I've
found for not having children!

Let us pray that U. admissions officers soon treat grades like, what they are, worthless. (This sentence is difficult to punctuate, help! -- as not like?)

bc

P.s. A reply w/o reading later msgs.

Michael Edmiston wrote:

Like Bernard Cleyet, I have not been following this thread real closely, but
he said something that struck a raw nerve in me when he mentioned admission
rates.

At Bluffton College we believe the ACT or SAT score is one of the best
predictors of how a student will fair in college. The HS GPA is almost
worthless, especially for comparing a student from one school with a student
from another school. However, a predictor that is based upon the GPA, but
used to work, is the HS rank. The "top students" at one school were often
comparable to the top students at another school, even if their GPAs were
not the same. Perhaps more important, the rank often indicated willingness
to work and also some measure of competitiveness. Therefore, students who
aimed for the top in high school often aimed for the top in college as well.
So the ACT/SAT score along with the class rank used to be a real good
predictor.

Notice the previous paragraph was written in past tense. Today grade
inflation has gotten so bad in high school there are too many 4.00 students.
This means the class rank doesn't work any more as an indicator. Suppose
there are 200 students in the graduating class and 25 of them graduate with
perfect 4.00. That means a student with a 3.99 GPA can rank no higher than
26/200 or about 87%. That means this 3.99 GPA student didn't even graduate
in the top 10% of her class.

At this point colleges are trying to decide what to do. We have typically
used class rank to help decide what scholarship level to award, but we are
seeing some pretty good ACT/SAT scores, plus good GPA, but very low class
rank. We assume this means the school had a flood of 4.00 graduates.

The reason this strikes a raw nerve for me is it "cheated" my son. He
graduated from HS last year. He was a good student but did not always
strive for the A. He graduated with a 3.8 GPA and got a 29 composite on the
ACT exam (he only took it once). This would indicate he is not outstanding,
but pretty good, and he ought to qualify for some scholarships. However, in
his graduating class of 104 students there were 26 students with 4.00 GPA,
and a few more above 3.9 (they got one B). Because my son got about 5 Bs in
high school (mostly in the freshman year) he ended up with a GPA of 3.8 and
a class rank of 70%. He not only didn't graduate in the top 10%, he didn't
even graduate in the top 25%. That knocked him out of just about every
scholarship category at every college. Yet he had one of the highest ACT
scores at his school (I think he had the third or fourth highest ACT score
in his class).

If ACT/SAT scores mean anything, then here we had a student in the top 5% of
his class as measured by ACT, but not even in the top 25% of his class as
measured by GPA. Almost all of the 4.00 students had lower ACT scores than
my son. How did they get 4.00 GPA? Partly because of tremendous grade
inflation, and partly because to get the grades the teachers assigned a fair
amount of "busy work" that my son sometimes refused to do, especially in his
freshman year.

I am not proud of him for skipping some assignments he thought were
worthless. Nonetheless, I am bothered that students with less aptitude were
able to get 4.00 GPA by completing busy-work assignments, and in doing so
knocked my son out of competition for scholarships.

When a school has 25% of its graduates getting 4.00 GPA, something is wrong,
and our Admissions Director says we are seeing this more and more, and my
son's school is certainly not unusual.

Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D. Phone/voice-mail: 419-358-3270
Professor of Chemistry & Physics FAX: 419-358-3323
Chairman, Science Department E-Mail edmiston@bluffton.edu
Bluffton College
280 West College Avenue
Bluffton, OH 45817

Benard Cleyet said...

<snip>

P.s. Also HS's by reputation gain admission of their students. especially
from private schools to private U's. The college advisor at my school told
me that their recommendations to MIT, Cal Tech,
Harvard, Stanford, etc. had never been turned down -- though this school has
changed much (many more foreign students, five times larger grad. class,
and co-ed!) I doubt that that this has changed.
Then the top two or three (of a class of 8) got a full scholarship anywhere
in the US.