Marty Weiss asked why HS class rank is high on the list of predictors for
college success but HS GPA is not high. He asks why they do not go
together.
Actually, they clearly do not go together because grade inflation, although
rampant, is not uniform. This means a person with a 3.8 GPA at one high
school could be considerably less motivated than a person with a 3.6 GPA at
another school. Literally, we see some students with 3.6 or 3.7 who are one
of the top five in a class of 300 at a school with lower grade inflation,
and we see students with 3.90 who are not in the top 10% of students of a
class of 300. The top students at the higher-inflation school all had GPA
of 4.0, 3.98, etc. such that by the time you get down to 3.90 you already
have 30 students above you. Grade inflation is that bad.
Also, academic ability and motivation of any particular class at any
particular school varies from year to year. When my son graduated from the
local high school in 2000, there was something like a 10-way tie for
valedictorian because 10 students out of a class of about 100 all had 4.0
GPA. That means a student who got one B (as a year-end average) in one
subject during during grades 9 through 12 was not in the top 10% of the
class. They named 10 valedictorians, but had to draw straws to determine
which two would be allowed to speak at commencement.
When my daughter graduated in 2004, also about 100 students, there was a
3-way tie for valedictorian. That year they let all three speak at
commencement. I do not think they reduced grade inflation between 2000 and
2004. Rather, I think my daughter's class had fewer motivated high
achievers.
Part of this high number of 4.0 GPAs at the local school is caused by a
fairly high number of students at this high school that are sons and
daughters of faculty members of the local university. We also have a high
number of public school teachers living in Bluffton who teach in public
schools within about 40 miles. But not all faculty/teacher kids are high
achievers. The biggest problem is grade inflation.
The point of this specific example of my local school is to show that
someone with a 3.7 or 3.8 GPA is actually pretty far down in class rank, and
is not really the top-notch student the GPA might indicated. In fact, I was
interested enough in this that I made a note for the 2000 graduating class
that a GPA of 3.72 was the dividing line between the top 25% and the bottom
75%. This is significant because some colleges require that you are in the
top 25% of your high school class before you can even be considered for a
scholarship. Thus, in 2000, a Bluffton HS grad with a 3.7 GPA would not
have been in the top 25% of the class.
There is pretty good evidence that this type of problem occurs everywhere,
but the specific GPA where 25% or 10% occurs is not the same from school to
school. Hence, the rank is the better indicator of motivation and/or
ability.
I think one problem with this is that some students do not get serious until
their junior year of high school when they begin to think more seriously
about college. If the student gets half A grades and half B grades as a
freshman and sophomore, then gets all A grades as a junior and senior, the
GPA is going to be about 3.75. That will knock them out of the top 10% of
the class for sure, and darn-near knocks them out of the top 25%.
Another thing that happens is that students and parents are becoming aware
of all this. Realizing how important class rank is, and realizing that some
colleges give automatic scholarships to valedictorians, some families
encourage the student to take senior math rather than pre-calculus, or to
avoid physics and chemistry. They also need activities, so they take band
and choir for credit, which is an automatic A, and many high schools count
the band/choir grades in the GPA. For this reason many college admission
departments recalculate the GPA. We do that at my institution. We
recalculate the HS GPA by looking only at the traditional academic subjects.
The recalculated GPA is often significantly lower than the HS-calculated
GPA. So far we do not distinguish whether the senior math grade was senior
math or pre-calculus or calculus, or whether the student took an easier
science instead of physics. We may need to start doing that. Our
recalculation does not affect the class rank because the HS has to determine
that. Therefore we definitely have some high-ranking students who are there
because they avoided difficult courses. It's a mess.
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Chemistry and Physics
Bluffton University
1 University Drive
Bluffton, OH 45817
419.358.3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu