WSJ: Why Colleges Scoff At Your Kid's GPA
Abe Kohen
Universities Devise Formulas To Assess High-School Marks
By ANNE MARIE CHAKER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
High-school students place a lot of weight on their grade-point averages.
But they may be interested to know that many colleges increasingly don't.
The problem is that GPAs -- always somewhat erratic because curriculums
differ so much -- have in some cases become almost meaningless as high
schools experiment with a raft of ways to measure students. Some, worried
about putting their students at a disadvantage with college admissions
offices, give extra weight to grades in more difficult or advanced-placement
courses. Other schools, in a nod to political correctness, are either loath
to measure students at all with traditional grades or have developed their
own creative way of assessing them.
To try to cut through this hodgepodge, colleges around the country are
coming up with their own formulas to recalculate each applicant's GPA. One
strategy -- used by Emory University and the University of California
system, among others -- is to drop the pluses and minuses alongside letter
grades. (So a B-plus in trigonometry becomes a B.) Another approach is to
disregard the applicant's entire freshman year of high school. Some schools,
like Haverford College in Pennsylvania, now go a step further -- throwing
out the GPA altogether and relying instead on the student's class rank.
In short, many colleges are changing how they approach GPAs, and in a
surprising variety of ways. The upshot is that it is now often impossible
for students to assess the admissions power of their grades unless they know
the system used by each college they are applying to. Colleges say that in
most cases, GPAs wind up dropping after the recalculation. So for some
high-school students, a 4.0 might be worth far less than they thought.
The high-school transcript of a student with lots of pluses next to his
grades, for example, could mean more to Johns Hopkins, which takes those
shades into account in its recalculation. At Carnegie Mellon, by contrast,
"an A is an A is an A," says Michael Steidel, director of admissions,
regardless whether there was a plus or a minus alongside it.
In addition, since colleges like Emory don't give credit in their formula
for difficult courses, it may not make sense for a student already taking a
decent dose of APs to overload on them and risk a low grade.
Of course, none of this in any way means that high-school grades don't
matter. Even where colleges don't take course difficulty into account in the
calculation itself, that doesn't mean they aren't checking how many honors
classes a student is taking. Many colleges continue to look more favorably
on applicants who take challenging classes, even if they don't factor that
into their GPA formula.
In the past couple of years, Johns Hopkins began recalculating GPA by
throwing out "non-academic" courses like art or music, unless such a course
shows academic rigor, as in advanced-placement art history or AP studio art.
(One recent applicant's transcript included an A in lacrosse -- needless to
say, that didn't make the cut.) Johns Hopkins, as well as the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor and Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, also throws out all
freshman-year marks.
Some colleges, including Georgetown University and Haverford, don't bother
recalculating GPAs. Instead, they ignore it altogether, instead focusing on
class rank. One hitch to this approach is that many high schools are
abandoning the practice of ranking students; in a recent study, over half of
high schools said they no longer do so.
But that doesn't stop college admissions officers from considering that
measure. Rob Killion, director of admission at Haverford, says that in the
absence of a ranking, he may have to "guesstimate" how those students placed
in the class. "Sometimes that hurts the applicants," he says, since his
guess is usually conservative.
When Shahzad Khan was sending applications to colleges last fall, he thought
he was a shoo-in at the University of Michigan. He had taken over a dozen
college-level classes at his Memphis, Tenn., prep school, and his GPA put
him in the top 20% of his class. But in the end, he didn't get in. He now
says he wishes he knew that the college was recalculating GPAs.
While colleges often don't publicize the details of these formulas, students
should simply ask colleges point-blank whether and how they do the
recalculations. In the case of courses such as art or religion, which may
not be counted in the GPA formulas, students can ask their high-school
counselors to write a letter vouching for its credibility as a rigorous
course. It carries sway with some schools.
"When in doubt, we typically include [a course]," says Mr. Steidel at
Carnegie Mellon.
The GPA, for all its foibles, remains a fixture at high schools. In a recent
survey by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, 91% of
secondary schools reported that they calculated grade point averages for
their students. Of those, 75% reported that they gave extra weight to harder
classes, or "weighted" GPAs.
In large part, the GPA policies are simply a response by colleges to the
growing variance among high schools in how they grade. For example, Taft
School, a boarding school in Watertown, Conn., favors a six-point scale for
its GPA -- rather than the traditional four-point scale. Other high schools,
like St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., use descriptive phrasing to
distinguish merit, such as "high honors" or "honors," instead of A's and
B's.
Governor Livingston High School, in Berkeley Heights, N.J., even uses an "E"
grade to "soften the blow" of failing a course, says Jane Webber Runte, the
guidance director there.
But as more colleges come up with new GPA formulas, some high schools are
now following their lead. Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, Mass.,
for instance, is now moving away from giving extra weight for harder
courses. The school hopes that doing so will lead colleges to look more clos
ely at the total transcripts of its students, says Peter Gow, the school's
academic dean.
Grade Deflation
Some of the formulas that colleges are using to recalculate applicants'
grade point averages.
Amherst College
Amherst, Mass
Looks at various factors, but in the context of the school it's coming from.
"There are places where an A means a whole lot and places where an A doesn't
mean a lot at all," says Tom Parker, dean of admission and financial aid.
Columbia University
New York
Doesn't do any recalculation of the GPA.
Emory University
Atlanta
Gives credit for chorus, band and art classes, but not for gym and health.
Also strips out the pluses and minuses alongside grades.
Haverford College
Haverford, Pa.
Uses class rank instead of GPA.
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore
Discards freshman year grades, as well as certain art or music courses
(religion sometimes makes the cut).
MIT
Cambridge, Mass.
Recently moved to a new system where the admissions office takes the GPA and
compares it to the highest GPA in the class; also looks at class rank.
University of California
Recalculation of GPA only includes grades from core courses (history and
English count, home economics doesn't); offers extra points for up to eight
honors courses.
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor*
Admissions office "scrubs" GPA to focus on grades 10 and 11, and to include
core courses such as science and math. Certain computer and religion courses
may also pass muster.
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill
"We take at face value what the school gives us and record it," says Jerry
Lucido, director of admissions.
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia
Only counts "solid-level courses," which include math, English, social
studies, foreign languages and science.
Yale University
New Haven, Conn.
Doesn't recalculate. Rather, "to the best of our ability, our officers just
have to understand the nature of the school and their reporting structure,"
says Richard Shaw, dean of admissions and financial aid.
*Some of the details of the recalculation may change following the recent
Supreme Court ruling on admissions practices
Copyright 2003 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
octo
An A+ was the most prized grade in an academic class when I was
studying upteen decades ago. Usually it was awarded only to a student
who demonstrated extraordinary understand of a topic/concept. Throwing
out A+ and equalize it to an A/A- amounts to categoring Barry Bonds as
just a major baseball player.
I dare to say that those universities, that weighted an A+ distinction
the same as an ordinary A, should re-examine the credentials of their
gate keepers.
"Abe Kohen" <ako...@xenon.stanford.edu> wrote in message news:<bfpvrl$hlrkl$1...@ID-102750.news.uni-berlin.de>...
Joshua P. Hill
>Abe,
>
>An A+ was the most prized grade in an academic class when I was
>studying upteen decades ago. Usually it was awarded only to a student
>who demonstrated extraordinary understand of a topic/concept. Throwing
>out A+ and equalize it to an A/A- amounts to categoring Barry Bonds as
>just a major baseball player.
>
>I dare to say that those universities, that weighted an A+ distinction
>the same as an ordinary A, should re-examine the credentials of their
>gate keepers.
It seems a very peculiar procedure to me, too. Why discard gradations?
One only discards accuracy in the process.
Josh
liam...@yahoo.com
But the fact is that the gradations is mere static, A in one school
may not be as good as B or even C in another school.
Joshua P. Hill
While it's common practice to round experimental results to retain
only those digits that are significant, in this case the error is a
systematic one, and of a magnitude that rounding the result to account
for it would make the measurement useless. The only way to account for
an error of that sort is to compensate for the systematic bias of the
measurement, e.g., by taking into account difficulty of courses,
average test scores and grades for the school, and prior experience
with that school's graduates. I suppose that you could argue that even
with correction, a certain degree of random error remains, but I'm not
sure how you can estimate the magnitude of that, and it seems to me
best to avoid discarding information that /might/ be meaningful.
Josh