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I worked in Admissions at a large state school from 2005-2007. Our method for determining admissibility reminded me of the heat map chart in this article - ie G

• insane_dreamer 4y ago
  SAT scores seem quite unfair as a single indicator of performance. GPA at least provides a view of a much wider range over which performance may naturally fluctuate.
• cammikebrown 4y ago
  I had a 3.18 GPA and a 31 ACT, is that outlying enough?
  • ajwinn 4y ago
    From a state school’s Admissions perspective, where the unit test resolves to admit/deny, there is nothing particularly outlying about your scores from what I recall. I see 31 and think, “admit”. I see 3.18, I think “probably admit”. I check your math scores (which is where a lot of people trip up), and see you got mostly Bs- heck, you’re on Hacker Mews, probably As, and I think, “admit”. Now I do the normalizing math and yeah, Admit. Congratulations!
    • wincy 4y ago
      Ooh okay okay try me. I had a 30 on my ACT my sophomore year then dropped out of high school my junior year. I was getting F’s my junior year because I couldn’t stay awake and had maybe like a 2.3 GPA before that. Would have reduced drastically if I’d stayed in school. It was only that high because some teachers were always super annoyed with me, and a lot of them would try to bend the system to give me a better grade but some just were like “homework is the grade sorry” even though I’d ace tests. Also my stepdad was doing meth so that caused issues. So am I an actual rarity?
      • ajwinn 4y ago
        You might be an outlier! But it sounds like you did not graduate high school or apply to college. If that’s correct, I would not have the context to know since the baseline of inclusion into my experience is people who graduate high school in some form - GED included, AND who provide test scores. I’m really sorry to hear about your stepdad, wincy. I hope things are ok for you now.
        • wincy 4y ago
          Things are great for me now. Thanks! I’ve got a wife and two kids and just got promoted to a SWE team lead. Mostly self taught. College just wasn’t for me.
    • tristor 4y ago
      I replied to you in another subthread, but I'm curious how you would have judged me (I'm assuming "deny"), I had a 36 on the ACT (a perfect score) and a 1.97 GPA.
      • ajwinn 4y ago
        I like to think I wasn't "judging" anyone, but I know what you mean. Because we used both GPA and test scores, yes, you almost certainly would have been a "deny" with a 36 ACT and a 1.97 GPA. If I had seen your file, it would have been the talk of the day. "Can you believe this file!" I probably would have talked to the Dean, maybe called you and given you some advice. That advice would have been something like: "Listen. Don't tell anyone I said this, but, this school is more expensive than it needs to be. Heck, who says you need college at all? But if you really want to go here, you've got two options. 1. See if you can get into the local community college for a semester or two and then transfer your credits - we won't care about your HS grades anymore. 2. AND REALLY DON'T TELL YOUR PARENTS/TEACHERS I SAID THIS You could, in theory... just get your GED. That's a loop hole around us caring about your GPA."
• TotoHorner 4y ago
  Well, I had pretty good SAT scores (2350+) and a very poor GPA (3.0/4.0). Main reason was that I just spent all my time pursuing ECs and didn't have enough time to spend on grades. Think you'll lose a lot of smart kids who spend time on ECs that way.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    That was probably more or less my college story for grad school. Very good GREs but lousy GPA in college. (And only somewhat less my story in grad school before going to the next grad school :-))
• yunyu 4y ago
  The edge cases are more common at elite institutions, which are the typical admissions mania targets. At the top ~10 university I attended, there were plenty of people (myself included) falling in the poor HS GPA bucket (mostly due to extracurriculars) with perfect or near perfect ACT/SAT scores, among other outliers.
• rootusrootus 4y ago
  I can see the value of the GPA. When I was applying to Oregon State way back in the day (this would have been early 90s), my SAT score was really great. Probably top 10 in my school. My grades, on the other hand, were sub-2.00. I may have had a problem keeping myself interested in school. But I found tests extremely easy. They rightfully told me to go to community college instead, because my GPA was abysmal. I'd have failed right out of OSU. I went to that community college and failed right out of it ;-). Then I went in the USAF, and maybe a year into that experience something clicked and suddenly I felt like an adult. I felt like my priorities realigned and I knew what I wanted and how to get there, and I could stick with it. So when I left the military, I went back to the community college, got perfect grades, convinced the admissions gal at OSU to ignore all the HS & college grades from a few years earlier, and let me in. Graduated with my bachelor's in CS with excellent grades. Ultimately went on to get my masters, though that was years later. Anyway, all of that to say ... my SAT score would have said "admit him" but my GPA was a more accurate assessment of my grit. I think both scores are useful, but don't give up on GPA.
  • 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).
    • empyrrhicist 4y ago
      Also, grade inflation is real and not uniformly distributed.
    • 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.
• mgkimsal 4y ago
  I think my HS GPA was... 2.9 or perhaps 3 (out of 4), yet I had a 29 on the ACT. The ACT score was in the 80s before some scoring model change. It's probably changed multiple times since then, but I'd learned there was a model change in 1990(?) which makes comparisons between them a bit less useful. My siblings had slightly lower scores years later, but because the model changed, there's not a lot of comparison we could make.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• balderdash 4y ago
  Out of curiosity how did you normalize for say 3.0 GPA at a competitive admissions magnet school, and a 3.0 GPA at an underperforming high school? Did you correlate pervious students from that high school and their high school gpa and their graduating gpa?
  • pirocks 4y ago
    I have long wondered about this. Note that you also need to be able to normalize grades across students who went to the same school but had different teachers. I suspect the answer is that both normalizations are hard so admissions people don't bother.
    • solveit 4y ago
      They don't not bother. They just do it by gut feel without writing anything down about how they're doing it. Admissions counselors at elite high schools "network" with admissions offices at universities to benefit their students in this process. This is common knowledge in the industry to the point that foreign elite high schools, which have a harder time getting name-recognition, spend a pretty sum of money periodically sending their representatives on month-long US trips to go around, say, the top 30 US universities to market their brand.
      • bena 4y ago
        This is true. I took the ACT on a lark my sophomore year of high school. I scored a 29. I also attended one of the top high schools in the nation. When I was registering for classes in college, my advisor kept trying to put me in Trigonometry or Pre-calculus (I can't remember). Because my ACT score in math said that's what I needed. I took the ACT while I was taking Geometry and Algebra II, so yeah, my math was probably weak. I tried explaining to them that my high school transcript shows I've taken up to Calculus. They wouldn't hear it. I refused to register for any sort of math below Calculus. Eventually, they told me to go talk to the head of the math department. I told them fine. I went down there all prepared to make my case. As I started to make my case, he saw my transcript, said "Oh, <SCHOOL NAME REDACTED>. What class do you want to take?" He didn't care about my transcript in the opposite way. I probably could have registered for 300 or 400 level math courses.
• twblalock 4y ago
  Entrance exams are a common option in other countries, and they are a good way for students who are late bloomers to get into top schools.
• hedora 4y ago
  According to the University of California’s own internal study, there is a small group of students with terrible GPAs and good test scores. They tend to do well in college. There used to be a set percentage of spots for students in that situation, but the admissions people decided that “Standardized tests are racist!” is a good twitter sound byte and eliminated the spots. Of course, their own reports said that the “bad GPA, high test score” cohort were mostly from underprivileged areas (and disproportionately black or hispanic). That nuance didn’t make the 140 character cutoff, so that group is officially abandoned by UC now. In other news, they’re now promoting a big push to make the student body composition match the general population. However, there is only one over-represented ethnic group in the UC system. Guess which one? Hint 1: Whites are under-represented. Hint 2: They swore they’d never bring back UC’s old “asian quota”. I honestly think the people running this state’s school system are malicious racists. Their results speak for themselves: California schools are currently ranked 43rd in the nation. They used to be top ten.
  • lokar 4y ago
    You jump from the UC to primary/secondary schools. They are not run by the same people. Most of the decline is due to underfunding due to prop 13
    • WillPostForFood 4y ago
      California spends about twice as much per student today (inflation adjusted) as it did before Prop 13 passed, so it doesn't track that Prop 13, or underfunding, is the cause of the poor performance.
      • JamesianP 4y ago
        All the 200+ student classes would certainly hurt them a lot though since that's a big chunk of some rankings.
        • WillPostForFood 4y ago
• scarface74 4y ago
  I just posted a comment about my step son who had stellar test scores after we spent $1200+ on a private tutor. Did he get more qualified for college than the kids who had parents who couldn’t afford private tutors?
  • ipaddr 4y ago
    Yes he is more ready to be a clog in the machine. He passed the first test. He studied enough leetcode and it doesn't matter how he got there. Will the tutor be there in college and will he be able to absorb all the information college gives are bigger questions.
    • scarface74 4y ago
      Doesn’t that argue that neither college test or the standard tech interviews are effective.
  • ajwinn 4y ago
    Excellent question. I’m of two minds here. As a high school student, I too struggled to get great test scores. I took the SAT four times, which finally resulted in a score that could get me scholarships. Did I become smarter? - I sincerely doubt it. Did I become less likely to fail out of college? …Seems unlikely, but I don’t know. As an admissions rep, I understood that high scores, whether SAT or GPA, are certainly both proxies for a prediction: If I admit this student, are they going to fail out? Unknown: It actually might be the case that students who get private tutoring are less likely to fail out because their parents can financially endure them struggling to repeat failed courses. I’d be interested to see a study on that.
    • hackinthebochs 4y ago
      Did your final score more accurately reflect your abilities? Probably. Can everyone increase their score by hundreds of points by repeated testing? Probably not.
      • 4y ago
• club_tropical 4y ago
  Was there a secondary adjustment step to finalize admit/deny? Your heatmap-based method would almost certainly result in an unacceptable racial composition of the class.
  • ajwinn 4y ago
    I worked in the underrepresented student office, so I was keenly aware/curious about that possibility when I began. However, after reviewing thousands of applications, my experience, to my surprise, was that GPA to SAT/ACT scores remained highly correlated regardless of race. If memory serves (and it’s been awhile) the outliers who were more likely to have higher SAT/ACT than their GPA normally suggested, tended to come from predominantly non-white schools. I’ve seen so many reports to the contrary that this surprised me to no end, but that’s what I observed.
    • club_tropical 4y ago
      I see your point on the GPA/test correlation and that is good in that it reflects that grade inflation wasn’t a major problem while you worked there. But my question about final admit/deny stands. If you look at the racial distribution of the upper performers of any standardized exam (your “heatmap tracing”), it is unlikely to me that a college would be fine with that class composition. Either there must be a secondary layer where your admit/deny’s are adjusted or your acceptance rate must be very high.
• dghlsakjg 4y ago
  I'm your outlier! My ACT was 34 and I can't recall my SAT score but it was also 99th percentile. My GPA on the other hand was abysmal. I can't recall, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was well below 2.5. Once I actually made it to college I was a pretty good student, though. Graduated with honors in 3.5 years.
• vamsipk 4y ago
  Sure, we can use only GPAs as long as all the applicants are graded on the same common platform. But today the GPA from one college is not exactly equivalent to the GPA from another one. The grading system as I heard is also not standard across US (leave alone international) with some instructors using absolute while others relative grading. So an A student from college X is not necessarily as good as a B student from college Y.
• Tade0 4y ago
  > With all that reviewing, patterns emerged, namely that SAT and ACT scores strongly correlate to GPA. My school experience was that it's easy to cheat during the year and much harder to do so in exams, so often people with generally good grades would do at best average at the end. I always had terrible grades(except for math), but they're not part of college admission scores in my country so I had no incentive to do anything about it.
• evrydayhustling 4y ago
  Yes, nobody is dropping test scores because they are irrelevant -- although that overreach does exist in the press. They are dropping them because they add little after GPA is considered and may introduce costs, barriers and biases. The author identifies the steel man version early on: "standardized test scores are nearly useless (at least after you know GPAs)" but then mostly ignores that parenthetical. This part that addresses it seems deliberately obtuse: > If you care about the difference in accuracy between GPA and ACT, then you should care even more about the difference between (GPA only) and (GPA plus ACT). It’s incoherent to simultaneously claim that the GPA is better than the ACT and also that the ACT doesn’t add value. Again, the version of this that reasonable people argue isn't that the ACT doesn't add any kind of value, it's that the amount and kind of value it adds (incrementally more predictive accuracy) aren't worth the costs and biases are introduced. If you myopically value accuracy, it doesn't make folks who want to balance accuracy with other goals incoherent.
• bena 4y ago
  I guess test scores are more efficient because GPAs are somewhat subjective and can be gamed to a degree. By both the school and the student. Two schools with two different grading tolerances can produce students with similar GPAs but different SAT/ACT scores. As the SAT/ACT is a national standard, not a regional one.
• anthlax 4y ago
  What do you think about GPAs being non-standard? Test scores calibrate between schools - GPAs only kind of do. I remember many classes that were taught by two separate teachers: one teacher consistently gave students higher grades. The other teachers students consistently did better on the AP test - much more strict with homework and test scores, but it ended up positively impacting the students.
  • lupire 4y ago
    Why did't the other teachers correct their grades at the end of the term?
• asimeqi 4y ago
  Short term one get can rid of test scores or GPA since they indeed seem to be correlated. But long term: 1. If we get rid of test scores, it would cause too much upward pressure on GPA which would make GPA less reliable. There are tens of thousands of high schools in the US. Even if the GPA distribution inside every high school is correct, how do you compare with GPAs from other high schools? And from experience I can predict that, once people realize that only the GPA is important, there will be outside influences (i.e. pay the teachers for good grades) that could cause even the distribution of GPA inside one school to not be correct. 2. If we get rid of GPA, students could just study for the test with obvious disastrous effects for their education. We need both GPA and test scores to keep both of them in check.
• commandlinefan 4y ago
  > to overcome his grades and emerge a genius on the SAT/ACT Isn't it usually the opposite? Artificially high GPA from grade inflation and favoritism is "set straight" by a standardized test?
• curiousllama 4y ago
  To be fair, some state schools do operate on just GPA. I recall my HS had that GPA/SAT scatterplot available for past applicants: UVA had a flat cutoff at ~4.1 weighted GPA, and the SAT literally didn't matter at all.
• 2devnull 4y ago
  Grades and gpas are based on tests too, but on crappy tests without any psychometric validity, often correlated with race and broken in a bunch of ways which standardized tests are not. How many high school math teachers run irt or dif analysis on their tests? Meanwhile, standardized testing companies spend a lot of money and energy trying to remove race from their tests. It is as though smart people have been working really hard on this problem for many decades and found an optimal solution. The solution is standardized tests.
• d0liver 4y ago
  My GPA was bottom 10ish at my high school. I graduated high school essentially because I already had most of the credits I needed to graduate from middle school. I got into college based on test scores alone (and I was surprised that this was possible). My GPA improved a bit early on in college and then improved much more around junior year once I started getting into harder classes. I ended up graduating with a math + CS double major in 4.5 years. So, sometimes people are just bored. And there are a bunch of other factors here too - perhaps the biggest one being that "graduated within six years" is not a great indicator of success. Linus Torvalds did not graduate within six years but did build the first version of Linux at university. GPA is a good indicator of how much work you're willing to put into what you're learning _now_, so it tracks well as a predictor of how much you care about GPA which is a pretty good predictor of whether you'll graduate in X years and probably not much else.
• Jerrrry 4y ago
  28 on the ACT, no studying. 1.4 GPA. I was eligible for the maximum academic grants for my state, just to be denied due to GPA because the string of high schools I went to were utter dystopian nightmares. this tracks.
  • nemo44x 4y ago
    Another problem with relying on GPA is it is easily gamed. Parents and students can pressure teachers and administrations since so much is reliant on it. And a 4.0 at one school may not be the same at another school. I understand some people "test poorly" but the truth is, if you actually know the material well, you'll test just fine in most cases. We can also coach students on how to approach testing. Other ideas are to break the test into various sessions with different admins to limit cheating potential and to take an average of the scores (or some other method) for each subject. I guess my point is - make test results the metric to remove all bias. Change how we approach testing and preparation.
    • sokoloff 4y ago
      It doesn't remove all bias. It does remove a lot of bias and concentrates the remaining bias in a particular dimension, which probably does substantially improve the fairness of the system, but we need to be clear-eyed that it's not eradicating bias.
  • matai_kolila 4y ago
    Your refusal to take responsibility for your part in that 1.4 GPA also tracks, heh...
    • Jerrrry 4y ago
      of course, but that just illustrates that GPA is less about actual academic achievement, and more about playing a revolving game of teacher's pet at best, and at worst, being another tortured cog in a horrible system of petty social games called "high school" giving any credence to GPA is upholding this hellish set of norms. K-12 should be K-9. High school is glorified babysitting, with bullying and drugs being the only escape, for both parents, teachers, and students.
• garyrob 4y ago
  My high-school GPA was mediocre because I simply was unable to pay attention in class, or to study at home, or to turn in homework that wasn't dinged over and over for "careless errors". I was born in 1956. Given today's knowledge of things like ADHD-Inattentive, I'm pretty confident that I would have been diagnosed. Some drug would probably have been prescribed, and it probably would have helped my grades (although I'm not convinced it wouldn't have hurt me in other ways). But for some reason, when I took my SATs, I found it to be fun. I got completely immersed for the period it took to take the test, and truly gave it all I had, with real focus. I got the best SAT scores in my school, which was shocking to some people. And it turned out that that was far more predictive of my future, including my college GPA performance, than my high school grades were.
• tristor 4y ago
  Interestingly, I was one of those "geniuses" that had a perfect ACT score but a horrible GPA (long story). I got rejected by every college I applied to except for the local state school, so that's where I ended up going. In the end I dropped out in my final semester and just went to work, but that's besides the point. I was more than qualified to academically excel at any university I wanted to attend, and I maintained a 3.9 GPA in college up until I dropped out. The problem with using just GPA is that GPA can easily be manipulated by school authorities who dislike you, test scores cannot.