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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. Proba

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.
  - 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.
- 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.
      - aeternum 4y ago
        Is it then more or less sexist if colleges aim to balance gender ratios (as most do)? Colleges often re-weight both GPAs and test scores based on sex, race, socioeconomic background.
      - 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.
- 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.
- tssva 4y ago
  These days to avoid this problem most schools normalize GPA's before looking at them for admission.
dehrmann 4y ago
TFA actually calls out that very high test score can be a a signal someone won't graduate.
- Gravityloss 4y ago
  But why take graduation as the target? Clearly it's not the school's mission in the world. The schools here certainly do get bonus money from the government for every person who graduates. On the other hand, companies like to employ people no matter what their degree - if they passed courses and did projects and learned useful skills in some school, that's definitely great, but graduation by itself isn't such a big thing. Then there's the whole other aspect of school, getting to know people, learning social skills, organizing events, even activism. Just as an example lot of politicians come from student politics background. If everybody just "minds their business" and "doesn't have an opinion about politics" then dictators can just seize power. So why should school intake optimize for graduation? We could get people who are really good at barely passing a large amount of narrow topic exams over a few years with methods like cramming in their room the previous night, but really bad at their job or other aspects of life.
  - lupire 4y ago
    When you start pulling that thread, the whole system of education metrics falls apart. Including people's assumptions that seats in school should be prioritized for people already learned more than everyone else.
- jkhdigital 4y ago
  A very weak signal, about as strong as whether the person is male or female. And it's outliers in both directions that create this effect, not just high scores. This probably just indicates that the student was not a great match for the school and is likely to lose motivation before making it to graduation.
thomasahle 4y ago
> 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. Do we care to measure grit? If someone can do the courses and pass the final exams, does it matter whether they did "sufficient grit" during the process?
- dwrodri 4y ago
  I think if you take "grit" to mean "discipline", it goes a long way. In my opinion, it's better think of school grades as a measure of efficacy instead of intelligence. Given a fixed amount of time, how correctly could you perform the task? Discipline, or "grit" as it has been called earlier in the thread, refers to one's propensity to allocate larger portions of time towards accomplishing a single task, especially in the face of adversity. Hopefully this perspective makes it more clear how "grit" is useful.
- xmprt 4y ago
  Grit is exactly what's needed to pass college courses and final exams. It's also one of the most important skills in the real world. It's easy to have a stroke of luck or be a genius for a day on a single exam. It's much harder to persevere and learn unfamiliar material that you don't want to do for many months, culminating in a final exam.
  - iopq 4y ago
    Finals exams were pretty easy, you don't need grit to just show understanding of material, you just need to show up to lecture, listen, participate in class I got A in all of my stats exams despite not doing homework, I still got a B in the class because homework is part of the grade But why should everyone be forced to do homework if some people don't need the extra time waste?
    - lupire 4y ago
      Because a job requires doing repetive work you already understand, so you shoul learn to do that. And because practice builds long term memory.
wodenokoto 4y ago
But how should they measure "I matured and now I have grit"?
- celtain 4y ago
  > I went back to the community college, got perfect grades Presumably they had a separate GPA, or at least term-specific GPAs, from their second round of community college.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Good question. In my case, I talked to the person in admissions who was making the decision and explained the situation and why I thought they should disregard the earlier grades. But absent that conversation and direct evidence, GPA is a start. Assuming that the high school curriculum is at least passably similar to what they're going to expect from you in college (of course it isn't, exactly, college tends to be more heavily focused on tests than homework), a good GPA demonstrates that you will do the academic work required to succeed in class.
jkhdigital 4y ago
Basically the story of my teens and early 20s except that my grades were good enough to get into CS at UIUC... where I promptly drank/smoked my way into an academic suspension. Switched to an easier school and easier major and failed out again which prompted me to enlist in the Navy. Graduated with highest honors from my boot camp class--it's fucking amazing what a little structure can do for people who need it. 16 years later I have a BS in economics, MBA, MSCS, and now trying to beat the final boss and get a PhD before I turn 40.
svnt 4y ago
I was the same. Top fraction of a percent on SATs without studying but never turned in homework. Got Cs. Got into state school in engineering, cruised through intro term, almost failed out second term when the weed-out started. Felt the same thing click into place over the summer: might as well try. No military experience required — 4.0 from then on. I think the whole process is biased against male students because they mature later, and there is nothing difficult in high school and no real form of soft failure to wake you up. We ought to make things harder, but support and include people when they fail the first time. We should normalize learning from failure. So much of it is down to your family environment. My parents hardly existed as an environment.

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.
- 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.
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.
    - aeternum 4y ago
      Is it then more or less sexist if colleges aim to balance gender ratios (as most do)? Colleges often re-weight both GPAs and test scores based on sex, race, socioeconomic background.
    - 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.
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.
tssva 4y ago
These days to avoid this problem most schools normalize GPA's before looking at them for admission.

dehrmann 4y ago

TFA actually calls out that very high test score can be a a signal someone won't graduate.

Gravityloss 4y ago
But why take graduation as the target? Clearly it's not the school's mission in the world. The schools here certainly do get bonus money from the government for every person who graduates. On the other hand, companies like to employ people no matter what their degree - if they passed courses and did projects and learned useful skills in some school, that's definitely great, but graduation by itself isn't such a big thing. Then there's the whole other aspect of school, getting to know people, learning social skills, organizing events, even activism. Just as an example lot of politicians come from student politics background. If everybody just "minds their business" and "doesn't have an opinion about politics" then dictators can just seize power. So why should school intake optimize for graduation? We could get people who are really good at barely passing a large amount of narrow topic exams over a few years with methods like cramming in their room the previous night, but really bad at their job or other aspects of life.
- lupire 4y ago
  When you start pulling that thread, the whole system of education metrics falls apart. Including people's assumptions that seats in school should be prioritized for people already learned more than everyone else.
jkhdigital 4y ago
A very weak signal, about as strong as whether the person is male or female. And it's outliers in both directions that create this effect, not just high scores. This probably just indicates that the student was not a great match for the school and is likely to lose motivation before making it to graduation.

thomasahle 4y ago

> 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. Do we care to measure grit? If someone can do the courses and pass the final exams, does it matter whether they did "sufficient grit" during the process?

dwrodri 4y ago
I think if you take "grit" to mean "discipline", it goes a long way. In my opinion, it's better think of school grades as a measure of efficacy instead of intelligence. Given a fixed amount of time, how correctly could you perform the task? Discipline, or "grit" as it has been called earlier in the thread, refers to one's propensity to allocate larger portions of time towards accomplishing a single task, especially in the face of adversity. Hopefully this perspective makes it more clear how "grit" is useful.
xmprt 4y ago
Grit is exactly what's needed to pass college courses and final exams. It's also one of the most important skills in the real world. It's easy to have a stroke of luck or be a genius for a day on a single exam. It's much harder to persevere and learn unfamiliar material that you don't want to do for many months, culminating in a final exam.
- iopq 4y ago
  Finals exams were pretty easy, you don't need grit to just show understanding of material, you just need to show up to lecture, listen, participate in class I got A in all of my stats exams despite not doing homework, I still got a B in the class because homework is part of the grade But why should everyone be forced to do homework if some people don't need the extra time waste?
  - lupire 4y ago
    Because a job requires doing repetive work you already understand, so you shoul learn to do that. And because practice builds long term memory.

wodenokoto 4y ago

But how should they measure "I matured and now I have grit"?

celtain 4y ago
> I went back to the community college, got perfect grades Presumably they had a separate GPA, or at least term-specific GPAs, from their second round of community college.
rootusrootus 4y ago
Good question. In my case, I talked to the person in admissions who was making the decision and explained the situation and why I thought they should disregard the earlier grades. But absent that conversation and direct evidence, GPA is a start. Assuming that the high school curriculum is at least passably similar to what they're going to expect from you in college (of course it isn't, exactly, college tends to be more heavily focused on tests than homework), a good GPA demonstrates that you will do the academic work required to succeed in class.

jkhdigital 4y ago

Basically the story of my teens and early 20s except that my grades were good enough to get into CS at UIUC... where I promptly drank/smoked my way into an academic suspension. Switched to an easier school and easier major and failed out again which prompted me to enlist in the Navy. Graduated with highest honors from my boot camp class--it's fucking amazing what a little structure can do for people who need it. 16 years later I have a BS in economics, MBA, MSCS, and now trying to beat the final boss and get a PhD before I turn 40.

svnt 4y ago

I was the same. Top fraction of a percent on SATs without studying but never turned in homework. Got Cs. Got into state school in engineering, cruised through intro term, almost failed out second term when the weed-out started. Felt the same thing click into place over the summer: might as well try. No military experience required — 4.0 from then on. I think the whole process is biased against male students because they mature later, and there is nothing difficult in high school and no real form of soft failure to wake you up. We ought to make things harder, but support and include people when they fail the first time. We should normalize learning from failure. So much of it is down to your family environment. My parents hardly existed as an environment.