Great College Advice | Educational Consultants and College Planners

The New York Times published a piece written by the director of admission at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, offering insider tips about how admissions folks read high school transcripts.  The entire article is worth a read, but here are the tips.
• Avoid being a “GPA protector.” Don’t play it safe [...]

Students and parents ask all the time about how colleges value weighted and unweighted GPAs.
The admissions office at College of the Holy Cross shared its in-house analysis form with the New York Times, allowing a peak into how carefully colleges look at your transcript.
The form can be found here.  It’s interactive, and quite helpful to [...]

A prospective client asked me a question this morning about comparing GPAs across high school.  He asked how college admissions officers compare a the GPA of a student at  very low performing high school with a very high performing high school.
We didn’t get into a discussion about how one really measures high vs. low performance [...]

Today a reader wrote in to ask a question about comparing grading system between two different geometry classes in California.
You can read the question here.

Picture this. Two geometry teachers in the same school.  Each uses a different grading scale.  In one class, you need an average of 90% to get an A, while another requires [...]

As a college consultant, I continue to receive many questions about which is better: taking easier classes and getting a high GPA, or risk losing a few tenths of a point by taking rigorous classes.
I’ve started asking others their opinion on this matter. When I was at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, last [...]

Why do high schools give extra weights to honors, Advanced Placement (AP), and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses?
Readers of some of my other posts related to GPA have expressed confusion.  I have stated that admissions folks at selective colleges are most interested in your unweighted GPA.  So these extra weightings are, in effect, stripped in order [...]

One of my most popular posts is dedicated to explaining the difference between an unweighted and weighted GPA.  It generated a lot of discussion (and continues to do so).
I thought I would take the opportunity to provide more clarity about how a GPA is used in the college admissions process.
But an initial word of caution [...]

One of my most popular posts is about how to calculate your “real” GPA.  Some readers have asked how to translate grades expressed as a percent into letter grades, and then into a GPA based on a 4.0 scale.

Below is a chart that can serve as a starting point.  Recognize,  however, that all schools and [...]

Everyone knows the importance of a high school student’s grade point average, or GPA. It’s the little number that labels us. It signifies whether we are a geek or slacker, or somewhere in between. The GPA is usually either a point of great pride or great shame. Those students who are proud [...]