Tagged: "GPA"
What to do when you are deferred from your first choice college
You've been deferred from your first choice Early Action college. Now what?
Community College and PSEO Classes Can Lead to University Success
For students who want to both save money and prepare for college success, consider taking college classes while still in high school. You may even get into Harvard (or at least the flagship public university in your state)!
What Does UCLA Really Want From Its Applicants?
The third in a series about writing the personal essay for UCLA applications. The key to the perfect essay is all in the L.I.D.
Evaluating Your High School Transcript
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 [...]
Class Rank, Weighted and Unweighted GPA, and the "Education Race"
It’s time to declare a moratorium on class ranking. One of my most popular post is on the difference between weighted and unweighted GPA, and the phenomenon of class rank. I get scads of comment on that post, and on other similar ones. Today I received one from a distraught parents whose daughter was being [...]
Comparing GPAs at High and Low Performing High Schools
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 [...]
Grades, Your GPA, Education, and Learning: How Do We Compare Apples to Apples?
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 [...]
High GPA or Rigorous Courses? Think Academic Preparedness
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 week, [...]
Weighted GPA, Unweighted GPA, Class Rank, and College Admission
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 [...]
GPA Explained–With Some Simple Advice
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 [...]
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Mark Montgomery
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