[charlesju]

Isn't GPA even easier to game than SATs?

-- Private schools can curve more leniently so its pay to play

-- Rich schools tend to have more AP/Honor courses which inflate weighted GPAs

I went to one of the best public schools in America and it was not uncommon for someone to take 100% AP/Honors and get a 4.5+ GPA.

[dahfizz]

I don't see how taking more advanced classes and scoring well is "gaming" your GPA. You are legitimately taking harder / more in depth classes and performing well. The fact that your GPA is higher as a result seems legitimate.

You can argue about availability of AP classes / funding / etc, but that doesn't detract from the hard work of the AP students. Plenty of rich white kids take hard AP classes and get D's.

[charlesju]

Given 2 equally smart people. The one that has the opportunity to take more AP/Honors will have more opportunity to get a higher GPA.

[dahfizz]

And as a result, the person who took more Honors classes will be "more educated" (assuming the Honors / AP classes succeed in their stated goal). Therefore, the student that took the Honors classes is more competitive.

It comes back to the question of what universities should prioritize. Should they be optimizing for the fairest / most equal student body, or the most gifted / competitive student body?

[jfengel]

More educated and more competitive are not the same thing.

What you want is the most talented, hardest working, brightest students. That's difficult to discern given the differences in the availability of opportunity. Scaling for availability is hard.

But it is clear that just selecting for the students who succeeded in the best environment will leave you missing out on potential. And worse, that rapidly becomes self-reinforcing, since the next generation of students will be influenced by your choices on this one.

[visarga]

Even when parents are paying for the lesson, it's still the student that has to do the hard work. But a student with less help deserves more merit for achieving the same.

[1980phipsi]

If you have a weighted GPA...

Also, GPA is not a great measure of student quality. IRT [1,2] is better.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1434976 [2] https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...

[Y_Y]

Is student quality a well-defined and measurable value? Is it a scalar?

[TchoBeer]

How well they do in college, I'd presume.

[threatofrain]

Gaming implies that your metrics are being ruined by moving towards an opposite effect, not that they fail to be perfect. Similarly, doing well in the IMO could be a predictor of wealth and circumstance, but it's also a signal for math talent.

If we're saying that AP tests and classes are too easy, then of course people can have a discussion about increasing difficulty.

[charlesju]

All I know is there are trivial AP classes like AP Government, AP Econ, AP Art, AP Computer Science, etc. at my school. Almost everyone got an A and a 4 or 5 on the test.

[TchoBeer]

In 2021, Under 50% of students got a 4/5 on compsci, econ (both of them), gov, and Art. The only thing which can charitably be included is AP drawing, which about 52% got a 4 or above. The high scores in your classes have more to do with school quality than anything else.

Stats from https://www.totalregistration.net/AP-Exam-Registration-Servi...

[exolymph]

And that betrays the whole game, right? It's not about teaching knowledge. It's about filtering and sorting people into legible strata for employers.

That and babysitting so parents can work without their kids setting the house on fire.

[danaris]

In some schools, so I understand, AP and Honors courses come with a "bonus" to GPA—so if you get 100% in the course, it may go down on your transcript as a 110%, that sort of thing.

[TchoBeer]

My school had a pretty good system, where AP grades got a boost proportional to how far from 100 they were, something like 40%, so if you got an 80 raw it would be boosted by 20x.4 = 8 to 88 final score. This effectively means that weaker students aren't penalized for chosing harder classes whilst very strong students don't get rediculously inflated grades.

[danaris]

Oh, at my school it was just a flat addition.

That's how the valedictorian and salutatorian a year or so after me ended up with final grades of something like 103.4 and 103.5.

[lostcolony]

It's not gaming, per se, but it definitely is a privilege based thing.

Getting into an advanced class generally means you already know the material that would be in the normal class (taking trig the year everyone else is taking geometry, for instance). How did you get to where you already knew that material? Well, you were either in the advanced class the year before, or, you already learned the material outside of class. How did you already learn the material outside of class? Better education at home. Which is easy to do with a private tutor or stay at home parent; really hard to do with a single parent, or dual income that don't allow for much in education expenses.

And because you are in an advanced class, you basically get a .5-1.0 bump to your GPA (so people are graduating with a 4.5 GPA at some schools), all because you had the extra early resources; you can't compete with just what the school provides.

[stale2002]

> . How did you already learn the material outside of class? Better education at home.

You are basically saying if someone is more educated, that they will do better in education.

Yes, that's the point. The more time and effort someone spends in their education, the better they will do in education.

[lostcolony]

No. I am explicitly pointing out that even if you learn everything taught in class 100%, and get perfect grades in it, you may not be eligible for some advanced classes. It requires outside investment. And then the advanced classes give you a leg up in terms of college admissions if GPA is a guaranteed entry point.

That means the grade inflation of AP classes just serves as an indirect proxy for money, rather than a reasonable consideration for class performance, knowledge, aptitude, or any such thing.

[stale2002]

> It requires outside investment.

So if you engage in more and better education, above and beyond the education that one is engaging in school, then that person will be better at education?

Yes, of course.

Just like if someone practices basketball, outside of their school team, and hires a basketball tutor, then they would become better at basketball.

Obviously, if someone spends more of their own time on something, anything, whether it is education, or basketball, or whatever, then they would become better at that thing.

The only question now, is why would that possibly surprise you, that people who go above and beyond whatever everyone else is doing, would become better than everyone else at that thing?

[karpierz]

The investment GP is talking about is money.

[vt100]

The "outside investment" is just time and effort. There is free access to information via public libraries, the internet, youtube, mathworld, etc.

[lostcolony]

Yeah, if kids all have equal time outside of school (because poor kids have the same workloads at home as rich kids), equal access to resources (because poor kids have equal access to computers and internet access as rich kids), and we're relying solely on the kids motivation (rather than parents who can supply time to engage with their kids education, unlike the kids whose parents are working multiple jobs just to make ends meet).

If all that's true, then yeah, it's just the kids' choice of how they spend their time and effort, and NOT a proxy for wealth. But I don't think all of that is true.

[dahfizz]

> It requires outside investment.

> That means the grade inflation of AP classes just serves as an indirect proxy for money,

So you think poor people just don't work hard enough? Only rich people care about their future and are willing to put in the effort to better themselves?

Sounds like some conservative propaganda to me....

[BitwiseFool]

Grade inflation is already a serious problem. I can only see this making it even worse.

[lozaning]

UC system, back when I applied only let you weight something like 8 classes, regardless of how many you'd taken.

[dnautics]

in california the top X% of all public high schools are guaranteed a berth at SOME UC, so to some degree intra-school comparisons are less at issue. (parent article is about the UC system as a whole).

[xyzzy21]

Private schools could but in my experience as a private HS grad, they DO NOT. There are other factors that prevent that.

[mattnewton]

This kind of drives home the bigger issue though, that grades between two schools look like comparable numbers but aren't.

[jessaustin]

Some don't. Others definitely do.

[president]

Presumably, that could be solved by lowering the weight for GPA

[Dracophoenix]

Would the school you went to be TJHSST?

[raunak]

Well, I graduated from TJ this year (2021) and it wasn’t very common for people to have a 4.5+. Yes, some, but not the average by any stretch - average was probably a 4.2, or a 4.3.