[rootusrootus]

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.

[jkhdigital]

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.

[TimPC]

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).

[scarmig]

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.

[Auracle]

For what it's worth, I regularly interact with high school seniors and this topic has come up a few times. When I was in school, there was one teacher that was known to be sexist against boys. If you were regularly an A student, you'd be getting Cs. I was one of them. She taught English, which is probably the best subject to teach if you want to be subjective with your grades. Hell, there was another guy in class that kept getting the same percentage grade down to the second decimal point.

Anyways, I graduated from high school in 2006. At the same school now, there are apparently multiple/many teachers that are fully accepted by both the guys and girls as being sexist against boys. I doubt this trend is limited to my school and it's concerning as hell.

[buscoquadnary]

And yet people wonder why the MRA and MGTOW movements are gaining ground...

[thaumasiotes]

> 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.

As far as college acceptance itself, the norm is for colleges to apply a lower admission standard for boys than they do for girls.

The structural issues are elsewhere, such as the emphasis on GPA and the related emphasis on grading for effort without caring whether the student knows the material.

[BlargMcLarg]

>the norm is for colleges to apply a lower admission standard for boys than they do for girls.

Where are you getting this from? The data and all incentives going female>either>male would suggest otherwise, if it would suggest anything at all.

[MengerSponge]

Schools that deliberately don't go out of their way to select for gender parity wind up with far more girls than boys. UNC Chapel Hill, for example, is 60% female. From what I understand, this does interesting things to their social dynamics.

Highly selective colleges that strive for parity must accomplish that by rejecting a few girls who would have gotten in on merit alone, and admitting a few boys who should have been the first ones out.

What incentives are you thinking of? What's the source of your data?

[Manuel_D]

It's more nuanced than that. Engineering schools have mugh higher admission rates for women, sometimes over 2x, in the case of MIT: https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/can-your-gender-give....

[giantg2]

Please cite a source for gender discrimination in admissions. Seems like this would be a textbook Title IX violation.

[thaumasiotes]

It's well known. Colleges will admit to it in public, often saying things like "we need to have a lower standard for boys, or else no girls will want to attend our school". (The ideas being that (1) the goal of running a college is to admit more girls; and (2) girls don't want to attend all-girl schools, so you can get higher overall female admissions by admitting some unqualified boys.)

If you think the data suggest that colleges are overall giving admissions preferences to females in favor of males, you haven't looked at the data.

[Gareth321]

I am yet to see a single university admit to biasing males in admission. Most of them admit to biasing by race, so it shouldn't be hard to find an example.

[BlargMcLarg]

If this is public, surely you have some actual sources to verify this?

>girls don't want to attend all-girl schools, so you can get higher overall female admissions by admitting some unqualified boys

This implies either unqualified boys are better attractors, or there not being enough qualified boys. I doubt either of those being true given tournament selection being omnipresent.

>you haven't looked at the data

The data most available shows admission rates to be fairly equal, with far more scholarships for girls in areas they lack presence than the other way around. The data on standards is practically invisible, and I'd be very skeptical of colleges publically admitting to sexism in today's age, let alone sexism in favor of boys. Openly doing so and not trying to change this is asking for a massive boycott.

[kbelder]

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.

[scarmig]

Classwork isn't some static thing; historically, boys had higher GPAs than women, and I suspect you can find some subfields of study today where boys consistently outperform women as far GPA goes. The choice of what subject matter goes into the curriculum that a GPA represents and how's it's taught and evaluated is a political choice. You could very easily make GPA equitable by removing one class that girls over perform in and replacing it with a class that boys over perform in.

[lupire]

The truly awkward question is that GPA is important because colleges give grades too, but maybe the classwork grading and tests are bad and not conducive not education overall.

[scarmig]

I'd be interested in seeing if there's a gender effect on how predictive SAT scores are on college completion rate. A quick survey indicates that this isn't an area education researchers have thought is a good use of their time.

[sahila]

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.

[celtain]

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.

[lupire]

The #1 difference between college and HS curriculum is that colleges have far far less classwork.

[npteljes]

I view it similarly to military, or construction. It's not the biases' fault, as many as there are, that men are overrepresented in these domains. I'd urge to address systemic issues, but the profile of representation is not necessarily a symptom of such an issue.

[PaulHoule]

(1) Many colleges are already practicing affirmative action for boys because many boys are not applying. Schools are glad to have girls but girls don't want to go to a school which is 70% girls so they try to admit more boys to make the social life more normal.

(2) There is a serious representation problem in primary education, particularly elementary schools. Both boys and girls benefit from having male teachers, boys particularly, since as it is they get the unambiguous message that school is an institution by and for women, one in which they don't have a place. It's bad enough that it shouldn't be thought of "we need to hire more men as elementary school teachers" but "we need to stop hiring women as elementary school teachers".

[giantg2]

"then continuing to use that (a la GPAs) as an admissions criteria _is_ sexist."

Please define sexist/sexism. This use doesn't match with my definition.

The measure is an objective one, which is highly correlated to graduation rate and thus pertianate. It's not like this is used to discriminate.

Yes, you could have individual teachers showing bias, but it seems that the data in the article doesn't support this being impactful. I'm actually a little skeptical that bias is rampant given how overbearing many of the school policies have become and an inability to explain grading differences would be highly suspect. I'd expect people to get sued/fired left and right over this if it's truly widespread.

[scarmig]

> I'd expect people to get sued/fired left and right over this if it's truly widespread.

The attribute of being labeled male is not a protected class (maybe legally, definitely de facto) in the same way that of being labeled female is.

To your broader point, disparate outcomes is ipso facto evidence of sexism. At least, that's what our society has settled on for other excluded identities, so we should do the same for men.

[krferriter]

They're trying to determine how well you will do in courses in college. Surely how well you did in courses in high school is relevant. It is not sexist just because some groups tend to do better than others at a certain point in time. Girls have increased their academic success because they've historically not been encouraged to do so, but in recent decades they have. Girls in high school today are like 2nd (or 3rd) generation of women in the US to have been actually broadly encouraged to do well in school and obtain professional careers. There is an issue with boys feeling hopeless about their futures, and maybe this is a factor in why they as an aggregate have done worse in school relative to girls in recent years, but the solution isn't to lower standards.

[scarmig]

SATs are predictive of college completion rates. Deemphasizing them in favor of another predictive metric (that women tend to do better on) exacerbates the disparate graduation rates that are adversely affecting men.

If we knew SATs are more predictive of college success for men than women, we'd even be able to simultaneously increase both representation of men in college and overall success rates. That's received a lot less study than other topics in vogue for educational researchers.

[aeternum]

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.

[MengerSponge]

It's also a maturity thing. Girls tend to be more mature than boys (emotionally and mentally) in their late teens, so their grades are a bit better. By the time everyone reaches their early 20's the differences have largely vanished.

[edmundsauto]

We regularly use outcomes as evidence of discrimination, so I think it’s reasonable to strive to be consistent.

If we look at SAT discrepancies to identify groups harmed by structural issues in the test, we should also do the same with grades.

[aeternum]

One solve for this is to require schools to anonymously publish their GPA percentiles along with some demographic info.

Bayesian analysis could then be applied to pull the signal out of the GPA data. GPAs can then be renormalized such that students are not incentivized to go to a HS that gives everyone As.

[solveit]

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.

[TuringNYC]

> This points to the real problem with GPA. The institution assigning GPAs to students have a strong incentive to inflate GPAs.

I think it is even worse -- the inflation is not universal. At Cornell (undergrad), most engineering classes set the mean to B- or C+. You had to go 1SD higher to get to A- and near 2SD to get A+. Imagine how shocked I was to hear my friends at Princeton had a mean set to A-. Consider the pressure this puts on some students and not others, esp when you're all applying to the same graduate programs. Is a Cornell B+ worth more than a Princeton A-? Statistically yes, but in reality no one is harmonizing the distributions.

There is also the issue of fancy private prep schools which have 10 or 15 "Valedictorians" which many of us public school students were shocked to learn when we arrived at college. You'd meet multiple people claiming to be valedictorian from the same school's graduating class until you learn that private prep schools stretch the meaning of valedictorian.

Some reason life lessons: pay enough and you get to bend the rules.

Some reason life lessons: more elite, less pressure.

[thaumasiotes]

> 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.

All three of these things are already happening.

For example, the Cal State University system has purely objective admissions for most campuses. That's good! But while they technically consider SAT scores, the last time I looked the difference in admissions points between a minimum SAT score and a maximum SAT score was roughly equal to the difference between a 2.0 GPA and a 3.0.

[trinovantes]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[sokoloff]

It's been many decades since I took the SAT (3x, at ages 11, 12, and 16), but I seem to recall that I had a choice of which schools to share my SAT results with, such that a school that only ever saw my age 16 SAT test couldn't possibly average in the other two scores.

[ipaddr]

It creates bad outcomes where students retake classes in the summers as a profession and game the system.

It also puts you at a disadvantage if you come from an immigrant area or poor area where your 90% will not count as highly as someone with 60% from the richest areas with a trackwork of success.

It really punishes anyone not rich and locks them out of elite universities and pushes most of the poor out of average universities.

A single test where everyone can study and pass seems more fair than basing it on things that can be impossible to change like where you grew up

[trinovantes]

Said test can also bias against the poor depending on how it's created. It can ask questions based on subtleties that only private schools/tutors have the time to cover or on life experiences that only upper middle class realistically have experienced.

Neither system is perfect but I think the purely SAT approach creates too much unnecessary stress for high school students when there are other proxies for determining future success.

[yardie]

> your future determined by one test.

There is nothing stopping you from taking the SATs multiple times. It's encouraged because you most likely will go up a few points the 2nd pass. I've taken it twice myself, 3 times if you include the PSAT. And I also took the ACT, only once.

GPAs you can only screw up once. If you fail even one class it's impossible to climb back to the top.

[hardware2win]

Tests are fair

Grades can be easily biased

[listenallyall]

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.

[olliej]

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]

Is that a typo or did you actually have an 8.7 gpa? I don’t understand how that’d be possible

[olliej]

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]

For sure. But weird I didn't know of any universities/colleges that gave above a 4.0 for GPAs (in the US) - thought that was more of a high school thing relating to Honors/AP classes.

[olliej]

Stanford and Harvard at least do this.

[anonymoushn]

Scaling the ranges doesn't fix things for the students. At my high school, some electives only awarded grades up to 4 and others were offered in flavors that went up to 5 or 5.5. Every foreign language actually spoken by modern humans had the first year offered with grades up to 4 only, so optimal play was to take Latin or take Spanish 1 in summer school since that counts for qualifying for Spanish 2 but does not contribute to your GPA. Most kids took Latin because they had lives.

[olliej]

If you want insane you should look at the old sixth form certificate system in NZ - each school is allocated a set of grades to assign to kids based on the grades the prior year got from school certificate. As in say your school got 5 As, 5 Bs, 5 Cs, etc in school certificate exams (the nationwide standard tests from when you are 15), then your school would get 5 1s, 5 2s, etc (1 being the best). Then the school gets to choose how those available grades are distributed - so say the 5 As came from math exams, the school could allocate all the 1s to the English department, so the best grade you could get in 6th form cert outside of the English department would be a 2. I had a friend who was a super talented musician, but his highest possible grade in 6th form music was a 3. Despite getting essentially As across the board in school cert music his best 6th form cert grade for music was notionally a C+/B- or some such.

Given you could get into uni on a high enough 6th form cert grade this is obviously absurd (I think that it was something like your total score for your best 4 subjects had to be less than 6, so you can see how one course consuming 3 points even if you were absolutely perfect screws that)

[PragmaticPulp]

> 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? :)

[listenallyall]

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.

[Spooky23]

They also weight schools differently. Shitty high schools + good scores let you avoid all of those cello lessons.

[empyrrhicist]

Also, grade inflation is real and not uniformly distributed.

[tssva]

These days to avoid this problem most schools normalize GPA's before looking at them for admission.

[atdrummond]

Admissions departments re-norm GPAs and many of the best high schools do not engage in grade weighting.

[svnt]

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.

[thomasahle]

> 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?

[xmprt]

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]

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?

[krferriter]

Refusing to do assigned tasks despite knowing it will be a factor in your final assessment score is probably something valuable to measure as a factor in predicting your future success at tasks. I had some college courses where the homework was optional, but this is not that, this is courses where the homework is required, but not completed.

[lupire]

Because a job requires doing repetive work you already understand, so you shoul learn to do that. And because practice builds long term memory.

[Der_Einzige]

I prefer to replace "grit" with "programs on my calculator". Turns out the calculator is still better at stoichiometry than the chemistry student with a lot of grit.

[SketchySeaBeast]

But in that case did the chemistry student actually learn the chemistry, or just learned the tool? What's the goal for taking that class?

[dchftcs]

His anecdote clearly says that his low GPA correlated to his inability to finish the degree (by doing the courses and passing the final exams), which is a real criterion to consider by admissions, and that relates to grit.

[dwrodri]

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.

[dehrmann]

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

[Gravityloss]

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]

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]

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.

[wodenokoto]

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

[rootusrootus]

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.

[celtain]

> 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.