| Great question - the short answer is that our Admissions office did not attempt to normalize non-mathematical factors. At first, this surprised me. How often do we as students somehow get the impression that extracurriculars, magnet, Montessori, AP, IB, student council, <more trophies/achievements of your choice/> are somehow positively associated with college admissions? From a non-Admissions perspective, accounting for these non-empirical differences seems wise and fair. However, they introduce subjectivity into the equation, which increases the likelihood of a human decision maker being unfair. So what normalization did we do? What would you do? Knowing that no equation is perfect, you must start with a goal and find the least-bad equation. The goal: Only admit students with a high likelihood of not failing out. Why: Failing out has consequences for most US students who take out large loans and must repay immediately if they fail out. The realization: High schools already provide a proxy for degrees of past failure - letter grades. Assumption: Assume that high schools use their letter grading system as a method of normalizing and displaying how hard their courses are. A B+ should represent a certain level of achievement regardless of school. The school has the autonomy to use any letter system they choose. Solution: Assign a point system to letter grades and calculate an average. Use only classes correlated to success at your university. This is the normalized GPA. Surprise #1 - If your high school thinks a tougher-than-average letter grading system (eg a 93% is a B+) somehow makes students more attractive to the majority of the 7000 US colleges, they are wrong. And probably causing students to lose out on scholarships. Surprise #2 - If you believe this system is unfair, you can aim the blame at technology. Applications to most universities (until recently I’m told) increase every year as digital applications make it easy to apply to 10 schools instead of 3. To handle the increase, colleges can hire 3x more admissions people, or find ways to speed up the process. Surprise #3 - Colleges always want more applications than ever before. By dropping SAT/ACT as criteria, it removes a point of friction in the customer experience, and removes a step in the calculation effort. (If they could drop GPA and keep SAT/ACT, this would the ideal situation from a metric and efficiency perspective, but Marketing and the public would throw a fit.) |