You’re one in a million, and that’s not really impressive at all
You might be impressed if your child has an “A” average in high school - it certainly sounds like they’re doing very academically. But are they?
According to general knowledge (and AI - look it up), anywhere from 37-47% of high school students have an “A” average. Given that there are 3,700,000 high school juniors in the country, using the lower estimate of 37%, there are 1.37 million juniors who also have an “A” average. Congratulations, your child is one of the top 1.37 million students in the country. So if you’re going to use their GPA as the leading indicator of their academic success, you’ve got a LOT of company.
To be fair, not every high school junior is heading off to a four-year college: only about 47% are. So we could make you feel better by saying an “A” average puts them in the top 650,00 of all students who’ll be submitting college applications. For those students looking to get into a top-20 college, there are about 60-70,000 open spots for incoming freshmen at these schools, that’s a 1/10 chance (simply by the numbers) of enrolling in ANY of those schools- in TOTAL. In other words, if all these “A” students dreamed of going to a top 20 school, 90% of just had their dreams dashed.
Now, there’s a great deal of nuance and latitude when we simply use numbers. Colleges will re-calculate your GPA (getting rid of the concept of anything over a 4.0). And we’re talking about enrolling in a school (open slots for freshmen), not acceptances. In addition, we’re assuming that acceptance decisions were made solely on students’ GPA instead of a holistic view, but on that note let’s come to accept that almost everyone has great extra-curricular activities (sports, debate team, jobs, internships, volunteering) and AI can provide a fairly stellar essay to anyone who can create clever prompts.
Here are two students with very similar appliations
Student A
4.2 GPA
Honors and AP Courses
Great Essay
Great Activities
Student B
4.3 GPA
Honors and AP Courses
Great Essay
Great Activities
Using just the information above, you could flip a coin to determine who might be a better applicant for a particular college. However, when Student A also includes their 1520 SAT, and student B decides NOT to list their SAT or they put down their 1170 score, the choice becomes a little easier to make. They’re BOTH straight “A” students (so says their GPA), but one has justified their high GPA while the other hasn’t.
In a perfect world, perhaps grades alone could paint a clear picture of academic success. But the proliferation of “A” grades makes the GPA almost meaningless by itself. Top students will differentiate themselves from the very large pack of "“all A” students by backing up their GPA with a comparable ACT/SAT score.
It’s unfortunate that the very smart students have to “justify” their GPA and separate themselves from the other 37% of similar students. But in reality, it’s sad that many of those “A” students possess the same GPA as their classmates when in actuality they’re not truly academic peers.