Your GPA Isn’t As Straightforward as You Think

Last week, one of our Application Nation families shared recently released statistics on a college's Early Action admitted pool of students.

Everyone gasped when they found out the middle 50% range of the admitted students' GPAs. It was much higher than anyone expected. If there's one data point that can be misleading on both the student side and college side of this process, it's the GPA. Frankly, I tell families not to rely on it to determine a student's competitiveness for a college.

Here's why.

Every high school in the country can decide their GPA scale, weighting process (e.g. giving extra points for advanced courses), and whether they report a weighted or unweighted GPA on students' transcripts. There is no uniform way high schools handle GPA. It varies wildly. That's why a student with straight As at one high school could have a 4.0; a student at another high school could have a 4.67; and a student from a third high school could have a 100 GPA depending on how their high school calculates the GPA. Just imagine how many different GPAs are reported to colleges on transcripts and applications in one year. It's mind-boggling.

Every college can decide how they handle this motley of GPAs. Some colleges will use whatever GPA is provided. Many of the more selective colleges will recalculate every single student's GPA to get a uniform GPA for comparison sake. And even within those colleges that recalculate a GPA, there is tremendous variety in what courses count, what scale is used, and how rigor of curriculum is factored in.

WATCH: Do Selective Colleges Recalculate Your GPA?

Not all colleges publish their average or middle 50% range of GPAs for admitted students. Those that do rarely explain if the GPAs are unweighted, weighted, recalculated, or a combination. This leads many students astray. They will compare their GPA to the one published by the college and assume they are competitive or not competitive based on that. Yet, there is so much nuance to this process, especially when it comes to grades.

I have a different way to determine the competitiveness of a student for this very reason. My families in Application Nation are taught to pay close attention to overall acceptance rates when it comes to building a college list. I group colleges into three categories based on acceptance rates: highly selective, very selective, and selective.

For example, colleges with acceptance rates of 25% or less will expect all As (or close to that) from students who are in the most rigorous curriculum (in all five core subjects) available to them at their high school. (Yes, there are some exceptions, but these are rare.)
Colleges that have acceptance rates of 26 to 50% will still expect good grades (mostly As and Bs; a possible lone C or so), but the student wouldn't have to take every single advanced level course that's offered to them.
And for colleges with acceptance rates of 51% or higher, a student's grades can be more varied and/or their curriculum does not need to be as rigorous.

No GPA calculation is needed for my approach. And there's no need to worry about how the colleges may or may not recalculate the GPA. Looking at your grades and curriculum, and aligning them with a college's acceptance rate is a far better way to determine competitiveness.

Sure, there is much more nuance to this. A college with an acceptance rate of 5% will have different expectations for a student's grades and curriculum than a college with an acceptance rate of 25%, even though they are technically both highly selective colleges. But I teach my families the nuance so that they can cut through the misleading information of GPAs and rely on more stable data to put together a college list.

Read My Feature in People Magazine: After the Admissions Scandal Changed Everything, Former Ivy League Dean Shares What Families Should Know About Applications Today (Exclusive)

Whenever a student shares their GPA with me, I never get overly excited or overly concerned. I tell them I would need to see their transcript (and school profile) to truly know how competitive they are for certain colleges. I have been evaluating students' transcripts for nearly 30 years. There is no way to rely on a student's GPA, no matter how high it sounds, just as much as there is no way to rely on a college's average or middle 50% GPA. Don't be fooled by GPA data. Get schooled in being able to find accurate college acceptance rates, and analyzing your own grades and curriculum.