Out of curiosity how did you normalize for say 3.0 GPA at a competitive admissions magnet school, and a 3.0 GPA at an underperforming high school? Did you correlate pervious students from that high school and their high school gpa and their graduating gpa?
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.)
I have long wondered about this. Note that you also need to be able to normalize grades across students who went to the same school but had different teachers. I suspect the answer is that both normalizations are hard so admissions people don't bother.
They don't not bother. They just do it by gut feel without writing anything down about how they're doing it. Admissions counselors at elite high schools "network" with admissions offices at universities to benefit their students in this process. This is common knowledge in the industry to the point that foreign elite high schools, which have a harder time getting name-recognition, spend a pretty sum of money periodically sending their representatives on month-long US trips to go around, say, the top 30 US universities to market their brand.
I took the ACT on a lark my sophomore year of high school. I scored a 29. I also attended one of the top high schools in the nation.
When I was registering for classes in college, my advisor kept trying to put me in Trigonometry or Pre-calculus (I can't remember). Because my ACT score in math said that's what I needed. I took the ACT while I was taking Geometry and Algebra II, so yeah, my math was probably weak. I tried explaining to them that my high school transcript shows I've taken up to Calculus. They wouldn't hear it. I refused to register for any sort of math below Calculus.
Eventually, they told me to go talk to the head of the math department. I told them fine. I went down there all prepared to make my case. As I started to make my case, he saw my transcript, said "Oh, <SCHOOL NAME REDACTED>. What class do you want to take?"
He didn't care about my transcript in the opposite way. I probably could have registered for 300 or 400 level math courses.
