Should universities consider the class averages of high school grades?

November 27, 2013 2:16 PM

This thought has been chipping away at my ethical conscience for the longest time. Here in Canada, our universities take the highest 6 Grade 12 grades to calculate your entrance average. Depending on the program, the top 6 grades can be your highest grades from any Grade 12 courses you have taken, or they will be a specified selection of courses (e.g. if you're applying to a Business undergrad program, then your grade in Advanced Functions will have to be part of your 6-course average calculation, whether it's a good grade or not). My problem is that I have seen a wide variance, in terms of class averages, for the same course. For the exact same course (meaning same subject, grade level, and course code), different high school teachers -- whether or not it is within the same school -- have different assignments and grading standards.

So for Grade 12 English taught by two different teachers, for example, the class average for the first teacher may be 88% while for the second teacher it is 65%. Let's consider a scenario with two different students taking these two courses: Student #1 gets a grade of 90% from the course with the 88% average, while Student #2 gets a 67% grade from the one with the 65% average.

When it comes time to apply to universities, the course averages are not even looked at by the admissions committee, so even though Student #1 and Student #2 are both 2% points higher than their respective class averages (and thus, as we can assume, the same comparative ability), Student #1 is undoubtedly advantaged over Student #2.
(The advantages of a higher entrance average are obvious: higher chance of getting acceptance into the program of your choice, higher entrance scholarship money, etc...)

I will provide my own personal example here: I went to a public high school notorious for its grade deflation. Class averages for most of the courses I took were usually in the low 60s. My own grades from these courses were in usually in the mid-80s to low 90s, so I was consistently above the class average by at least 20% points. Meanwhile, a friend (in the same year as me) who I met during university went to a Catholic high school where the class averages were insanely high (think high 80s to mid-90s; no kidding -- she showed me her high school transcripts).
Her entrance average was thus around a 95%, while mine was around an 87%. She was given a $3500 entrance scholarship from our university, whereas I was given a $2000 scholarship.
Then, during the second semester of our first year, we ended up taking the same course together (neither of us had any background in that subject, as it was an elective for the both of us). She ended up with a B- while I got an A. (Of course, this is only one course and one sample case, but I am trying to illustrate how differential high school grading standards can result in misleading conclusions about academic ability.) All throughout university, I had a higher GPA than her (even got accepted into an Honours Society), but since we were in different programs (same field of study -- social sciences -- but different programs), I cannot make a valid comparison from this.

My younger brother, who is now in Grade 11, is attending a Catholic high school where the class averages are also extremely high (80s and 90s, with one class average at 94%). Suffice it to say, his current high school grades are higher than mine were, even though I was as smart, or slightly smarter, than him when I was his age (my own observation based on living with him all these years).

I think it is extremely unfair that universities do not factor in the class averages of high school grades when calculating the entrance averages of students. However, I do entertain the possibility that admission committees know about this and agree with my position theoretically, but think they can't do anything about it because it is a pragmatic issue fraught with practical obstacles. In that case, I would propose a solution of looking at the relative percentage grade *differentials* between students' grades and their respective class averages. You could probably deduce a ballpark of a student's class rank based on what their grade is compared to the class average, for example.

Does anyone here think this solution would be feasible?

posted by vanizorc to Education (12 answers total)

I remember when I was applying to universities, I was told that many admissions departments try to adjust for the relative rigor of the school, for example by monitoring the average first-year performance of students from a given high school over a period of time. So, if students from school X have high grades in high school but tend to have lower averages at the university, then in the future, school X applicants get their grades adjusted downward. and vice versa. But this was more likely to happen in big schools in competitive programs, since such analysis is not trivial to do. The US sidesteps the issue with the SAT, naturally.
posted by PercussivePaul at 2:21 PM on November 27, 2013

Response by poster: @PercussivePaul: If only Canada had an "equalizer" like the SAT. I long for the day the Canadian system will adopt it (or a similar test). But it may never be implemented in our country due to so many educators being against "testing culture" -- a sentiment I frankly think is a crock of bull.
I'm glad to hear that your school system had those adjustments in place. In Canada, however, there are no such adjustments -- not even for the large and high-ranking institutions like University of Toronto. This is precisely why I'm angry about it.
posted by vanizorc at 2:29 PM on November 27, 2013

I believe many admissions departments in Canada do this already, but based on schools, not particular teachers or courses. Also, bear in mind that some provinces have provincial-level exams, which make it easier to compare (and they do take into account the relative difficulty of different provinces' exams).

Can you clarify why you believe there are no such adjustments made?
posted by ssg at 2:30 PM on November 27, 2013

What problem are you trying to solve here? Or are you just ranting? I mean, we could all offer our opinions about what the correct thing to do is, but are you looking for ways to change Canada's system? Or are you just surveying as to what general opinion is?
posted by dfriedman at 2:34 PM on November 27, 2013

What you're describing isn't Canada-wide: in Quebec, CEGEPs and universities use the R score.
posted by third word on a random page at 2:35 PM on November 27, 2013

The difficulty with using a differential between the class average is that classes and schools can be considerably different from each other in quality of students, not just in how they grade. A magnet school for science might have a 90% average in Physics because all of their students are science-oriented geniuses, while a grade-inflating school might have a 90% average in Physics because because they grade inflate and an alternative school might have a 60% average in Physics because their student population is barely getting through school in the first place and just taking and passing a hard science class is unusual for them.

I don't know if they do it for undergrad admissions, but U of T Law explicitly does the kind of comparisons you're asking about when comparing applicants from different undergraduate programs.
posted by jacquilynne at 2:36 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]

What about kids who take more advanced (gifted) classes, self-selecting for classes with a higher average as a result?

What about kids who happen to be in legitimately "smarter" classes, for whatever reason (chance, income, better teachers, other social factors, etc)?

Is it fair to penalize students for their classmates working exceptionally hard one semester, or to reward them for classmates slacking off?

Yes, the current situation isn't fair to everyone, but life isn't fair, and curving grades using class averages is unfair in different ways. I think it'd be more useful to lower the intense focus on grades in the first place.
posted by randomnity at 2:36 PM on November 27, 2013 [1 favorite]

UBC currently gives a 2 percentage point admissions average bump to the entire province of Alberta because of systemic grade inflation in BC and Ontario. They did an analysis of the grade outcomes of students from Alberta vs. other first year students to determine how much the 'bonus' should be. They also have instituted supplementary applications to try to expand their admissions criteria beyond raw numbers. These are the main responses I have heard of to the unfairness you are talking about.

It would seem odd to make this adjustment based on individual classes given that high school classes are small enough for randomness to make a big difference in class average. I also do not know what you would do, then, with AP or Honours classes that would naturally have a higher class average. So to answer your question, using class averages do not seem to be a reasonable solution to the unfairness you point to.
posted by lookoutbelow at 2:36 PM on November 27, 2013

Also: BC has provincial examinations in most academic subjects, so the problem you're describing is mitigated considerably, because at the end of grade 12, everyone has to write the same exams and demonstrate the same knowledge. Admissions offers come before those exams, but provincial scholarship offers are based on them.
posted by jacquilynne at 2:38 PM on November 27, 2013

Actually, vanizorc, I was referring to a southern Ontario context. Specifically the University of Waterloo is one of the schools that I heard was doing this.
posted by PercussivePaul at 2:40 PM on November 27, 2013

In Australia, your ATAR (university entrance ranking) is a combination of your class marks and your marks on a state-wide exam for each subject. The discrepancy between each school's own marking standards and their respective performance on the exams is used to scale the final ranking - so, if you had a lower grade from a school that was academically selective or marked harshly, and then you did outstandingly well in your exam, your overall mark would be adjusted accordingly (and vice versa). This seems to me to be a better solution than merely considering class rank.
posted by jaynewould at 2:56 PM on November 27, 2013

Response by poster: @ssg: When I was a senior in high school, academic advisors and undergraduate counselors all told me the same thing: that not only would class averages not be factored in; ad comms wouldn't even look at them. Considering my observations of my friends in uni, this seems to be true. A student with a 95% entering average whose class averages were around 91% would be chosen over the student with an 84% average where the class averages were in the 60s.

As I am now a senior at the University of Toronto (transferred here during 3rd year from another uni), I have asked my advisors and graduate-program counselors similar questions. Graduate programs do not take the school you attended for undergrad into account when considering your undergrad GPA, which is why you see a lot more (proportionally-speaking) Grad/Med/Law students from "easy" unis such as Ryerson and Western, compared to unis known for grade deflation (or at the very least, a more competitive student body) like U of T.

As an aside, it is not only me, but many of my friends, who also have these observations.

And which "provincial-level" exams (for undergrad program applications) are you talking about? There are none that I know of in Ontario.
posted by vanizorc at 3:00 PM on November 27, 2013