Right-- and the system as it stands is poised to mostly reward kids like mine (or those who can be made to LOOK that way, anyway)--

who can pack more than seems humanly possible into a day-- every day. I feel very strongly that this is WRONG, by the way. A kid like Cricket's ought to look like a great prospect for college by virtue of the quality and depth of her output.



A word about GPA here-- 'weighted' is very significant at some high schools, and hardly at all at others. AP is about twice the volume of work compared with the standard issue course, but an A in an AP course is a 5.0, and the standard course, it is a 4.0. An honors course is not that much more work than standard (but all the assessments, etc. are different and more... erm-- 'enriched') and that is a 4.5-- which explains why my DD's GPA is what it is, I hope. She does have a couple of A-'s and a B on her transcripts. She's just packed a LOT of classes into her past four years.

We also successfully lobbied for her to be able to take some things at the AP level without having had a full year of the regular course first (which I think is stupid-- at least for kids that actually BELONG in an AP class to start with, let's just say). Physics, for example. Policies like that really hobble highly capable kids from distinguishing themselves come college time. Grrr.

Because they are on semesters and use Carnegie units to calculate graduation credit, she will graduate with-- I think-- 26? maybe 27 Carnegie Unit "credits." That's nine classes a year-- on average-- and technically, students can graduate with only 24 credits.

This is why admissions offices use unweighted GPA, though. Trying to parse what it all means otherwise is Byzantine. To say the least.


Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.