12-17-2019, 11:09 AM
I find talking about weighted GPAs to be absurd, every school does it differently (mine didn't at all, I've heard of places going as high as 6.0 for certain courses), so you never know what you're talking about. Anyway, perhaps something like a 3.65 would be a disaster now, but I thought that it depends on what else you're doing to make up for it, and that admissions cares more about trend lines, ie I didn't have the strongest 4-year GPA, but my junior/senior year GPAs were probably pretty close to a 4.0 with the most difficult slate I could take at my school, so I think the slightly worse results in earlier years mattered less. No idea if that's still the case (or really if it was even true then).
We're certainly in an interesting place right now regarding admissions to elite schools, it really doesn't seem like the current system can hold up under its own weight for much longer, but short of a massive federal commitment to expanding slots at elite research universities, I'm not sure what to do. (Although I've certainly been a fan of "everyone who clears this bar gets put into the pool and it's a random draw from there", I'm not sure it's practicable.)
We're certainly in an interesting place right now regarding admissions to elite schools, it really doesn't seem like the current system can hold up under its own weight for much longer, but short of a massive federal commitment to expanding slots at elite research universities, I'm not sure what to do. (Although I've certainly been a fan of "everyone who clears this bar gets put into the pool and it's a random draw from there", I'm not sure it's practicable.)