yeah this is a really hard problem and I don't see a fix outside of standardized testing. Every school is individually incentivized to use every trick - grading out of 5.0, grading loosely, giving a bonus score for AP/IB courses "because of difficulty", etc and teachers are obviously very sympathetic to the future of their students and the impact that being a Grading Nazi could have. And parents are obviously incentivized to find the school that's going to make Little Billy look best (best educated is great but not sufficient, that's why we're discussing testing).
You need a uniform grading system, which means a uniform material and a uniform grading process, which is... standardized testing, or at least AP/IB courses.
i came from a rural high school that didn't have any ap/ib courses. i wonder how much that affected my college applications.
i still got to go to the college of my choice (fire up chips!) but i have to wonder -- if i was able to boost my gpa using ap/ib courses, would i have received more scholarship opportunities/better offers from other schools?
That assumes the AP classes would have boosted your GPA. If the harder class knocked you from an A to a B then it would have been a net negative, at least at my high school (AP counted as a 1.2 weighting, so an A in a regular class is 4.0 and a B in an AP class is 3.0 * 1.2 = 3.6).
Admissions officers will tell you they are aware of what programs schools have, and take that into account. If your school has no AP with GPA inflation your 3.x is the same as a 4.x at some bigger high school. How true that is idk.
that may be true for colleges looking at local feeder schools ("northwestern knows that my high school doesn't have grade inflation"), but I don't know how that idea scales nationwide or internationally. To steal an example, how does a college in Seattle know that a high school in Illinois has grade inflation or not? is that tracked anywhere centralized?
you could certainly look at past performance of students from that school but that turns into a "legacy system with more steps"...
Anecdotal, but it seems universities have solved this by figuring out which schools have grade inflation. I went to a gifted school in Chicago that was quite competitive and did not have grade inflation. 20% of the school went to Northwestern every year because they'd accept every B student.
For one thing, if a school has grade inflation so bad that even an A+ from that school isn't enough to get into Yale - is that a problem?
For another example, if adjustment for grade inflation means Yale will ask for an A+ from Martin Luther King High, Detroit while they'll accept a B from Phillips Academy, Andover - is that a problem?
Well the thing is I went to an inner city public high school. It was much closer to "Martin Luther King High, Detroit" than it was to a prep school. Majority of students were below the poverty line, yet almost half were accepted to Northwestern every year, many with full rides.
I've met people from elite private day schools. Their education in a different world than 99.99% of public high schools, except maybe a few like Stuyvesant in NYC and Lowell in SF, or the fortunate few where 3/4 of the kids have parents who are doctors or college professors (why not both?).
You need a uniform grading system, which means a uniform material and a uniform grading process, which is... standardized testing, or at least AP/IB courses.