Hi again! As we wind down the Early Action reading season, it's time to take a very close look at an application for admission. In the next few postings, I will take you step-by-step through an application as I read it to give you a sense of what we are taking a look at on this side of the desk. Here we go...

Before we even start to read the application itself, we take a close look at the student's high school academic performance, and put the student's grade point average onto our own Providence College unweighted 4.0 scale. Why do we do this? Well, each year we receive applications from thousands of different high schools, and it feels like there are thousands of different grading scales out there. We see everything, from 4.0 scales to 5.0 scales to 100-point scales, to high schools that do not calculate GPAs. I remember one application from a couple years back where the high school had a 13-point scale and the student had an 11.28 GPA. What does that 11.28 mean in the context of our review process and in comparison to all of the other applicants we are looking at? Good question. That's why we recalculate! When we move into our Committee on Admission process, where our entire counseling staff is gathered together to make the final decisions on around 2,500 applications, it is helpful if we are able to look at these students on the same "playing field" -- or grading scale, so all students (including the one with an 11.28) have their GPAs converted to our PC scale.

We’ll call our example applicant “Sarah Student,��? and begin with our “recalcing��? process. In recalculating her GPA, I am only counting the grades she has received in core academic courses: the areas of English, Math, Natural Science, Social Science (History), and Foreign Language. We also count any other "non-core" courses that are taken at the Honors or Advanced Placement level, and this particular student has an AP Art Studio course and an Honors Business elective that I'll include in the GPA recalculation...

Along with being able to consider all applicants on the same grading scale to make it a lot easier for our counseling staff, another reason that we recalculate the GPA is so that we get a true sense of how each student has performed in his or her academic courses-- so, we are not counting classes that your high school might include in your GPA, such as Physical Education, Health, and "Basket Weaving 101." This way, the GPAs we consider are not inflated by non-academic courses. As an aside, if you attend a religiously-affiliated high school, we will count your Theology/Religion courses in the recalculated PC GPA.

Our example applicant, Sarah, has done very well in high school and has an unweighted PC GPA of a 3.61. Yes, you read that last sentence correctly -- the recalculated GPA we use is on an unweighted scale, and the reason for this is, again, because there are SO many different weighting scales out there. At some high schools, a student might get 2 extra credit points for taking an AP course... at another high school, a student might receive 5 extra points... at my own high school, there is no extra weight given to AP level courses. So, we take the weight out of the GPA in order to (again) put every applicant on the same playing field. But don't panic... the "weight" gets put back in to every application in our "strength of curriculum rating." And we NEVER look at your GPA without also looking at your courses. We'll get more into curriculum in tomorrow’s posting! I’ll meet you right here then!