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Comment by jbullock35 | Hacker News Reader

> if you get recruited to play Water Polo, Crew, Golf, Volleyball, or Beach volleyball at UC Berkeley, and ~95% of kids who play those sports come from wealthy families, and recruiting gave them an edge in admissions, does that count as "inappropriate?" I would say so, but I doubt this report would.

The report comes close: "the average grade point average for the bottom quartile of applicants whom UCLA admitted for academic year 2019–20 was 4.15, but the average grade point average for its admitted student athletes was 3.74. Similarly, two‑thirds of the admitted student athletes whom UC Berkeley evaluated through its holistic review process for academic years 2017–18 through 2019–20 received the lowest possible rating from its application readers—which is equivalent to a recommendation that the applicant be denied admission."

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> the average grade point average for the bottom quartile of applicants whom UCLA admitted for academic year 2019–20 was 4.15, but the average grade point average for its admitted student athletes was 3.74

So the student athletes averaged halfway between an A and an A-? So did I in HS, 15 years ago, and I was a pretty good student! GPAs are really hard to make sense of with all the AP bonuses and whatnot. Standardized test scores strike me as providing a more apples-to-apples comparison. Of course that’s increasingly difficult to do in a test-optional world. (My recollection from an article about ‘The Chosen’ in 2005 is that recruited athletes tend to score 100-200 points lower on the SAT, on average, at Ivy League schools. I would double-check had I not exceeded my monthly free New Yorker quota: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in/amp)

The way I've seen it calculated is this:

For regular classes, A: 4.0, B: 3.0, C: 2.0, D: 1.0 (with some variance depending on + or - grades offered). For Honors/AP classes, every grade is essentially bumped up 1.0 point.

So yes, a 3.74 is around an A- average, but that's an A- average in less rigorous classes, without competition from top students. That's more of a B-/C+ average in AP/Honors classes (obviously the calculation is far from perfect, though, because every school has it's quirks- at mine, you couldn't get above a ~4.5 overall). For reference, I graduated high school with a 3.6 with multiple Cs and hardly any As, simply by virtue of taking the maximum number of AP/Honors classes. The point being, a 3.74 is not a terrible GPA, but good students are generally over a 4.0 these days.

Most schools do that, but not all. My school (a private school in the US) didn't bump up anything.

Colleges recalculate GPA's by high school to compare apples to apples. So even if your school doesn't, many colleges will use this weighting system.

I thought it was widely regarded as acceptable that athletes had lower academic requirements. You can meet the admissions criteria via academics or via athletics. This doesn't mean any sort of inappropriate behavior.

The article describes something actually inappropriate: falsely saying students are good athletes in exchange for money.

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