Today in my classes, my students were registering for their classes for next year. To do so, the counselors gave them each a copy of their transcript.
A girl asked me, “Mr. Lax, how good is a 3.76 GPA?”
I replied, “Wow, that’s really good. Keep it up and you should be in great shape when you graduate in two years!”
Then she asked, “What’s this ‘81 of 356’ mean?”
I looked. It’s her class rank.
A kid with a 3.76 is barely even in the top quartile of her grade.
I guess all our kids are above average here.
Just chiming in to say - I get it.
Seems to me that when I was in high school, certain classes had a possible rating of 5.0, thus you had kids with GPAs higher than 4.0. Making a 3.7 pretty mediocre, comparatively.
That’s still true, but it’s restricted to AP classes. I teach sophomores, so they don’t have that opportunity yet.
I was reading some article about a student who had a 6.7 GPA. I knew about the slow inflation above 4, but I had no perspective what 6+ even meant. My first thought was that maybe it was out of 10, and wasn’t that good. The I saw she was valedictorian, so I was back to having no idea what it meant again.