High Gpa Quotes

The higher my GPA gets the more I realize high school is useless

What is your collective GPA for this year?” “Not as high as I'd like it to be.” Freud steepled his fingers in front of his mouth. “What about your parents?” “I don't know. They haven't been in school for a while.

He made it to the front door before he looked back at her. Then his eyes grew wide. “Oh! I almost forgot.” He came back over to her and handed her a card. “These are my numbers, e-mail addresses, business URL, physical address, and mailing address. You know…if you need to get in touch with me.” Get in touch with him? But he left out his social security number, his date of birth, and his high school GPA.

One semester later I did, indeed, graduate with a 4.0. I had done it. And after that, my GPA did . . . Nothing. I never planned on going to graduate school. I wasn’t applying for jobs that used grades as a measurement. I didn’t need that GPA for any single reason other than to SAY I had it and impress people. I could turn this into an argument for “Let’s reward a high GPA after college in LIFE! Can we get priority seating on Southwest? A free monthly refill at Starbucks? SOMETHING to make four years of my life chasing this arbitrary number WORTH it?!” (Great idea. Never gonna happen.) Or I could argue that if I’d been easier on myself and gotten 10 percent worse grades I could have had 50 percent more friendships and fun. If someone’s takeaway from this story is “Felicia Day said don’t study!,” I’ll punch you in the face. But I AM saying don’t chase perfection for perfection’s sake, or for anyone else’s sake at all. If you strive for something, make sure it’s for the right reasons. And if you fail, that will be a better lesson for you than any success you’ll ever have. Because you learn a lot from screwing up. Being perfect . . . not so much.

Don't forget that your happiness is the most important thing, and that you should never equate your GPA or school with your sense of self-worth. . . . If you're feeling overwhelmed, take a step back and remind yourself that you are not your grades.

They are not raising children so much as living résumés, and by the time high school arrives, the kids have learned to sign up for activities strictly to impress college admissions committees, ignoring (or, eventually, losing sight of) what they personally find interesting in the here-and-now. They have acquired the habit of asking teachers, “Do we need to know this?”—rather than, say, “What does this mean?”—as they grimly set about the business of trying to ratchet up their GPA or squeeze out another few points on the SAT.

What makes the SAT bad is that it has nothing to do with what kids learn in high school. As a result, it creates a sort of shadow curriculum that furthers the goals of neither educators nor students.… The SAT has been sold as snake oil; it measured intelligence, verified high school GPA, and predicted college grades. In fact, it’s never done the first two at all, nor a particularly good job at the third.” Yet students who don’t test well or who aren’t particularly strong at the kind of reasoning the SAT assesses can find themselves making compromises on their collegiate futures—all because we’ve come to accept that intelligence comes with a number. This notion is pervasive, and it extends well beyond academia. Remember the bell‐shaped curve we discussed earlier? It presents itself every time I ask people how intelligent they think they are because we’ve come to define intelligence far too narrowly. We think we know the answer to the question, “How intelligent are you?” The real answer, though, is that the question itself is the wrong one to ask.

Karen Arnold, a researcher at Boston College, followed eighty-one high school valedictorians and salutatorians from graduation onward to see what becomes of those who lead the academic pack. Of the 95 percent who went on to graduate college, their average GPA was 3.6, and by 1994, 60 percent had received a graduate degree. There was little debate that high school success predicted college success. Nearly 90 percent are now in professional careers with 40 percent in the highest tier jobs. They are reliable, consistent, and well-adjusted, and by all measures the majority have good lives. But how many of these number-one high school performers go on to change the world, run the world, or impress the world? The answer seems to be clear: zero. Commenting

1.11 Why Do Myths About Intelligence Definitions and Measurement Persist? Given all this strong empirical evidence that intelligence test scores are meaningful, why does the myth persist that scores have little if any validity? Here is an informative example. From time to time, a college admissions representative will assert that in their institution they find no relationship between grade point average (GPA) and SAT scores. Such observations are virtually always based on a lack of understanding of a basic statistical principle regarding the correlation between two variables. To calculate a correlation between any two variables, there must be a wide range of scores for each variable. At a place like MIT, for example, most students fall in a narrow range of high SAT scores. This is a classic problem of restriction of range. There is little variance among the students, so in this case, the relationship between GPA and SAT scores will not be very strong. Sampling from just the high end or just the low end or just the middle of a distribution restricts range and results in spuriously low or zero correlations. Restriction of range actually accounts for many findings about what intelligence test scores “fail” to predict.

I KNOW THAT THERE WILL ALWAYS BE PEOPLE who think that the extra courses I took to help raise my high school GPA were a lame excuse for making up classes I failed the first time around. There are other people who will always be convinced that I am just a dumb football player who only graduated from Briarcrest because I had a lot of people helping to pull me along because they wanted to get me into college. All I can say in response to that is, look at my academic record while at Ole Miss. I wasn’t just squeaking by with the minimum GPA—twice I made the dean’s list. It’s amazing how a life can turn around with some encouragement, some support, and someone willing to say, “I believe you CAN do what you’ve set your mind on doing.

The standardized Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) for 2013 paint an equally grim picture. Only 43 percent of the 1.66 million students who took the test scored high enough to be classified as “college ready.” What is worse, this is the fifth year in a row that fewer than half of the young people who took the test scored above 1550, the threshold for demonstrating the capability to maintain a grade point average (GPA) of B-minus or better in a four-year degree college or university.10

Bottom line: The pool of great candidates is far bigger than just people who completed college with a stellar GPA. Consider dropouts, people who had low GPAs, community-college students, and even those who just went to high school.

Thomas Edison described himself as being “not at the head of my class, but the foot.” Einstein graduated fourth in his class of five physicists in 1900.54 Steve Jobs had a high school GPA of 2.65; Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba (the Chinese equivalent of Amazon), took the gaokao (the Chinese national educational exam) and scored 19 out of 120 on a math section on his second try;55 and Beethoven had trouble adding figures and never learned to multiply or divide. Walt Disney was a below-average student and often fell asleep in class.56 Finally, Picasso could not remember the sequence of the letters in the alphabet and saw symbolic numbers as literal representations: a 2 as the wing of a bird or a 0 as a body.57

high schools across the country may vary enormously and we try to take account of this by recommending that students complete the most challenging courses available to them at their particular school. When we talk about challenge and rigor, the signal we’re sending is that while college is a transformative, often life-changing experience, it requires serious preparation. We believe that students are in the best position to maximize their experience at our institution when they complete challenging and rigorous classes that are offered at their high school. Students don’t do themselves any favors by trying to pump up their GPA by completing a non-college-prep curriculum. Avoiding courses that prepare one for college is not an effective strategy

the School Report (SR) and the high school profile. The SR includes information about curriculum, the number of students attending four-year colleges, and GPA, as well as a counselor evaluation that rates the rigor of a student’s course work and academic achievement. Some schools also provide the college with a profile that describes the curriculum, faculty, student body characteristics such as size and ethnicity, class rank, GPA ranges, awards, and even grade distributions for the class in every offered subject.

Until recently, San Francisco’s acclaimed Lowell High School admitted a majority of its students based on middle school GPA and a standardized admissions test. Lowell’s student body was 82 percent non-white,8 but because blacks were underrepresented compared to their share of San Francisco’s population, the school board in 2021 accused Lowell of “perpetuat[ing] segregation and exclusion.”9 Henceforth, Lowell would use a lottery for admissions. (The receipt of Ds and Fs shot up 300 percent in the first lottery-enrolled class.)10

Still, Iyengar and Westwood’s research is a fundamental challenge to the way we like to believe American politics works. A world where we won’t give an out-party high schooler with a better GPA a nonpolitical scholarship is not a world in which we’re going to listen to politicians on the other side of emotional, controversial issues—even if they’re making good arguments that are backed by the facts.

When both males and females were considered as a single group, the impact of having a roommate classified as a frequent or occasional precollege drinker was to reduce a student’s end-of-year GPA by more than a tenth of a point on a four-point scale. But the effect was dramatically larger for males than for females. Relative to males whose roommates were nondrinkers, those whose roommates were frequent precollege drinkers had end-of-year GPAs that were 0.28 lower; for those whose roommates were occasional drinkers, the corresponding deficit was almost as great, 0.26 lower. These effects are comparable to the effect of a student’s own high school GPA being lower by half a point, or to having scored fifty points lower on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.27 By far the most dramatic impact observed in this study was for males who were themselves frequent precollege drinkers and were randomly assigned to a roommate who was also a frequent precollege drinker. Relative to the overall sample GPA, these males had end-of-year GPAs that were almost a full point lower.28

Just as computer science was erecting barriers to entry, medicine—an equally competitive and selective field—was adjusting them. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, dozens of new medical schools opened across the country, and many of the newly created spots went to women. Standardized entry exams also began to change. In 1977, the MCAT, a test for entrance into medical school, was revamped to reduce cultural and social bias. But the game changer was the implementation of Title IX, which prohibits sexual discrimination in educational programs. From then on, if a woman could score high enough on the newly revised MCATs and meet other requirements, med schools could not legally deny her entry, and women poured in. Why wasn’t the same progress being made in computer science? Professor Eric Roberts, now at Stanford, was chairing the computer science department at Wellesley when the department instituted a GPA threshold. Of that period he later wrote, “In the 1970s, students were welcomed eagerly into this new and exciting field. Around 1984, everything changed. Instead of welcoming students, departments began trying to push them away.