At Stanford, nearly 73 percent of enrolled first-year students who reported a high school GPA had a 4.0. Among those whose schools reported class rank, 97 percent finished in the top tenth of their class. These are extraordinary academic records. They are also, within this particular population, remarkably ordinary.
That creates an issue for admissions offices. The 4.0 hasn’t lost its value; a student without strong grades will have a difficult time competing at the most selective colleges. But it has lost some of its ability to distinguish one excellent student from another.
There is evidence that this extends beyond the rarefied world of Stanford admissions. ACT researchers have documented rising high school grades and recently found that the relationship between GPA and first-year college performance varies with the level of grade inflation at a student’s high school. The relationship between ACT scores and college performance, however, was comparatively stable. A grade still tells us something, but it now requires more interpretation than it once did.
After two decades in admissions consulting, I find myself paying less attention to the number at the top of a transcript and more attention to how it was assembled. Two students can arrive at the same 4.0 by very different routes. One exhausted the mathematics curriculum, moved into multivariable calculus and pursued an independent project because there was nowhere else to go. Another chose a more cautious path. The outcomes are identical; the choices contain the information.
This is why course selection matters long before anyone begins filling out applications. The point isn’t to accumulate the largest possible collection of AP courses or manufacture difficulty for its own sake. What becomes revealing is progression: where a student sought challenge, where an interest deepened, and what happened when there was no obvious next course to take.
The same pattern appears outside the classroom. A long activity list can be assembled; but sustained commitment is harder to manufacture. Intellectual curiosity is similarly difficult to reduce to a line on an application because it tends to reveal itself indirectly, through what students read, build, research or pursue when nobody is assigning the work.
There is a broader phenomenon here. Whenever people understand what an institution measures, they begin optimizing for the measurement. Eventually the institution has to look behind the metric at the behavior that produced it. Colleges do this with transcripts. Employers do it with résumés. Investors do it with financial metrics. The better we become at producing the desired signal, the less the signal can explain by itself.
The return of standardized testing at highly selective colleges adds another piece of evidence, but it won’t solve this problem. No new number can permanently escape the incentives created around it.
The 4.0 isn’t becoming worthless. It is becoming something else: more common, more necessary and less capable of telling the whole story. We spent decades teaching students how to reach the number at the top of the transcript. Now the interesting information may be in the choices underneath it.
Marc is the author of Untangling the Ivy League, a best-selling guidebook on the Ancient Eight. He earned a BA from Cornell University and an MBA from University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Marc chaired the admissions ambassadors at Cornell and the admissions advisory board at UNC.
