I own a tutoring company and your child’s 4.0 GPA probably isn’t real |
Fox News senior national correspondent Rich Edson reports on findings about students’ preparedness for the next level on ‘America Reports.’
College application deadlines in January are approaching. As they do, students and especially parents are having tough conversations and revising their school lists and expectations in one direction: downward. Ninety percent of parents believe that their children are at or above grade level proficiency, yet, according to standardized measures, 12th-grade students have the lowest math and reading preparedness on record. Only 22% of 12th-grade students are proficient in math, and only 35% in reading.
Typically, families only realize how inflated grades are when they start looking into colleges. For instance, in 2024, the average unweighted GPA of an admitted student to UCLA was a perfect 4.0. In other words, the average student had never received a "B" in any class throughout all of high school, and potentially never even an "A-minus."
With that realization comes another one: how unprepared their "top performing" students are. As the owner of a tutoring company, I see and hear some version of the following countless times: "My kid just got her SAT score back, and it is much lower than we expected. She is a top performer at her school but scored in the 1100s."
I'M A CONSERVATIVE STUDENT AND THE NO. 1 QUESTION I GET IS: 'HOW DO I SURVIVE LEFTIST PROFESSORS?'
SAT and ACT scores are a rude awakening, both because parents have been misled about the academic preparedness of their kids for so long and because it’s often too late to go back and relearn everything now.
Students are discovering that high school grades........