What’s That? Why the High School Profile Matters.
Photo by Jackson Emery at Unsplash
There is a document pivotal in admissions that most people don’t even realize exists. Often, students never even see this piece of their submitted application, and no, it’s not a letter of recommendation. It’s the high school profile, and the very first document that we as advisors access (or request if it’s not publicly available) when preparing to onboard a new student.
Why does it matter? Why should every student and parent review theirs–not just when they are applying but in the years before?
Let’s start with what the school profile is. The school profile can be anywhere from one to four pages and generally includes some combination of the following information:
Demographics of the high school, including racial, geographic, and financial aid breakdowns
Information on any special programs or offerings
GPA scale and grading metrics, including course weighting
Mean or median test scores, including SAT, ACT, AP, and International Baccalaureate (IB) information, dependent on the school
Information about GPA distribution, reported as middle 50th %ile, decile, quintile, or quartile
Graduation and specific course requirements
AP, IB, and honors courses offered
College matriculation list, typically with a multi-year lookback
Why do colleges need this information? Well, performance is relative, and so is rigor. Admissions officers evaluate your file in the context of where you come from, what is available to you, and how you perform compared to your peers.
So, set aside the assumption that your GPA and test scores are universal numbers and instead think about your candidacy within the framework of relativity. For example:
Where do your GPA and test scores situate you within your class?
Does your school profile indicate that you come from a well-resourced school with traditionally high test scores and abundant AP/honors offerings? If so, you might be held to higher admissions standards. If it is clear that your school is under-resourced, the opposite might be true.
Have you taken the most rigorous courses available to you? If there is a higher-level course in your field of interest that you have opted not to take, colleges will wonder why. Conversely, if you haven’t taken that fourth year of language, but they can see that it’s not offered at your school, this information might mitigate the impact.
Do students from your school regularly attend the specific colleges and types of universities that interest you? If not, why?
Sometimes, what a school omits is as important as what it includes. Here are some omissions that we look for:
IB Data. If a school offers the IB diploma but doesn’t report the pass rate and/or the average IB score of their students, this could indicate that rigor of the curriculum and/or the performance of their students is not at IB standard. Generally, schools with strong IB numbers choose to report that information.
AP Data. Similarly, when schools that offer AP courses do not report the score distributions, this might be an indication that students are not performing well on AP exams, possibly calling into question the quality of the school’s curriculum. As with IB data, AP data can give readers a sense for curriculum execution and help them contextualize a student’s transcript.
GPA Data. When schools do not report GPA distribution information, we usually take this as an indicator of grade inflation. If grades skew high (some schools report their middle 50th %ile unweighted GPA as 3.75-3.95!), then those As might mean less. Relatedly, colleges often want to understand where a student sits in their class, so a student with a 3.7 who is below the 50th percentile of their class will have far fewer options than a student at a different school where the same grades place them in the top quarter.
A key mistake that applicants make is keeping a myopic focus on their own profiles at the expense of understanding (a) the pool of applicants with which they are competing, and (b) institutional needs and priorities. (More on the latter in a coming article!) As a result, while most can recite their unweighted and weighted GPAs, know their SAT breakdown and superscore, and can list their resume accomplishments, they may lack a realistic sense of the strength of their candidacy.
So, let this be your reminder to think in relative terms. Take a close look at your school profile, don’t overlook the importance of context, and enjoy the wisdom that comes with perspective!
