Everybody's a Winner wrote:
The smartest generation.
SERIOUS grade inflation. This is why colleges today are MUCH MORE interested in seeing the difficulty of the classes you take in high school as opposed to just your GPA.
Also, the school districts do things differently from each other. AP classes are pretty much worth 5.0 everywhere, but some school districts count honors classes as 4.5. I think that's bogus.
Today, the AVERAGE GPA to get into Ohio State is 3.6. That is CRAZY. Back when I was in high school, OSU would take anyone with a 2.0 or higher. It's just that a 3.5 is no where near as close to what it used to be.
If you get half A's and half B's and you don't take any AP classes, you will have a 3.5, and you will have a hard time getting into even a second or third tier college.
Want to go to an IVY or many of the top Liberal Arts colleges, then you'd better be at 4.0 and higher with a lot of AP classes and honors classes, very high test scores, and be great at something in addition to just academics; sports, music, volunteerism, something.
My daughter's high school quit naming a Valedictorian. Now they just say that EVERYONE with a 4.0 or higher is 1st in the class. Last year's graduating class had 27 of those. So far in my daughter's grade, there are 19 of those (out of about 430, and of course a handful of them have GPAs of 4.3 or so because they have straight A's and take AP classes).
3.5 is just nothing these days.