I work with many student athletes, some of whom excel in cross-country. I have asked these cross-country runners if they would run the 100m race during track season to which most exclaim, “Ew, no! I hate sprinting!” On the contrary, many of my sprinters, when asked if they would run 5 miles, express the same negative sentiment but towards distance running. Fundamentally, running 5 miles and sprinting 100m are two vastly different skills. Being good at one doesn’t directly translate to being good at the other. So even though both events are “running,” the type of running involved is inherently different.
As a full-time test prep professional, I have gotten the question “Why Doesn’t My Child's GPA "Match" His or Her SAT®/ACT® Score?” hundreds - if not thousands - of times.
The truth is that the premise of the question is flawed, as there is no such thing as a GPA “matching” a test score. We work with students who have a 4.0 (or even higher than a 4.0 GPA), and that same GPA can equate to a 910 SAT, 1200 SAT, or 1450 SAT. GPA and standardized tests are two fundamentally different metrics — quite comparable to the 5 mile run vs. 100m sprint.
GPA has been steadily on the rise — in 2010, the median GPA was 3.16 and, in 2021, it was 3.44 (credit to ACT®). More and more students are getting As in school, and, as this happens, GPA becomes less of a reliable metric. There are no regulations at most schools regarding how many students can receive an A. On the other hand, standardized tests operate as a bell curve. Getting a 1450 on the SAT® precisely means that you performed better than 96% of test-takers. In many schools, having a 3.7 may only put you in the 35th percentile. There is no standardized grading scale between one school and another — even between one teacher and another teacher instructing the same class in the same school.
It is also important to understand that GPA takes many more factors into consideration than does a standardized test. GPA accounts for homework, participation, projects, good class behavior, and tests. Extra credit may even factor in. A standardized test purely measures mastery of the content being tested. Whether it’s fair or not is a separate question, but it is simply a mastery of test content without other factors to either enhance or deflate the grade.
To summarize, the idea that GPA and test scores should “match” is fundamentally flawed, as they are very different in what they intend to test: a 5.0 GPA student may score poorly on a standardized test, whereas a student with a 3.0 may achieve great success with standardized testing. I am not denying that, usually, students who do well in school are more likely to do well on standardized tests but asserting that doing well in school is not enough to do well on standardized tests for some students.
