You talk about “choice,” but no parent should have to choose to put their kid in one of these horrible study camps, or else get shut out of a first-tier high school or college.
Foreign students, many of them Chinese nationals, are admitted in droves to the University of California, while Americans are increasingly being excluded. The UC wants foreign students because they can charge them four times the tuition that Californians pay.
So now the average GPA for UCLA admission is 4.3. When I was coming up, a 4.3 wasn’t even mathematically possible. 4.0 was perfect. But now you spend your childhood in a study camp and take a college course, which is factored in to your high school GPA — now you’re better than perfect. And that 4.3 is the smokescreen that allows the UC to falsely claim that a foreign student is smarter and more deserving of admission than the kid with the 3.9 who played sports, went to the prom, and didn’t take college courses in high school.
My parents didn’t “accept mediocrity” from me — I graduated with honors from the UC. And yet if I applied today, I would have no chance of admission. So what’s changed? Chinese-style study camp prisoners get the slots in the universities that my parents’ and grandparents’ taxes built and paid for.
I’m not going to accept being called a racist (not that you called me a racist, but others on this thread have), when this is about culture, not skin color. And I’m not going to shrug at the destruction of American life — no more football or cheerleading, kids, if you wanna go to UCLA — that this sick style of schooling wreaks.
Many of the parents pushing these study camps are American, and parents of American children. That doesn’t change the fact that they’re trying to import a foreign schooling culture to America. And it’s a cheap tactic to wolf-cry “Racist!” when other parents express that they don’t want a foreign style of schooling here, or their kids to have to compete with the victims of it.
These study-camp parents are willing to do what sane parents aren’t — steal their kids’ childhoods. Why are we rewarding that behavior with all the seats at our best schools?
The reason you can have a GPA greater than 4.0 is that AP courses are weighted higher than a normal course. So an A in an AP course is considered a 4.3, rather than a 4.0.