Certain schools/teachers giving easy A's

[government]

My friend goes to a more ghetto school than me and his teachers in AP classes practically hand out A's. Right now he has a 115% in AP world history from all the easy homework quizzes with trivial questions like"what year did X battle take place" and extra credit.Homework is assigned like every 2-3 days whereas at my school we have homework every night, multiple essays per week, and hard as f*ck tests that you can't pass by just memorizing dates and names of leaders. Most people in my class have a B or a low A and work hard to get those grades while my friend has a 115% and barely has to do anything.

Not complaining about my class at all its what I would expect from any AP subject, but it kind of pisses me off that people at other schools get super high grades from barely working at all. He isn't that smart either, we are both in 11th grade and he is in normal level precalculus while most of the people who are at my school are taking AP calc ab/bc or Multivariable.

The reason why I am telling you guys this is because I want to know if colleges make any effort to distinguish an A in one school from an A in another. I don't want someone to get accepted into a college instead of me just because their teacher decided hand out easy A's.

 

[G037H3]

grades aren't everything

when you have a much higher SAT, it will show that you're more prepared for uni

 

[Pengwuino]

Colleges are pretty aware of grade inflation. This is why they look at things such as the SAT tests. Though they know it exists, it's probably very hard to say school X inflates grades twice as badly as school Y.

And if it makes oyu feel any better, people who go to crumby high schools that aren't challenged won't be able to make it at a high powered university.

 

[hadsed]

Only some schools care. There are some colleges that look strictly at GPA + SAT and that is it, end of story. You'll have to figure out which schools will actually look at the courses you took, give some weight to recommendations, extracurriculars, class rank, etc. Fortunately, those schools are easier to find than the former type. It's a screwed up system, so you'll have to work your tail off to get everything as high as possible, but if you ask me, it's not really worth it (unless your life plans include working as an investment banker out of undergrad or something equally as crazy).

 

[Pengwuino]

Only some schools care. There are some colleges that look strictly at GPA + SAT and that is it, end of story. You'll have to figure out which schools will actually look at the courses you took, give some weight to recommendations, extracurriculars, class rank, etc. Fortunately, those schools are easier to find than the former type. It's a screwed up system, so you'll have to work your tail off to get everything as high as possible, but if you ask me, it's not really worth it (unless your life plans include working as an investment banker out of undergrad or something equally as crazy).

It's not worth getting into a good university?

 

[hadsed]

I wouldn't say 'good' university, I'd limit it to those upper tier schools that everyone seems to stress over. But also it depends on your career goals.

 

[twofish-quant]

The reason why I am telling you guys this is because I want to know if colleges make any effort to distinguish an A in one school from an A in another. I don't want someone to get accepted into a college instead of me just because their teacher decided hand out easy A's.

Yes people know about difference in grading policy and they try to correct for this. One way that they do it is to not sweat small details. The difference between an B and a A may be due to differences in grading. The difference between a D and a A is probably not.

As far as AP classes go, people are going to be a lot more interested in the score that they make in the AP test itself than on the grade they got in the class. Also what classes that you take matters a bit more than what you get in them.