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As a family with a highly aspirational high school student and as a public school board member in a community where we have recently extensively debated AP grade weighting, we have had many conversations on this subject. In my opinion, the energy in the debate is indicative of a society overly focused on simplistic quantitative measures. "Simplify and Exaggerate" is a media trend that dilutes rational thought on complex issues in many areas.
In my recent conversations with admissions departments and faculty of highly selective schools, the feedback we have often received is "follow your dreams", almost to heck with the scores. This is easier for them to say than it is for students to live based on the perceived pressure to show high signaling quality numbers, but I think it's worthy advice. It seems that admissions departments strive to be less formulaic (although there may be certain cutoffs). For example, I don't think that a highly selective university would necessarily reject a student not in the top 1% GPA if the rest of the application were compelling. A passionate and honest essay by Kevin about a desire to do great things in Micro Biology with supporting demonstrated activities and extracurricular studies may weight more than the 1% vs. top 5% (but probably not get a 50%er into Harvard).
On GPA weighting, this is an area where a guidance counselor letter of recommendation can be used effectively. If the recommendation stated that Kevin pursued a course in Micro Biology even knowing that it would damage his GPA, that would look very favorable. Guidance counselors can be sympathetic to this and effective to communicate unique academic records circumstances.
It seems that the constraint in finding great students (and for many of our successes) is not an issue with having inadequate human capital, but rather lacking the vision and motivation to follow our dreams. The top 1% will always apply to the best schools, but my sense is that great schools would rather have a top 5% student with a demonstrated passion to pursue their dreams rather than someone with high book smarts and human capital that was only focused on GPA. The key in successful college applications these days seems to be to share a portfolio to demonstrate the potential for future success as much as formulaic scores.
The choice for Kevin to take that Micro Biology class would be the one with more integrity to pursue his dreams and I'm sure that would have come out in other ways in the application. Great university admissions departments are not fooled by GPA pumping strategies, they strive to seek for other underlying qualities of future success. More often than not I think we all have a tenancy to do what we think will get us high signaling quality to others rather than take risks to pursue our dreams that often would have resulted in better ultimate success or at least educational failures that are more personally valuable than perceived external rewards.