> I mean a plot of say high school GPA vs say college graduation rate or college GPA would be rather informative.You'd have to be very careful in how to measure both the inputs and the outputs.
First, "weighting" makes high school GPAs pretty difficult to interpret without a lot of context. This is compounded by the fact that "weighting" is a bad solution to the underlying problem of trying to compare fundamentally incomparable coursework. There's really no numerical way to compare a grade in a remedial Biology course to a grade in an AP Biology course.
Second, grading varies wildly from school to school and teacher to teacher, and what an "A" means will also vary wildly. Some teachers emphasize understanding, some emphasize busy work, and some hand of "A"s like candy. To give one example that might be useful to the HN audience: I've volunteered in several AP CS courses:
- In one course, getting an "A" required writing thousands upon thousands of lines of if-else conditions following inane string formatting guidelines. Barely any looping. AFAICT the teacher was the least competent math teacher that was removed from teaching any math courses that were tested for in state standardized tests (never taught algebra or geometry -- just all the random remedial courses and electives).
- In another course, getting an "A" required writing real programs, using some data structures appropriately, knowing the difference between constant/linear/"not linear" algorithm, etc. Students even wrote some simple proofs. Teacher was a CS major.
- In a third course, basically everyone got in "A". Teacher was, I shit you not, a gym teacher. Literally a warm body. Course was basically self-study on days I wasn't there.
So, even in relatively "standardized" AP courses, there's often not a nice bell curve, teachers aren't using the same rubrics or even assignments, and you really have no clue whether that grading reflects ability to put up with bullshit busywork or actual understanding.
Third, you also have to be careful about how you're measuring the results. College GPA and graduation rates are not field-agnostic. A 4.0 in CS or Physics or Math is not easily comparable to a 4.0 in Communications. Also, universities aren't comparable. A degree/GPA at Small Noncompetitive Liberal Arts College is simply not comparable to a degree/GPA at MIT or Stanford.
Also, dropping your lucrative major for a useless major can have an even bigger impact on your life than dropping out. The number of people who start in STEM and end up with a Communications or Business degree is just as relevant, or arguably even more relevant, than the number of Communications or Business majors who end up without a degree.