system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: High school GPA should be compared the persons z score.

If you are unfamiliar with a z score, all it measures is how many standard deviations from the mean a score is. So if the mean is 100 and the standard deviation is 15, a score of 115 would have a z score of 1 and 85 would be -1.

Colleges should evaluate high school GPA by finding the z score of a particular student. This would help to identify high schools that artificially inflate their GPA by making courses too easy, as a 3.8 may really have a Z score of .1 if everyone else's GPA is inflated. Likewise, someone with a 3.1 might have a z score of 2.25 if their school is really hard or disadvantaged, allowing schools to better identify skilled students in disadvantaged settings.
gpt
That might be useful for bigger schools but any small school might have problems with sample size. A 30 person class is not gonna be ideal when it comes to finding means and z-scores. Plus, most colleges already use class ranking, which approximates this data anyway. If you're the valedictorian with a GPA of 2.8 they're gonna know that you're the cream of that school's crop even without a z-score.