alt Hacker News> A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many.
Damn, this is as stupid as it gets.
Replies
gopher_space • last Saturday at 8:25 PM
The students operating at this level are identical. There’s no practical difference between a 4.0 and a 4.5 GPA when comparing students from different schools.
jayd16 • last Saturday at 11:45 PM
Ok well look at it the other way. Should a student be punished if they took every AP offered but less than another student?
There nothing stupid about controlling for circumstances.
As an analogy, let’s say you want to build a fun race car that you can take to the track. You go out and look at a bunch of used cars and you want to be qualitative so you measure out their 0-60 times.
You could just say “the car with the best time wins” and take the fastest one you tested. Or you could consider context like “this one had bald tires tha could easily be upgraded” or “we tested this one going uphill”.
The goal is to find the car that can be turned into the fastest and not which has the best numbers right now.