AP 10 point boost

Applying to College
1

i have a question,
my school boosts your AP grade 10 points towards your gpa. for example, if you get an 85 in an AP it will count as a 95 towards your gpa but it will still show up as an 85. now, my school weighs their gpa. so you have to calculate your gpa yourself and they don’t do unweighted gpas so colleges don’t know our uw gpas. my question is, how do colleges know that you have a 95 not an 85 in an AP while recalculating your gpa? if they count it as an 85 that is not fair? i already got accepted to a good college but i just wanted to know how do they count it.
thanks!

2

It counts as an 85. Colleges generally don’t use the HS weighting systems because each one is different.

3

To quote Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest: “Ah, but nobody ever said life was fair, Tina.”

But, yes, it is totally fair. An 85 is what you earned; any GPA weighting boost is dependent upon each individual school.

4

Think of it this way. The way they make it fair is by noting that you have taken a challenging course. That has its own relevance in the application process, separate from GPA.

5

Many good schools reasonably EXPECT both high grades AND curricular rigor. Failure to accomplish either is a clear “admissions negative.”

6

The way you worded the question is confusing. I’m going to assume that you switched UW and W and I’ll answer to that accordingly.

I can say that I’m in the complete opposite situation. My school only sends weighted averages, so 90 in AP is 95 on our transcript (half of what your school weight is for AP) and I really dislike that simply due to the fact that weighting systems vary from school to school. Heck, I’d argue massively inflated averages is unfair to many, and I’m on the road with 11 APs.
Lucky for us, colleges require what is known as a school profile. Using that and their many years of experience, each applicant is considered in proper context. If a course is hard, then its reasonable that grades are slightly lower. They’ll understand that. There’s a reason why many higher tier schools take rigor of record very seriously.