I recently attended the Summer Residential Governor’s School for Humanities and It really opened my eyes on GPAs and how schools and regions of Virginia have made it a mess.
I was from Virginia Beach and to my knowledge, we hardly weight grades for honors ap or duel enrollment courses. This makes a perfect 4.0 rather unheard of for a cumulative. We also use a modified 10 point scale that makes getting an a more difficult. Just to mention, other people from here said they had between a 3.6-3.9.
A 4.0 = (93 – 100) +.0488 for AP only
A- 3.7 = (90 – 92) +.0488 for AP only
B+ 3.3 = (87 – 89) +.0366 for AP only
B 3 = (83 – 86) +.0366 for AP only
and so on…
But at the schools in NOVA where a lot of the people were from, their average GPA was a 4.3-5.1 on a 4 point scale.
________ coreHonors/DuelAP/IB/Industry Certs
A+ 97-100 4.55.05.5
A 90-96 4.04.55.0
B+ 86-89 3.54.0_________4.5
B 80-85 3.03.5_____________4.0
and so on…
It is also important to mention that when SAT scores came out over the summer, most of them were at 1000-1200 few actually had super high scores.
The people who went to these schools say that they don’t report class ranks and only have unweighted GPAs.
In my school, I had a 3.71 with the majority of my classes being honors/AP/Industry certification (only two normal classes which were mandatory for graduation with no higher option). It would be safe to say that if I was always in their district I’d be well above a 4.0.
How do colleges look at this information? Do these people have an advantage to more prestigious schools simply because their reported GPAs are higher than ours? Does that make it harder for us to earn scholarships because our unweighted gpa won’t stack up to their weighted ones? Why do schools do this in the first place when all it seems to do is distort the student’s actual performance for people who not familiar with the scale?
You have it easy. Where we live a 97 is an A+ but still contributes a 3.7 to your GPA for a normal CP class.
However, the answer to your question: GPA is calculated very differently at different high schools. As such the GPA that is listed on your report cards really are very difficult or impossible to use to predict which schools you can get into. Universities will look at your actual grades.
Along with your transcript your HS will provide a school profile which describes (among other things) your school’s grading system, course levels etc. So don’t worry, your transcript will be reviewed in the proper context.
Also a number of colleges recalculate GPA based on their own criteria (ex. unweighted, academic classes only etc.)
Colleges know how different high schools grade and score. In particular, Virginia state schools will definitely know how different schools in VA grade and score. They will know that if two students at different schools have mostly A-minuses and similar numbers of honors classes and APs, and one has a 3.7 GPA and the other is 4.3, that there isn’t necessarily a difference.
My D just graduated from a NOVA school that adds weight and also does class rank. My guess as to why they do that is that it encourages better students to take honors and AP classes. It also means that the top-ranked students are ones who took challenging courses, and not ones who, let’s say, only took two years of science and no honors and APs, and still got good grades. Whether this is a good idea or not is another question.
Also, there is nothing new. By the way, your GPA scale is also weighted when you add the extra points for AP. While the second example is not in a 4.0 max scale. After all, having an A in one school may be less challenging than getting a B in another school. So the GPA need to be in the context of the school.
At least in Northern VA when a school sends a college a student transcript they also send a profile of the school and how grades and gpa are calculated. That is taken into account when a college is reviewing an applicant file. I am sure your high school does the same thing when they send a student transcript.
My S’s hs has a max 4.0 for any class: choir, PE, or dual enrolled organic chemistry. And an A- is a 3.667, B+ 3.33, B 3.0 etc.
Some one told my D when she was applying she should report that scale as weighted, because if she had an A- some schools would recalculate the gpa and any A- would become a 4.0, but if she reported it as unweighted they would just take the number on the transcript without really evaluating it. Is there some validity to that? Should everyone just report everything as weighted so the gpa’s are evaluated by a person rather than a computer?