I’m gonna be applying later this fall, but I’m worried that my course rigor might HURT me because I’ve taken well over 8 semesters worth of dual-enrollment courses, which Berkeley gives extra weight to, but only up to 8 of them. This will end up dropping my UC GPA because many of the weighted courses won’t be weighted and will count as regular courses. Any reason why the UCs do this? Do they know that it hurts some applicants?
Unweighted, weighted-capped, and weighted-uncapped will all be visible to admission readers.
Weighted-capped is primarily used at the base level for UC and CSU eligibility probably because they want to retain an incentive for students to take honors/rigorous courses, but do not want weighted GPA to simply reflect the availability of huge numbers of such courses at the student’s high school. Some UC studies indicate that unweighted GPA was slightly more predictive of college GPA at UC than weighted GPA was, perhaps because UC students generally chose as many honors/rigorous courses while in high school, so the weighted (uncapped) GPA may have just reflected differences in availability.