<p>I have always thought that UC places a cap of 8 points/courses - equivalent to 4 year long courses - for calculating weighted GPA. But recently I heard that UC Berkeley does not have a cap and would weigh all courses that are eligible for weighing.
Is that right?</p>
<p>The UC system has an application that takes self-entered grades for classes that fit into the official a thru g categories. It has the applicant adjust them to a letter grade systems as well as removing any + or - portion of the letter grade. </p>
<p>The system then calculates two GPAs - unweighted, and one that weights up to 8 semesters of honors and AP classes, but even some of those are excluded - e.g. a 9th grade class listed as honors will not be counted. </p>
<p>However, the information that is passed to the admissions group of every campus to which you apply has all the detailed grade entries you made. </p>
<p>Most campuses have a very strict, defined way of ranking applicants - usually only the UC GPA with the weighting is used for grades, but they include MANY other factors with unique weighting for each campus. </p>
<p>Cal does not have a fixed algorithm, instead the admissions committee sees all the grades you reported and the system has calculated it various ways - fully weighted, unweighted, gpa for various categories, by year. Because they use a holistic system of admission, they synthesize everything they know about an applicant to determine how they evaluate them - first dividing them into definitely want, definitely dont want, and the rest, numerically that is represented by less than ten categories. There are many kinds of factors. It the school is trying to increase its pool of students from a certain geography, that might get a student ranked higher than someone who is otherwise identical but from different areas, for example. If the school wants more musicians, or any characteristic that is being established to shape the university and the incoming student body, that may be way one application is in a higher category than others, but outstanding stats and solid accomplishments are definitely a big factor that also tends to get the application put in a high category. </p>
<p>Two readers look at each application, and assign it to one of the categories. If the two differ in their rating, it goes to a third and more senior admission committee member for review. The applications in the middle categories are the ones that are then reviewed by the committee to whittle down to a final list. The higher categories are already set to get a ‘yes’. The lower categories are already set to receive a rejection. </p>
<p>For some in the middle, Cal will send out a request for supplemental information - a questionaire, a chance to submit 1H senior HS grades, and a chance to submit one reference. That is used to finish the decisions of the middle categories. Confusing things, the supplemental request also goes out to many who have those special characteristics the school might be looking for - a published novelist, a national level first place in some prestigious musical com[etition, athletes that are underrepresented. A version will go out to anyone who might face disabilities, too, so that further hides whether someone was given a middle category rating. Unless you know the kind of supplemental request, you can’t guess if they are ‘borderline’ or not. </p>
<p>To answer your question exactly, Berkeley has a capped GPA - the same UC GPA that all campuses use, but it also calculates various kinds of GPAs from the data in your application and from its historical records about students who applied and students who attended Cal that came from the same high school. They do not see class rank, but can ‘guess’ very, very roughly by knowing that attendees from past years had GPA of X and class rank of Y from your school.</p>
<p>the “UC-gpa” (weighted-capped gpa) is solely used for admissions eligibility, i.e., are you eligible to attend any UC campus? If so, the app reader will then see all of your gpa’s: weighted-capped, weighted-uncapped, and unweighted. The UC computer also calculates the gpa’s of everyone who applies to UC from your HS – a kinda ranking by itself – which is available to all app readers.</p>
<p>Thanks rider730 & bluebayou for your detailed replies.</p>