I applied in early October to the Division of Undergraduate Studies. I live in state. I’m worried because I feel like my unweighted GPA is particularly low. Please help me out! Here’s my profile
GPA: -4.3 (w)
-3.36 (uw)
SAT (old): 1830
-CR-620
-Math-670
-Writing- 540
APs
-AP Environmental Science
-AP Language and Composition
-AP Government
-AP Comparative Government
-AP Psychology
-Honors for all other classes.
Clubs
-Greening Stoga Task Force (president)
-Unicef Club
-Model UN
-Freshman Baseball
-Young Democrats
Work
-Camp counselor for 5 weeks in the summer the last two years.
High School
-Ranked 3rd best public school in Pennsylvania according to http://www.usnews.com/
It depends on how easily weighted your classes were. That’s a large jump from unweighted to weighted. You have a lot of AP classes so that helps you. I think your chances are good, but not guaranteed. DUS is least competitive so its good you applied there. Did you add summer option? It doesn’t hurt you to do so. Your weighted GPA is great, but I’ve seen some 4.0 kids denied because their schools weighting scale was too easy. For example, at my kid’s school, honors classes are only givern 0.1 weighting. My daughter took tons of honors classes with good grades a d it only brought her GPA up 0.3 from her unweighted. That’s difficult weighting. Some schools have double weight. That’s easy weighting …
I should have said my daughter’s GPA raised .03…as in, she had a 3.5 uw and ended up with a 3.53 weighted. She did not take any AP but took many honors. In our school, in figuring out GPA, regular classes are weighted 1.0. Honors 1.1 and 1.2 for AP classes. I’ve seen several schools who DOUBLE the weight for an AP class. This is why you cannot ‘chance’ people based on GPA. Someone might put that they have a 4.3 GPA but with the weighting, their highest could be a 6.0. Others have a 4.3 out of 4.3 possible. Totally different. So yes, it depends on how your school weights. Some are easier than others. @wfootball126
@jlhpsu I understood what you meant, that weighting is just insane to me. Maybe my school just doesn’t weight highly at all, but if i got a 90 in an honors class and an honors class my grade would be a 96 for the honors and a 99 for the AP, while yours would be a 99 for the honors and a 108 for the AP if I’m understanding you correctly. Is my school just really damn strict on weighting for harder classes?
@wfootball126 In our school, if my kids got a 90, that’s a B+. In a regular class that would be a B+ and a 3.5 QPA score. In an honors class, that 90 is also a B+, but it’s weighted 1.2, so the QPA for that class would be a 3.84 and in AP weighted 1.2, that B+ would be 4.2. So if you took all regular classes and got a 90, you’d get a B+ and your GPA for that year would be a 3.5. If you took ALL honors classes, your GPA would be a 3.85. If you took ALL AP classes, you’d get a 4.2.
My daughter took 6 honors classes and got either A’s or B+'s in all and it only raised her GPA by .05 because it got watered down with the rest of her regular classes. Grading scale matters as well. In our school a 90 is a B+. You need a full 94% to get an A in our school. Neighboring district an A is a 90. That matters as well for GPA. A 4.0 at our school is much more difficult to obtain than at neighboring school.
The good news, Penn State takes this all into consideration. So if your school weights hard, and your UW and W are not that far apart, they understand that. On the other hand, if someone is getting double weight for a class, then that can’t be compared to your .07 weight. So PSU compares what you do against what others in your SAME school do - basically, the judge you based on what you achieved within your school’s scale.