<p>^^of course, the downside to that is a student could max out on college prep/shop/PE/driver’s ed/health classes (6+), earn all A’s, and have more grade points than a 4.0 AP/IB student who only took 5 academics per semester.</p>
<p>The point being is that there is no ‘fair’ way to calculate GPA, (with fair being equal to 100% of the students).</p>
<p>Our school doesn’t weight grades at all, they do weight class rank though. Our grading scale is HARD though:</p>
<p>94-100-A
87-93-B
81-96-C
75-80-D
below 75 F</p>
<p>B students at our school would be A students at many of your schools. It doesn’t really “hurt” for college admissions because they do see the grading scale but where it REALLY hurts is for scholarships that want a GPA above a certain point. A 3.7 at our school would be a 4.0 at some of the schools listed here.</p>
<p>It’s nice that they do weight your class rank because of what ucbalumnus said-kids could not take any advanced courses and be the “#1” student in the class otherwise. In our school if you don’t take honors/AP classes you can’t rank above the 50% and in most years your rank won’t get above 75% because of the number of kids that do take AP’s, etc. I think that is about as fair as you can get.</p>
<p>SteveMA
Our district had a 7 point scale up through DD’13’s freshman year. They finally changed over to the 10 point scale. So her 7-9th grade high school credits are graded on the 7 point scale (a few Bs that would have been A-s). Now they have the 10 points with +s and -s which I think is much more fair. The school profile shows both grading scales. </p>
<p>Here honors classes, AP and IB have a weight that adds on to your over all GPA. Honors adds .0125 and AP & IB add .03 per class per semester to your overall GPA. Weighted GPA is the only one given and is used to determine class rank. </p>
<p>Unweighted average + weighted points = weighted GPA</p>
<p>D’s school has a system I haven’t seen mentioned. Grades are given as percentages. The ranking GPA is calculated by: subtracting 60 from the grade, dividing by 10, and adding the weight value - 3 for regular courses, 4 for honors courses, and 5 for AP. GPA is the average of all of these. Electives (band, art, business, etc.) aren’t counted in this calculation. However, the student who takes AP science, math, etc. as their “electives” gets THOSE counted. Obviously, there is a race among the competitive to collect as many AP’s as possible. </p>
<p>So a student taking all regulars with a 100% would end up with a 7. Depending on the year, that could put them into the top 10-20%. In theory the top value would be 9, but in reality some of the required courses (global studies, health, …) do not have honors or AP sections.</p>
<p>Our school has one of the weirder ones.</p>
<p>Slow classes are unweighted. (i. e. things like Algebra 1 stretched out over two years.)
Regular college prep classes are weight x 1.05
Honors and AP are both weighted x 1.1</p>
<p>Since honors and AP are not much weighted over regular classes there’s usually a handful of highly ranked kids who take no or very few APs but get perfect grades in the classes they do take.</p>
<p>The reason that this really doesn’t matter is because unweighted number grades appear for each course on the transcript and the weighted grades only are used to calculated the weighted GPA for class rank. My older son probably lost a rank or two due to scheduling issues and the fact that Latin, unlike other languages, didn’t offer honors as an option till Latin 4. Younger son probably gained a rank or two by having near perfect grades in orchestra even though only academic courses are calculated into the rank. (But arts were counted, just not gym and health.) As far as I could tell the kids got into colleges appropriate to their level of attainment, whatever their grades and ranks were.</p>
<p>For many years Purdue used a 6.0 GPA (where you got 2 points for an F and 6 for an A :)). Seemed to work fine. </p>
<p>Likewise, Purdue gave numeric grades and in most of my graduate courses an 85 was enough for an A. No grade grubbing since they were giving numeric grades for courses which eventually corresponded to letter +/- grades.</p>
<p>I’ve ceased worrrying about it. The admissions folks can look at a transcript and count up the As Bs and Cs and can look at the high school profile and see what that means. A 92% at our school would not be an A. Our midwest school is the same as SteveMA and does not ‘weight’ except for senior ranking which is not computed or released until spring…right before the senior scholars are announced.</p>
<p>Would not say I have ceased worrying about GPA calculations, more like I have resigned myself to it. Son #2 goes to private highly rigorous, college prep school. 2/3 of the kids have gpa’s 3.0 or below. They do not weight gpa at all. Son#1 went to our public, where the grade inflation was ridiculous–75% of kids made honor roll every semester, more than passed the state competency exam. The joke in town was that if a kid had a pulse, he/she had a B. Son #1 did virtually no work his junior and senior years and graduated with a very good gpa. When I see the supposed average SATs at some schools, I really scratch my head, I don’t know if there really are that many kids getting 3.7 and 3.8, or the colleges lie, or the grade inflation is that out of control. Very, very few kids at son #2’s school have those kinds of gpa’s. Colleges say they adjust for the rigor of the school, but I’m not sure I buy it, rankings are so numbers driven. Son #2 received a vastly better education than son #1, was required to and did work much harder, but has a gpa quite a bit lower, a bit discouraging to think that I got him a much better education and that he is much better prepared for college, but at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to college admission.</p>
<p>nepop–did your boys apply to any of the same schools? Curious what their overall results were. I agree, I get worried when I see these 4.0/4.0 kids with ACT scores in the low 20’s. What ARE you learning in school? People assume that they are getting a good education because they have good grades, scary really.</p>
<p>Aren’t you glad you aren’t an ad comm and have to figure all of these things out though :D</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>To deal with this, the school could weight the courses so that 6 non-academic courses would have a maximum number of grade points no greater than 5 regular academic courses, and 6 regular academic courses would have a maximum number of grade points no greater than 5 honors academic courses. That way, taking the more rigorous option would be advantageous, but taking an extra lower weighted course would not be disadvantageous (as described by some posters in other threads whose kids chose not to add on a band, orchestra, art, shop, etc. course instead of an empty period to an honors academic course load in order to avoid losing rank).</p>
<p>Seems doubtful that there would be much opposition to this type of thing, since the students taking mostly non-academic courses (as opposed to one such course as an extra course in addition to a full load of academic courses) are not likely to be going to a college that cares about class rank.</p>
<p>SteveMA–Yes, I am glad, it’s all a puzzle, Adcomm’s must need a lot of tylenol this time of year. There is some overlap between schools two sons applied to, will be interesting to see how it goes for son #2. I’m with you on the 4.0’s with low SATs/ACTs. I get it that some kids don’t do well on those tests. But you would think that more parents would scratch their heads sometimes with the discrepancy. Again, my town has kids making honor roll that don’t pass the state competency exam, which is not a very high bar.</p>
<p>I grew up in a place without weighted GPA, so the valedictorian was a home ec major that used her free ride for valedictorians to complete her secretary training. The 2nd and 3rd ranked kids went on to be a pharmacist and engineer. DS school rewarded academic honors on all students, even those not in the college track, but weighted GPA for class rank. It was nice to see the chords on the top performers in the cosmetology, EMT and law enforcement classes as well. The students in those classes worked harder for those As than some of the grade grubbers in the college prep track since there was a lot less extra credit in those classes.</p>
<p>Funniest grade story ever - A fellow Elbonian at Cajun State U. took 2 years of remedial English (arrived with little knowledge of the language), 20 credits a semester and 6 in summer. Amassed some 2+ years worth of 4.0. Needless to say, Cajun State counted remedial English as part of his overall GPA and despite near 3.0 GPA in regular courses he was invited every semester to all kinds of honor student functions (which, hilariously enough, were cumulative and not semester GPA based).</p>
<p>90-100 = A —4.0
80-90 = B ----3.0
70-80 = C ---- 2.0
honors classes add .5 and AP add 1.0.
High grade inflation and class rank based on how many AP classes taken.</p>
<p>Ap and aice = 6
honors = 5
regular = 4
yay</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My school has the 94-100 A = 4.0, but the other ones are a little different.</p>
<p>B = 85-93 = 3.0
C = 74-84 = 2.0
D = 65-73 = 1.0
F = 0-64 = 0.0</p>
<p>Nothing is weighted.</p>
<p>Our school weights very unusually. Each weighted class increases a students multipier by 0.01. Example:</p>
<p>Honors English 94% A 4.0 *
Honors Algebra 92% A- 3.7 *
PE/Health 98% A+ 4.3
Spanish 87% B+ 3.3
Honors Biology 93% A 4.0 *
Orchestra 95% A 4.0
*weighted courses</p>
<p>So, UWGPA is 3.88
Because 3 courses are weighted, the students multiplier is 1.03 so their WGPA is 4.00</p>
<p>By senior year, the top students will have taken 15-20 weighted classes and have multipliers of 1.15 - 1.20 for their cumulative WGPA.</p>
<p>My school has the easiest grading system ever. It’s awesome.</p>
<p>89.5-100+= A (4.0 reg., 5.0 AP)
79.5-89.4= B (3.0 reg, 3.75 AP)
69.5-79.4= C (2.0 reg, 2.5 AP)
59.5-69.4= D (1.0 reg, 1.25 AP)
0-59.4= E (0 reg, 0 AP)</p>
<p>Most complicated system ever…
90-100=A (4 points)
80-89=B (3 points)
70-79=C (2 points)
60-69=D (1 point)
-60=F (0 points)
Grades in between two grades are based solely on teacher’s preference, so there is always a lot of sucking up in order to get an A. The points are divided by the amount of classes to get UWGPA, which they use for the honors roll. For each honors/AP class, you get 1 honors point, max 3 per semester.
They calculate WGPA by UWGPA*(# of honors points/100)=WGPA, meaning the highest GPA is a 4.96. Every year, the school has around 20 valedictorians.</p>
<p>I think it is weird that our school only ranks by weighted 100-point-scale (+9 for IB classes, +5 for pre-diploma, updated at the semester). When I had to ask for a 4.0 scale for some scholarship app my counselor just said I got a 4.0 because I had all As…</p>
<p>Sent from my Desire HD using CC</p>