<p>We moved between my d's freshman and sophomore year and fully expected her gpa to start over and were very surprised to see a cumulative gpa that included her freshman year in the other school. She will ask her counselor about it this week but it would be nice to know what the norm is at other schools. My older d moved at the same point and her school only reported their own grades. They submitted a transcript and gpa only from her time there and included her freshman year transcript from the other school separately.</p>
<p>The norm is what your other daughter experienced. At my school, we do not combine GPAs. I frequently send a previous school transcript along with our own transcript. One of the reasons for this is that different schools have different grading scales and different levels of intensity. Some schools weight honors and AP classes, some don’t. But of course, if your daughter attends a school where it is there practice to blend the previous transcript in with their own - so be it - I don’t think you would be able to change it and if it is just freshman year, probably not going to be a big issue either way.</p>
<p>S transferred from private to public high school at the beginning of junior year. His transcript includes the grades from his former school. One problem is that his current school doesn’t acknowledge honors classes taken at his former school on the transcript and doesn’t weight them as such. So, the transfer adversely affected his weighted GPA and subsequently class rank. When applying to colleges, we submitted copies of transcripts from his former school which indicated classes that were honors. We also asked his counselor to note on her recommendation that some courses taken at the previous school were honors but were not designated at such on his current transcript.</p>
<p>DD transferred after freshman year and GPAs were combined. The new school did not put her freshman grades on her new school transcript, but asked us to request official transcripts from the first school to be sent with all applications. We knew when she transferred that the new school would not weight her honors courses and we were aware that that might affect class rank in the end. The new school used a 100-point scale and the old school used A-B-C, etc. with no pluses or minuses, so we figured it was a wash.</p>
<p>Had this experience 3 times. All 3 times the new HS combined the GPA and had the 9th grade grades on the transcript.
For 2 of my kids it wasn’t an issue. The 9th grade school weighed grades and the new HS was willing to honor those weighed grades. For my oldest it was not to her advantage. Her private prep school did not weigh 9th grade grades. Her highest GPA for 9th was a 4.0. Those who had attended 9th at the public school had 3 or 4 weighed classes. It did affect her rank. When the time came to apply for college the counselor said she would make a note on her report that it was not a true representation of her rank due to a school change. We never saw the recommendation so don’t know if she actually did it or not.</p>
<p>We moved during the high school years for all three of mine. They combined the GPAs for each of them and did not adjust for the grading scale used at the other school. They also did not adjust for weighting. We moved between DD1’s junior and senior years and the new school kept her 2 b+s (93s) as B+s, even though they were in courses not even offered at the new school, and because there was no weighting, those two grades kept her out of the top 10%.</p>
<p>I could have written Psi’s post verbatim, except my daughter’s counselor flat-out refused to say anything about the honors courses she had taken at the private school. She went from being in the top 10 or 15 in her class at a strong school to being ranked in the 160s out of 550. Things worked out fine in the long run, but this was one aspect of the school switch that was not OK.</p>
<p>DD switched from a rigourous school to a school with easier grading (we learned) and she went from top 10-15 down to bottom 50% as they used her other grades! Within a week or two of attendance at the new school, she became know as smart girl and we worked around it, but it was odd that they would use other school’s grades in ranking.</p>
<p>The college for which DD received merit money agreed to toss her ranking part of the requirements and use SAT instead.</p>
<p>Thanks - I hadn’t thought about ranking - our old school did not rank because there were so many kids who moved in and out. The Val and Sal were picked by a combination of gpa and courses taken. Hoping this wont be bad for my d who went from being a B student to an A student - I guess at the very least she will have the upward trend!</p>
<p>I’m not even sure there is such thing as a norm. A friend of mind who is a GC has told me that there is no standardized method for calculating a GPA from a prior school. My advice is to meet with the GC personally and go through your D’s grades from her previous school and see how the current school treats them.</p>
<p>Yes, I would recommend asking the to compute a “this HS” GPA and rank in addition to whatever else they do.</p>
<p>DD walked into straight As at her new school, but her old school graded with deflation so her A/B reports made her drop low in the rankings.</p>