I am mostly asking this to people who have gone through the college admissions process and know whether colleges use weighted GPA or unweighted GPA.
Different schools use different systems (learned from a Vanderbilt admissions officer that there’s even a high school that grades with stars), so they look at you within the context of your school so ultimately both will be examined.
It depends! See, for some examples, this WSJ article: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB105899458688282900
In general though, a good conservative heuristic is to assume that the most competitive colleges work with unweighted GPA and also look independently at course rigor.
Colleges either look at uwGPA, or they use they way to recalculate wGPA.
Some schools also recalculate GPA using only academic classes.
I heard most schools look at your un-weighted GPA because that shows you how well you did regardless of the different level classes you took. If it’s really high (3.8+), then they look at your weighted. However, know that your ranking is determined by your weighted GPA.
One obvious reason they don’t use your uwGPA is because of the lack of standard in weighting.
Most use unweighted but on college data they use their weighted GPA.
@stanfordswag please give us a list of these {most} schools that list WGPA for their average. The vast majority I’ve seen use the same UW GPA that is published in the CDS based on a 4.0 scale.
Major typo correction:
One obvious reason they don’t use your wGPA is because of the lack of standard in weighting.
It depends on the schools. I believe most use unweighted however other schools may strip your weighted and re-weight it themselves using their own system.