<p>Wondering what is standard practice in college-prep type publics and privates. Are weighted course grades (honors/AP) listed with the weight added or without it (or are they listed both ways?) in your high school's transcript? Does the transcript present both unweighted and weighted GPA? What do you think serves students best? What is easiest for college adcom reviews? Does your transcript include the weighting formula, or is that documented elsewhere, and if so, where? I am looking to document what other schools do for a possible change by our public district. We send nearly all grads to college, and 5% or so to Ivies.</p>
<p>I guess my answer is “without”. That’s because our school doesn’t weight. Whether you take a standard curriculum or the 2 extremes of shop/tech ed or AP/IB classes, all grades are unweighted. A 4.0 is the highest on the transcripts.</p>
<p>Thanks–but I am hoping to find out what happens in schools that DO weight.</p>
<p>My kids’ hs listed each class and the actual grade received.
The gpa - if it was weighted (they weight only certain classes) is then weighted. A detailed explanation is also enclosed explaining how they weight and which classes are weighted.</p>
<p>For instance - AP Calc was weighted, Honors English was not weighted.
If a student got a 85% in each class - that would show on the transcript, AP Calc 85 and H Eng 85.
To calculate the gpa the AP calc would weight up from a 3.0 to a 3.3, while H Eng would remain a 3.0.</p>
<p>Our school does not weight, except for a calculation done and not listed on the transcript for class rank. Our transcripts list grades and whether the course was on level, honors, AP or duel enrollment.</p>
<p>I should add - as many permutations there are to weighted classes and gpa’s - I have seen it done. There is no “standard” and each school does their own thing.</p>
<p>Our CA public district lists all course grades without weighting and then has 3 different types of GPAs presented - each with a weighted and non weighted variation. Note that junior high courses are listed on the transcript but are graded credit / no credit (although the latter would never appear on a transcript) and thus are not included in the calculations.</p>
<p>1) Academic GPA - courses are tagged as one of three categories: non academic, honors or academic. This GPA uses courses in the latter two buckets. Non academic is normally things like PE, after school sports and teacher’s assistant. For weighted GPA, courses tagged honors are given an extra grade point - e.g. an A = 5.0. AP and regular honors courses both get the same weighting.</p>
<p>2) Total GPA is everything on the transcript lumped together. Still presented as weighted and non weighted - but PE now counts (after school sports are credit no credit.)</p>
<p>3) 10-12 GPA - all classes taken in 10-12th grade - that is total GPA minus 9th grade. Still presented as two numbers, weighted and unweighted.</p>
<p>Class rank is provided as a number e.g. 83 of 352. Not sure what determines class rank but I suspect total GPA weighted. </p>
<p>Hope this helps.</p>
<p>Our HS transcripts present both unweighted and weighted GPA and class rank. More info is better, IMO.</p>
<p>The info used to determine weighting is listed on the school profile.</p>
<p>I’m glad the school uses both weighted and unweighted, because IMO there is some gatekeeping going on with access to honors and AP classes, particularly with non-native English or otherwise disadvantaged students. If a student achieves a high GPA even without any (or few) honors classes, he/she can still show a higher unweighted GPA and rank. Based on my kid’s stats, there aren’t all that many students who benefit from this, i.e. slackers and less able students aren’t showing top GPAs.</p>
<p>My impression is that colleges decide on a data set to view and either rely on the HS to provide it, or compute it, so I would think that providing them w/all the info would be a plus, but that’ just a guess.</p>
<p>Our school shows the weighted grade and gpa along with the designation of whether it was an honors or AP class. I have no idea what my DD’s unweighted GPA is.</p>
<p>Only the GPA is weighted, so everyone gets to see on the transcript that he got an 82 in honors Latin even though weighted it’s a 90. They report both unweighted and weighted GPA. The annoying thing is that even non-honors classes are weighted (plus 5%) so it makes everyone’s grades look low. Only the extra slow moving classes aren’t weighted.</p>
<p>Oh - and this is done using a program that appears to be either standard for California (or at least widely spread) known as either Aeries or ABI (the latter being a new name as of this morning).</p>
<p>The grades are shown as is, but the GPA is presented as weighted GPA only. (Had to hand calculate an unweighted GPA when it was needed for a scholarship application.)</p>
<p>Our public HS in SoCal does it just as scualum describes in post #7. For purposes of determining rank, and also val/sal designations (all students over 4.0 are sals so about 25 or so a year in classes of 500-520), it is the weighted academic GPA that is used.</p>
<p>The GPA given it our HS transcripts is the weighted one. I guess the colleges have to figure out the unweighted on their own</p>
<p>Private Catholic HS</p>
<p>In ours (suburban public), the grades are shown “as is”, but the GPA is shown only weighted, and the class rank is shown only weighted. It’s calculated off semester grades, which are only A’s, B’s, C’s, etc. (that is, no plusses or minuses). In honors and AP classes, an A counts as 5.0, B 4.0, and so forth. </p>
<p>For the poster who indicated that she can see that her kid got an 82 in Honors Latin: We don’t calculate that way. Just the letter grade. Doesn’t matter if it was a 90.1 or a 99.9. We don’t even know that information.</p>
<p>For the poster who indicated weighted “academic” GPA: I am presuming you mean that they exclude certain classes, such as gym or non-academic subjects such as wood shop or home ec? Here, all classes are included in the calculation, and our state is one of those that requires 4 years of daily P.E. So no matter if you get A’s in all your AP’s, you’ll always have “just” an regular A=4.0 in gym.</p>
<p>Our suburban public HS puts both the number grade and the letter grade on the transcript (I think; at least on the one they send to us they do; on the website is says letter grade on the transcript; I’ll have to check that out.) And both are weighted. For an honors class 3 pts are added to the marking period grade, AP classes add 5 pts. So a 90 stays a 90 for a regular class, it changes to a 93 for an honors class and changes to a 95 for an AP class. Additional quality points are added to Honors and AP grades to determine the GPA. There’s an additional .5 added to an honors class gpa and 1 whole point added to an AP class GPA.</p>
<p>The 90 in a regular class is a 3.3 GPA; the 90 in an honors class is now a 93 and the gpa is 4.0; the 90 in an AP class is now a 95 and the gpa is 4.7. </p>
<p>After 3 years, I think I’ve finally figured that out ;)</p>
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<p>In your example above, in our school, the 90 in a regular class would be an A (as would the 99 in the regular class, for that matter) and kid would get 4.0 … the 90 in an honors or AP class would be an A, 5.0. </p>
<p>YK, I hear that colleges recalculate these all to their own standards, but it just seems like a huge waste of resources. Seems to me that at one point they just have to kind of look at them and say, “Yeah, this kid could compete academically at our school” or “No, he can’t” and not sweat the minute differences.</p>
<p>how about A vs. A-, etc. Does your school put different grade points to these, e.g, 4.0 for As and 3.7 for A- etc. Or, the difference between A and A- is just for the transcript and they are treated the same way in calculating GPA (4.0)</p>
<p>Our kids’ school lists A-, B+, etc for the quarter grades but not the semester grades – semester grades are only A, B, etc. So, the only input that goes into our GPA’s are 5.0 (for an A in honors / AP), 4.0 (for an A in regular / B in honors), 3.0 (for a B in regular / C in honors), etc.</p>
<p>hyeonjlee - H and I attended the same college but he was 3 years ahead of me. I have both our transcripts. At one point, the college went from either doing the A-/B+ thing to the A/B thing or vice versa (I don’t remember which way it went) - so our GPA’s are calculated differently.</p>