<p>Pizzagirl, you bring up a good point: in our district a 90 & 91 are B’s. Different districts put the grade cutoff’s at different places. So it’s not always just weighting that’s an issue, it’s different grading scales. A 69 here is an F; a 70-71 is a D.
No pluses or minuses here either…</p>
<p>Ours does both weighted and unweighted.</p>
<p>Our district reports the numerical grades (1-100 scale). I know there’s no A+, but there is a B+, but unless you read the fine print I don’t really see that it matters. If I’m an admissions officer, I’m going to read a 99 as an A+. (I’m also going to read a 91 as an A- even if someone’s transcript says it’s really a B+.)</p>
<p>On your school’s transcripts, if a letter grade is associated with a particular numerical range, is the letter grade based on the UNweighted number grade, or the weighted number grade? For example, if 90-100 is an A grade, and a student earns a grade of 89 in an AP class before weighting (of say 10 pts), would the student’s letter grade be an “A”?</p>
<p>My schools transcript only has number grades the translation to letter grades is in the school profile if you read it carefully. In the above example my sons gread of 89 appears on the transcript. The only place it turns into a 99 is when calculating the GPA. You never actually see it as a 99. Would be lovely if you did, S2’s grades would look soooo much better!</p>
<p>My SoCal public school’s transcripts have classes listed with letter grades, without weighting and without pluses or minuses. Weighted and unweighted GPA are both listed at the bottom.</p>
<p>At our suburban high school, the grades are shown as the actual letter grade, but there are three GPAs listed, unweighted, weighted and then core GPA.</p>
<p>We are in GA and the Hope Scholarship doesn’t include some classes. I believe that is what the CORE GPA is for.</p>
<p>
Right. Different grading scales and different weighting schemes make school system to school system comparison almost impossible. My school system has letter grades only and no pluses or minuses; A must be 94 or above. So a 93 is a solid B. There are only honors courses in English, and they are not weighted at all. (AP and IB and special courses in an advanced math/science academy are weighted.)</p>
<p>Don’t worry, the colleges know how to “sort it”. </p>
<p>My D is at a VERY large school, and has several Ivy admits each year. </p>
<p>I believe most schools (including ours) provides a “prospectus”. It hopefully details their grading in detail. Shows their break points for A+, A, A- etc. Then it shows their weighting system. And it tells about the school overall, awards, ranks, competitiveness, etc.</p>
<p>Then, the transcript itself shows each class of course, AND lists whether or not it’s A/P, IB, honors, etc. It provides the letter grade (no percentage/percentile), and the overall GPA by semester, and averaged. This GPA is the weighted grade, but the weighting is listed right next to it. GPA 4.54 (.6667).</p>
<p>So they get the full picture, then do with it whatever they will.</p>
<p>My S’s private school only shows the weighted grades, but explains how much weight is given to honors and AP classes. My understanding is most colleges recalculate your GPA anyway so all kids applying are compared on an even playing field.</p>
<p>“For example, if 90-100 is an A grade, and a student earns a grade of 89 in an AP class before weighting (of say 10 pts), would the student’s letter grade be an “A”?”</p>
<p>On our transcripts - the grade earned is the grade recorded. The “weighting” part doesn’t come in until the GPA is calculated.</p>
<p>I believe that most schools send a “school profile” with the transcript that explains their grading system, the demographics of the school and the types of classes that they offer (how many AP, honors, etc.) so that should clear things up for adcoms.</p>
<p>In DD’s school, the 3 or 5 points are added to the marking period grade for honors and AP for report card/transcript purposes, so no one sees the “original” grade. We have access to an online grade book, and I’ll often ask DD about a grade close to report card time and she’ll tell me, oh that’s without the extra 5 points. When I get the report card those 5 points are there with no reference to the unweighted grade. </p>
<p>Amazing how different things are from school to school.</p>
<p>Yes, but I always hear that colleges recalculate, to take into account that some places use +/- and others don’t, that some places include all classes (such as gym or consumer ed) and other places exclude them, that some places count 90 and over as A and others count 90+ as A, that some places weight honors and AP and others don’t.
But I have to say, it doesn’t pass the sniff test. Let’s take any of the elite colleges – they are receiving, what, 20,000+ applications a year? And someone has to manually sort through and figure out what this particular high school does and then calculate it according to the college’s way? Is there any proof that this really goes on, or do we think that if the college sees that Joe has a 3.98 and Suzie has a 3.9, they figure Joe and Suzie are both smart enough to do the work and then move on to the EC’s and intangibles?</p>
<p>“Colleges are virtually evenly split on the practice of recalculating GPAs. Forty nine percent do and 51% do not. High yield institutions are more likely than low yield institutions to recalculate GPAs”</p>
<p>Source: National Association of College Admissions Counselors, Report on State of Admissions, 2006.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nacacnet.org/PublicationsResources/Research/Documents/06StateofAdmission.pdf[/url]”>http://www.nacacnet.org/PublicationsResources/Research/Documents/06StateofAdmission.pdf</a></p>
<p>However, there are plenty of exceptions to the above generalization about which colleges do and don’t recalculate. See the quick survey below. </p>
<p>Vanderbilt Does not recalculate</p>
<p>U Mich Recalculates</p>
<p>U California Recalculates</p>
<p>UNC Chapel Hill Does not recalculate</p>
<p>UVA Does not recalculate</p>
<p>Princeton Recalculates</p>
<p>Harvard Recalculates</p>
<p>U Del Recalculates </p>
<p>U Chicago Does not recalculate</p>
<p>Michigan State Does not recalculate</p>
<p>Cornell Does not recalculate</p>
<p>Brown Does not recalculate</p>
<p>Notre Dame Does not recalculate</p>
<p>Maybe the colleges with large applicant pools who say they recalculate actually do so only for that portion of their applicant pools who are actually competitive for admission but not sure admits. It does seem like a very labor intensive data transfer (aren’t all transcripts hard copy?)</p>
<p>Nobody paid any attention at D’s small Private school. Number of AP offered were very small since some teachers did not believe in offerring AP. School is known for rigor and couple or more top kids (class size approximately 30 to 50 kids) usually end up at Harvard and other Ivys with low weighted GPA compared to other schools. Honors classes are not weighted at all. D’s comment, however, was tht her Honor Chem. prepared her much better than others’ AP Chem. I am trying to say that weighting or not is not the whole picture, some schools are simply known to Elite colleges for their rigor.</p>
<p>University of California only looks at specific classes for their GPA - and the students self report those grades on their electronic applications - so no data entry required. Transcripts are only required by UC when you have been admitted and chose to enroll - greatly lessening the data input chore. </p>
<p>In many ways, I think the UC system is one of the most pragmatic applications processes.</p>
<p>One exception for the UC’s is that they receive the transcripts for the top 12.5% of each high school that participates in the Eligible in the Local Context program (ELC) during the summer prior to the Senior year to determine the top 4% of the upcoming graduating class, this is based on a set of courses required to be eligible for the UCs. The UC’s then uses the 10-11th grade UW academic grades with up to 8 points (4 year long AP/Honors classes) added then recalculates the GPA. The top 4% are guaranteed admission to some of the UC’s, this year it was UCD, UCI and UCSB. A note however that this system will be changing starting with the HS class of 2013, it is a little more complicated but has a broader range so it will be interesting to see what happens.</p>
<p>D’s school lists the actual grade (A, B+, etc.), but includes the weighting (an extra 0.5 for AP/honors) in the calculation of the GPA.</p>
<p>Our public school reports only unweighted GPA. I’m not sure I know how I feel about it. It doesn’t matter for schools that recalculate but doesn’t feel “right” for schools that don’t recalculate when so many kids report here their weighted GPAs pretty consistently. My son was “shocked” when someone told him his GPA was 3.7 if he took into consideration “weight” for his AP classes.</p>
<p>Our public high school lists the actual earned grade in the class. They only figure in the weight when they calculate the cumulative GPA. At the bottom of the transcript, they list both the unweighted and weighted cumulative GPA.</p>