I was told by my principal that “any college worth its salt will take out those elective classes like “Yoga”, etc that give you those free A’s to see your true GPA”. Is this statement true? Why or why not? To what extent?
It will totally depend upon the college. Most will not tell you how/if the recalculate GPA. My best guess is that most do not.
At the end of the day though, one or two yoga classes is not going to move the GPA much to be meaningful. Now if a transcript is littered with free A’s (unless, for example, taken as part of phys ed / fine arts graduation requirements, and then all applicants from the HS will have equivalent free A’s) then eyebrows will be raised regarding the rigor of your courses.
Most colleges are not going to take a GPA number as some sort of ultimate truth for a bunch of reasons…and recalculating to take out yoga is a minor issue compared to the larger issues.
From what I can tell, no elite college is going to sweat the different between, say, a 3.7 and a 3.8, or spend an inordinate amount of time with a calculator to arrive at a comparable GPA for each student. PE credits are the least of the problems.
Problem 1: DIFFERENT SCALES. I was recently at an alumni event with a Dean of Admissions from an elite liberal arts college who was also previously an admissions dean at a top national university. He asked for a show of hands of how many of the high school students in the audience had GPAs out of 4.0, vs 5.0, vs. 6.0, vs. 7.0. It was enlightening. His point: just looking at a number isn’t that informative for admissions offices.
Problem 2: DIFFERENT CURRICULA AND LEVELS OF DIFFICULTY. Is a 4.0 GPA from highly competitive High School A the same as a 4.0 from struggling High School B? Student 1 has 10 AP classes, but Student 2 goes to a private high school that has a highly challenging elective curriculum rather than AP classes, Student 3 is going for an IB diploma, and Student 4 has a high school where students do dual enrollment at the community college. How do you compare?
If a few electives take what might otherwise have been a 3.7 GPA to a 3.85 GPA, I think that makes almost no difference whatsoever in admissions, except at large state institutions with admissions formulas. For many other colleges and universities, the strict number seems less important than the context surrounding that number.
Your mileage may vary, but that’s what I’m hearing.
If you are in California, you can find out which courses at your high school are included in recalculating GPA for California public universities at https://hs-articulation.ucop.edu/agcourselist .
Some colleges do in fact recalculate GPA and it’s not a lot of effort - computerized.
It is easier for the colleges to do this if the academic records are given to them in a standardized form (e.g. when applicants self-report their courses and grades into the application) rather than if they have to convert whatever format the high school transcript is in to what their computer uses.
Different colleges handle GPA differently – there is not one rule fits all here. But suffice it to say that admissions officers see the whole transcript and will quickly tell if a GPA has been inflated by a bunch of non-academic courses.
Thats what a weighted GPA is for - in fact, iirc, my school doesnt count electives.
Weighted GPA is only helpful when calculated with the same weighting system.
Weighted GPA from different high schools using different, unknown, or unspecified weighting systems cannot be compared or relied on.
Weighted GPA is meaningless out of context as there is no standard for weighting. For the most part, weighted GPA only matters internally, e.g. for computing rank. Most colleges will use the unweighted GPA or will recalculate according to their own formula. Again, outside of UC and CSU and a couple of others, colleges are not transparent about how/if they recalculate GPA. It’s just something else to file under “It is what it is.”
Devil is always in the details.
Our HS’ highest weighted GPA is 5, with a 6-point grading scale- 94/100 is the lowest A-, 93 gives you B+. Only 99 and above gives you A+ and the full weighted GPA of 5! So I don’t think we could even compare unweighted GPAs across HSs.
Never understand why American schools would convert a straight-forward 100-point grading system to the letter grading system then to the 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 GPA system. (Devil-making!)
Well, I never understood our love with the US customary system either! 
Our transcript has 5 GPAs pronted on it
UW academic
W academic
UW all
W all
UC GPA
All As are 4, Bs 3, Cs 2
+1 for honors and AP
Both are incorrect … there are some elite colleges that have living, breathing people (who are well trained, by the way) examine every single transcript and recalculate every GPA using the school’s preferences.
@GnocchiB not to nitpick but my statement is correct. While yours may also be true, it doesn’t make mine inaccurate given the language used. A pet peeve of mine.
You are correct, @itsgettingreal17 - I should not have phrased mine in that way.
And I stand by the part about some elite colleges having real people do the grade recalc process.
I can’t tell you about most colleges, but we know a bit about Harvard because of court documents. It’s pretty clear that they read transcripts and then translate into their own system of numbers, with mostly academic 1s (more than just a grades, this goes to people going above and beyond the house school curriculum) and 2s which are basically the A students.
Our high school actually did report only grades on a 0-100 scale. Weighted scale went to 110 in theory, but since a number of required freshman courses weren’t weighted no one had a 110. The Val my older son’s year had a 106 WGPA. Our school only counted “academic” courses, but it was pretty confusing what they counted. I never figured out how they came up with my younger son’s WGPA which was higher than I thought it should be. He had 98s and 99s in two orchestras every year, and at least some of them must have been factored in. I’m pretty sure any college doing recalculating didn’t count them, so we chose to be cautious when looking at GPA figures for school. I figured rank would put the grades in context anyway.
I just chalk up GPA calculations as one of those things you shouldn’t spend too much time worrying about. Do well in rigorous courses.