Do colleges really care about class rank? Because not every school weighs the weighted gpa the same and weighted gpa affects the class rank. Will colleges then recalculate things; there is a lot of grade inflation at my school and my school weights unweighted classes as 4 points while AP/IB/honors/college courses as 5 points the same. My school also doesn’t count A- and thats why people at my school can still have an unweighted gpa of 4.0 and have plenty of 90%. Because of this, will colleges see honors classes as rigourous as college classes? Because for both my sophomore year and freshmen year, I just took honors classes and a few unweighted courses. In my sophomore year, I then learned that unweighted courses drop GPA and class rank even though you get an A in it. I stopped taking them but realize that I need to take one more to fulfill a graduation requirement. This class will worsen my stats and I do not know what to do. If I wait until second semester senior year to take the class, will it still affect admission?
My Current Stats are:
Class Rank: 82/458 , WGPA: 4.6471, UGPA: 4.0
Previous classes: Freshmen(English 9 honors, Earth Science honors, American Studies honors, Algebra l honors, Theatre, Foundations of Tech, Spanish 1, Health) Sophomore(English 10 honors, Government honors, Geometry honors, Algebra 2 honors, Precalculus 10 week summer class at community college, Chemistry honors, Biology honors, Spanish 2, Spanish 3 honors, Theatre 2)
There is no universal answer to your question: different colleges have different policies. Some recalculate all GPAs based on just your core academic classes, others only use UW GPA, others take whatever the school sends. Your school will supply a profile that includes info on how the weighting is done, how rigorous your course load has been compared to your peers, etc. Your GC will also be rating you on your academic strength relative to your peers (reflecting GPA and rigor).
Colleges are very familiar with the range of weighting systems, and the ways that students can play with course selection to enhance a WGPA. They will see your UW 4.0, and that will tell it’s own story.
Unfortunately, grade inflation is out of control across high schools, particularly at prep schools and the wealthier suburban districts. I honestly don’t know how AO’s decipher transcripts that appear to be deliberately opaque from the 25,000+ different high schools in the US.
Actually the schools you refer to provide excruciating detail in their academic profiles so that colleges can “decipher” transcripts. In many ways they are the exact opposite of opaque.
Please look at Harvard Westlakes profile below (representative of day preps) and tell me CTDad what info is missing that you would like to see? What evidence or experience do you have upon which you are basing this “deliberately opaque” comment?
If you live in Texas, your class rank will matter to in-state publics. Elsewhere, most HSs don’t report rank on students’ transcripts anymore, so I would not worry about this as others have suggested.