My daughter’s school provides both weighted and unweighted class ranks and GPAs. Some college applications appear to give a choice as to which one to mention. Is there a preferred option for selective colleges??
She has a higher unweighted rank (rank 1 as unweighted GPA is 4/4) than weighted rank though her weighted GPA is also quite high. Thank you for your suggestions/advice.
Rank #1 with unweighted 4.0/4.0 is easier to interpret than trying to figure out a high school’s weighting system, from the point of view of an admission reader doing subjective or holistic reading at a highly selective college.
However, some colleges or scholarships reportedly take weighted GPA at face value, so some of these may be more advantageous to give weighted GPA to.
That’s quite odd. How do they handle valedictorian/graduation speaker?
Seems to me the obvious answer it to pick whichever is more advantageous - unweighted in your case.
I would suggest providing both GPAs and a class rank of #1, assuming the school truly has no “official” rank distinction.
We’ve relo’d a lot, and I’ve found this to be a regional thing. In our current area, schools would end up with 20+, #1 kids because of unweighted class ranks and colleges knew that. There was a big push about 5 years ago to eliminate the unweighted class ranking system, so unweighted rank now carries no weight (no pun intended, lol). Colleges in the region want to see the weighted ranking, since kids could theoretically get straight 4.0s with no honors or AP classes and be ranked the same as another kid who took 12 APs with straight A’s. I’d do what looks best for her application, but do some research to see what her potential colleges are actually evaluating.
Thank you so much for your messages. @Tigerwife92 will try to do the research you suggested. @RichInPitt I am not sure if there is an option to give both in some of these forms.