<p>Our high school uses a ranking system, based on weighted GPA's, that is very detrimental to students who take a full course load without any study halls. For example, take a kid who takes 3 "honors" classes that have a 5.0 scale, 3 classes with the regular 4.0 scale, and a study hall. If they have all A's, their GPA would be 3 classes times 5.0 plus 3 classes times 4.0, all divided by 6, or 27 divided by 6 classes, which equals 4.5. Then take a kid who wants to add to the same schedule and take a more "rigorous" courseload and takes another regular class, maybe orchestra. So their GPA is calculated at 31 points divided by 7 classes, or 4.428. So the student was actually penalized for taking the extra class! Multiply this over 3 years, and the problem is even more pronounced. (Our high school is very competitive, and the top 15 or so students are within fractions of each other.) These GPA's are then used to rank the students for college applications. I understand that colleges like to say that they do not base decisions on GPA's because of so many different ways they can be computed, and would rather rely on class rank to see how competitive the student was. But do they realize that class ranking is based on these potentially faulty GPA's? The problem has been noted by our school and they are correcting it for the incoming freshman, but for political reasons, they will not fix it for current seniors. What a situation for a kid who is told by admissions counselors how important a "rigorous" schedule is as well as class rank! Not only would my daughter have had a much easier life these past 3 years with extra time at school to do homework plus one less class to even have homework in, but she would have had a better ranking! What a bummer! The counselor has said they will explain their faulty system in a side note to the applications, but what if you have 2 students applying for the same college, one who took study halls and one didn't? Attests to my daughter's character that she chose the extra classes anyway....but how would this look for the other student? If she pretended she never took the extra classes and just had them deleted from her transcript, her GPA and ranking increase dramatically. Interesting situation. Anybody else out there run across this issue?</p>
<p>I believe this is actually pretty common. So much so that adcoms understand and take it into account. I've seen it called "grade grubbing" and "score whoring."</p>
<p>My own son is currently out of the top 10% because he takes extra music and foreign language. (By graduation he'll have 6 credits FL and 5 music.) Those are only graded on a 4.0 scale. Accordingly, his WGPA is "only" 4.0 (UW 3.6). He's 43/318. Kids who stop FL and arts when they meet the minumum can then load up on APs and increase their GPAs. </p>
<p>So, Son's GPA is lower than if he traded courses he loves (FL & music) for high-scale APs and honors. But, that's OK. His schedule demonstrates passion. That's important, too. </p>
<p>Don't sweat it. Schools recalculate the GPAs anyway.</p>
<p>Our local HS uses a system that works very well. An "A" is a 4.0, an "A-" is a 3.7, a "B+" is a 3.3, etc., and weighting goes like this:</p>
<p>"AP courses with a letter grade of C- or higher are weighted at +.0125, per course, per quarter, added to the cumulative GPA."</p>
<p>If you play around with it you can see that it avoids all of the problems kentuckymom refers to.</p>
<p>Here is some information taken from Notre Dame's website (as an example):</p>
<p>"What GPA do I need to be competitive for admission to Notre Dame?</p>
<p>Many schools use different GPA scales and computation methods, so it is difficult to give standardized information regarding Grade Point Averages. We do not recalculate GPAs for our admissions decisions. Instead, we rely much more heavily on class rank when determining how competitive a student is within his/her school. Competitive students are near the top of their class, no matter how their GPA is computed.</p>
<p>What kind of credentials do I need to be competitive in the applicant pool?</p>
<p>Admission to the University is competitive. Admissible students possess strong academic records and are usually ranked at or near the top of their high school class. The average student admitted for the class of 2011 was ranked in the top 5% of his or her graduating class. "</p>
<p>And this isn't about a trade-off between a music class and a higher-level honors class, it is about taking a music class or any other class vs. a study hall!</p>
<p>I would hope admissions counselors realize that if they recalculate GPA's using their own formula, that the high school rankings they emphasize were based on the very GPA's they feel the need to recalculate! And colleges love to brag about the high percentage of incoming freshman that are in the top 5% or 10% of their high schools!</p>
<p>I think you need to understand, too, that usually admission officers are not all that concerned with EXACT class rank, but more with the overall percentage of class rank. Are you in the top 5%, 10%, 20% etc. In the long run, your daughter is better off in having the experience of being in a music program she enjoyed and learning how to schedule her time, balance her life, etc. If she is being compared to a classmate for admission, the committee will look at her overall transcript and notice that she has pursued things of interest to her.</p>
<p>thanks for the responses! What happened is it moved her out of the top 5% into the top 10%. I know that's still great and honestly, even knowing what it did to her ranking, she would still have kept the heavier load because that's just the kind of kid she is. It's just I keep hearing so much about the thousands of apps colleges get, that I would think her app's chances for getting sifted to the level of review necessary to realize all this, would go up if her statistics looked good with just a quick look--top 5% does look better than 10%! It hurts when you know they've really earned it.</p>
<p>Does anybody else know how, mathmatically, a high school could deal with the study hall problem in ranking calculations? Sherpa, I'm going to your suggestion with her scenario vs. the same schedule with a study hall to see if that takes care of it. Thanks!</p>
<p>any weighted GPA calculations out there that consider the effect of study halls?</p>
<p>Our school disregards study hall and lunch when calculating GPA. </p>
<p>I was forced to take a study hall sophomore year to accommodate Honors Physics, and it was completely disregarded in GPA calculation. </p>
<p>Our school weights band/chorus and some easy electives like human development and accounting. As a result, the valedictorian for the past four years were all in band or chorus, often both. </p>
<p>Grade whoring happens a lot in my school. Everyone here speaks of fractions of difference as a small difference, but in our school, there is a huge difference between fractions of GPA. A 4.6 is much higher and harder to get than a 4.5 or even a 4.55. </p>
<p>Similarly, the higher you go, the more effort and work you need to put in to just increase your gpa by the slightest fraction. Currently, the valedictorian has a 4.70 and I, who's second, have a 4.67. Even though the difference is only .33, that is essentially impossible to make up unless if he gets B's and I get straight A's.</p>
<p>sozo--how does your school calculate it? see the example in my first post--a weighted total of points divided by 1 fewer class comes up with a higher gpa than one with the heavier schedule?</p>
<p>Honors/AP weight - 5.0
Regular - 4.0</p>
<p>Add the total points and divide by the number of credit courses you take. </p>
<p>So, suppose you're in 5 AP classes, 1 study hall, 1 lunch, and 1 gym, and for simplicity, let's say you received A's in every class. </p>
<p>5*5 + 4 = 29.
29/ 6 credit classes = 4.833 gpa.</p>
<p>Actually, our school is the same as yours. It's just that students in our school pick up a joke honors class to inflate their gpas.</p>
<p>For example, assume you have a 4.5 gpa for freshman and sophomore year. What people in our school do is take Honors accounting in junior year as a 7th class, which can increase your gpa to a 4.52 easily.</p>
<p>Using your example above with the 29 credits, if a student added an orchestra class (at our school no music classes are considered honors), then you would have 33 points divided by 7 classes, for a 4.714 GPA. So, at our high school, no music students are ever at the top of the class or valedictorian. So the students are penalized for NOT taking a study hall as well as for participating in any fine arts program! Makes no sense.</p>
<p>At my kid's school, number grades are given so even determining an exact GPA is tough. Furthermore, NOTHING is weighted for class rank! Kids taking the easiest courseload can be ranked way ahead of kids taking the most challenging curriculum. It is very frustating to have your child who takes all honors and AP classes miss out on the top 5 or 10% of the class, while those taking an easier load are ranked way ahead. The guidance office keeps telling the parents, it doesn't matter, the colleges look at the course work. This is true, but I also know kids who have missed out on merit money because they weren't within a certain percentage of the class. I find it very frustrating and unfair.</p>
<p>It's also very interesting to note that in our school, the top ACT and SAT test scorers are almost always the kids with the heavier course loads (no study halls), and therefore are not at the top of the school rankings because of the way they're calculated. There seem to be many people on this website that feel standardized tests aren't a good basis for college admissions, and that GPA, rankings, and essays are more important. These ranking inaccuracies are another reason I feel that some sort of standardized test scores are very important. Without them, and if rankings aren't really reflective of the difficulty of the student's schedule, overall comparative difficulty of the school or of a particular teacher or class, the essay becomes far more important than it should, especially since there is no way of knowing for sure how much help they had in writing it.</p>
<p>That's like my school, but in addition, so far anybody who has been valedictorian has taken Spanish. Spanish is the only language that has AP so of course those that take Latin, German, or French can never get that extra bit of AP GPA credit.</p>
<p>It obviously does make a difference, but it's very apparent when someone is a grade grubber. Grade grubber test scores are much lower than the people ranked in the teens. We had 7 people earn scores equivalent to or above a 2300 on the SAT, 2 were in the top 10 (4 and 9 I believe), the rest were in the teens. However, eventually, those people have to take the requisite classes that they missed in earlier years (Health and P.E. are common ones) and those often knock that person out of the top 10.</p>
<p>Basically, if your student is a hard worker, it will show above their GPA and class rank.</p>
<p>I am very surprised that ND does not recalculate gpa. Many colleges/universities do recalculate, and they would not count classes like band, phys ed, choir when reclculating. Many will count only academic classes required for admission (which can be another issue).</p>
<p>I think this situation is very common. Currently the #1 ranked senior at my daughter's HS is taking 4 AP classes, 1 unweighted elective, and 3 study halls. The school weights an A in AP = 5, honors = 4.5, regular = 4. So a kid who has, for example, 5 years of a foreign language will have a lower GPA than a kid with otherwise identical grades and courses who took only 3. However, I think college adcoms are onto this strategy.</p>
<p>I'm ranked about 30 out of 270 and I have a cumulative GPA of a 3.9! I got a B in advanced math courses frosh and soph year. We have the same problem at our school. So many kids take the easiest classes and are ranked incredibly high because it's so easy to get straight A's. The classes aren't weighted until our junior and senior year, but I doubt that's even going to help that much. Algebra I and Algebra II advanced (freshman classes) were both weighted the same, but obviously Algebra II was much more difficult. This is the only instance where I appreciate the SAT, because a lot of the kids ranked high have low standardized test scores. One girl ranked #6 got a 1450/2400 hundred on her SAT's and this is actually pretty common. I hate class ranking.</p>
<p>The more selective the school, the more likely that the GPA is unweighted because there is already an expectation that students should be taking the most rigerous classes their school offers.</p>
<p>NACAC's 2006 Annual State of College Admission Report provides analysis of the combined results from the Admission Trends Survey and the Counseling Trends Survey. Based on surveys of school counselors and colleges and universities nationwide, NACAC provides this report to highlight issues of concern to college-bound students, their parents, and the educators who serve them. </p>
<p>Even if you don't read the whole report, you should definitely read Chapter 4 Factors in the Admissions Process</p>
<p>
[quote]
Colleges and universities receive transcripts and GPA calculations from thousands of high schools, each of which may calculate GPAs differently.</p>
<p>Many high schools use a traditional 4-point scale to measure grade averages, others use weighted 4.5- or 5-point scales, while still others use grade scales that reach as high as 8 or 10.</p>
<p>To provide a standard comparison of grade point averages among applicants, some colleges recalculate grade point averages. Colleges
are virtually evenly split on the practice of recalculating GPAs—49 percent do and 51 percent do not. </p>
<p>High yield institutions are more likely than low yield institutions to recalculate GPA.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>(Basically more selective schools where if admitted the student is more likely to enroll will recalculate your GPA to a 4 point scale)</p>
<p>Schools will look at major courses : English, Math, Social studies, Sciences, Foreign language, etc. They will back out of the GPA non academic courses such as: Band, Gym, Peer Leadership, study hall, Yearbook, etc.</p>
<p>there was a recent discussion on the parent's forum about GPA, maybe this will help</p>
<p>My school doesn't have that problem. They don't weight at all. I'd rather have some score whorers with study halls above me then some people with 3 gym classes. That's how ith is here.</p>