My school grades on a 4.0 scale with APs worth 5.0.
I took college courses over the summer and had them added to my highschool transcript. However, my school refuses to weight them on a 5.0 scale (they don’t have a good reason).
Anyways, by adding these courses to my highschool transcript, my GPA is brought down to a 4.42 from a 4.46. Is it worth removing these courses from my highschool transcript (and sending the college transcripts to where I am applying) to bring my GPA back up to 4.46?
Also, if I have a 4.46 can I report it as a 4.5 on the common app?
Yeh. You’re talking “top colleges” and worried about .04?
Colleges will look at choices, what they show about your thinking and the challenges, the rigor, relevance, and letter grade. Not all recalculate gpa. (Why should a top holistic? They’ve got the actual transcript(s) to see the real performance.)
Be sure you understand how this works, for your targets.
There are so many different weighting standard that the weighted GPA number is a bit meaningless (4.46 would be outside the top 25% at my D’s school). An admissions committee will look at the classes you took and the actual grades you took from your transcript, and may recalculate a GPA in a consistent manner for all applicants to deal with these types of issues.
So I would say it’s not worth the effort.
If you do, then I would say it’s mathematically accurate to put a 4.5. But it won’t really matter.
Fwiw, I suspect the “good reason” is that it’s the school’s documented grading policy. Does the documented grading policy include “college courses” when defining the weighting process?
Whether “mathematically accurate” or not, I would not advise a student to list a GPA on an application (or résumé) which deviates from what is on the transcript, except, as an example, if the application allows fewer decimal places than the transcript shows (which is not an issue for the Common Application).
It may be more impressive to say 4.0 unweighted in hard courses including AP and college courses. Weighted GPAs are not really comparable across high schools; a 4.5 weighted GPA may correspond to an unweighted GPA significantly lower than 4.0 if the high school has an exaggerated weighting system (such as the South Carolina standard weighting system).
Also, whenever you need to send transcripts, you need to send both the high school and college transcripts. They will want to see the records from the original school you took the course at (the college for the college courses), not the pass through school (the high school that puts them in your record for dual enrollment purposes).
Thank you for letting me know that I still need to send my college transcripts even if the courses are on my high school transcripts. I did not know this.
Also, I agree that I am worrying too much about a minor difference. It is my school’s policy that only courses offered by my school will be weighted on a 5.0 scale. I am just frustrated that the rigor of my courses is not being recognized.
From an admissions perspective, your rigor is recognized. They will see a college transcript and they will see your grade. The fact that it is not reflected in your HS GPA is of no consequence.
Note that some colleges will have you do SRAR* instead of sending transcripts. Such colleges are likely to recalculate GPA their own way, so your high school’s GPA calculation may not be seen at all.
*SRAR = self-reported academic record, where you enter your high school and college courses and grades into the college’s system. Verification is done by final transcripts later if you are admitted and matriculate.
My assumption is that when OP asks about “removing these courses from my highschool transcript”, that means the course would be removed from the transcript, which means the wGPA is 4.46, as OP states. Which would round to a 4.5 exactly as you describe.
The “if I have a 4.46 can I report it as a 4.5 on the common app?” question I was answering seemed to make that clear, at least to me.