<p>For Freshman year, our school only has honors classes (only two offered, but big workload with them)</p>
<p>I am not taking any, should I regret it?</p>
<p>I heard GPA is very important, so I am focusing on GPA next year, and taking harder classes Sophomore and etc.</p>
<p>SO what do you think?
GPA > = < Workload?</p>
<p>Why did you decide not to take any? </p>
<p>Rigor of schedule is equally important. It depends on what the classes are.</p>
<p>For selective colleges, you should maintain a high GPA and take challenging classes. For less selective colleges, a high GPA tends to be more important than the rigor of your schedule (because a lot of them have automatic scholarships if you meet certain GPA cutoffs). </p>
<p>It’s not a big deal that you didn’t take honors classes this year, as long as you catch up later.</p>
<p>It’s not going to matter if your GPA is a 4.0 because you perfected easy classes compared to that kid that got a 4.5 who worked hard.<br>
If you were an AO, who would you rather take, the kid with easy classes and a 4.0 or a kid with hard classes and a 4.5?</p>
<p>Shoot, I mean UW GPA</p>
<p>@halcyonheather’s post is pretty much your answer to your question.</p>
<p>Let’s put two situations:</p>
<p>you take all easy classes and have a 4.0 vs you take all advanced classes that your school offers and have a 3.7</p>
<p>AO seem to look fondly on the student who took all opportunities that their school offered. However, let’s say you are not good at math. Taking an honors accelerated math course in which you would be lucky to pass would be a bad idea. But if you would bet an A or high B in the regular class, then you should probably be in the advanced course (if it’s your choice if you can take it- some are class placement only).</p>
<p>Additionally, advanced classes tend to have kids that want to be in the class and the teacher will get more involved with the students, so your experience will be better.</p>
<p>Overall, if you are capable but worried about your GPA, take the advanced class. It’s worth it.</p>
<p>It depends somewhat on how low your GPA is going to end up being if you take advanced classes. I mean, if you’re comparing a 3.7 and a 4.0 you might as well take all the advanced classes. On the other hand, you probably shouldn’t take AP classes if you’re going to get Cs in them. Ideally your GPA should be 3.7 or higher.</p>
<p>
I wouldn’t take a weighted GPA at face value like that, especially if they were from different schools. Some kids don’t have advanced classes available to them. </p>
<p>Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t there a bigger emphasis on class rank than on individual GPA? In that case, you’d probably want to see how many people are taking the honor courses and how much it’s weighted at your school. You posted on another thread that your school is super competitive, so I would take the honor classes. But the other posters are right that it really does depend on what grades you would get with and without the weighted class to decide. </p>
<p>At my school, GPA is on a 100-point system, honors and pre-AP classes are boosted 7 points, and AP classes are boosted 10 points (so compared to other schools, there’s isn’t a lot of emphasis on AP classes). As freshmen, we were only given 2 possible AP classes to take (and an infinite combination of honor classes). Out of people ranked in the top 30/700 of my class, there’s less than 5 people not taking the maximum number of AP’s. </p>
<p>So basically it depends on the difference of difficulty between the two courses and whether you can compensate the difference with the weight of an honor class at your school. </p>
<p>
You can determine this for an individual college by looking at their Common Data Set. Generally colleges will say they care more about your grades (which are correlated to GPA even though they’re not the same thing—selective colleges generally look at the actual letter grades on your transcript, not any single number) and course rigor than your class rank, because not all high schools rank and class rank can be calculated different ways depending on the school. In most cases you’re expected to take the most challenging classes available and earn mostly As. (My high school ranked on unweighted GPA, so it didn’t matter if you took advanced classes.) Class rank will play a bigger role if you go to an unusually challenging school where you can be the valedictorian with a 3.5 unweighted GPA or something. </p>