<p>where as neighboring school districts have:
A+ 96-100 4.25 4.75 5.25
A 90-95 4.0 4.5 5.0
B+ 86-89 3.25 3.75 4.25
B 80-85 3 3.5 4.0
C+ 76-79 2.25 2.75 3.25
C 70-75 2 2.5 3.0
D+ 68-68 1.25 1.75 2.25
D 65-67 1 1.5 2.0</p>
<p>(The neighboring school is ranked higher than our school and has better placements than ours)</p>
<p>Granted that colleges look into the toughness of the courses and the grading policy, is it humanly possible to look at each application so closely when there are thousands of applications. Wouldn't a low GPA be filtered out in the first pass in some colleges?
Some people approached our School Board to review the grading policy and the school district asked for evidence to show that a low GPA would affect college admissions. Where can one get such data?</p>
<p>Because of variations in the way high schools calculate GPAs, many selective private colleges recalculate an applicants GPA according to their own formulas. And of course, its not just strong grades, but also a challenging program of study (AP, Honors, IB) that colleges are looking for. I think the problem of low GPA may be more acute for applicants to public universities that do not recalculate GPAs and that make use of absolute GPA cutoffs for admissions or scholarship purposes.</p>
<p>This question comes up from time to time, and near as I can tell the answer is "who the @#* knows?" I've pretty much given up trying to figure out how colleges will looks at my son's unweighted 0-100 point grading scale. I could make a valid argument for converting it from anywhere from 3.1 to 3.7. Once you start narrowing your list of colleges, it makes sense to ask the admissions office some pointed, specific questions about this.</p>
<p>Here in Washington state, our big universities (UW and WSU) maintain conversion charts for any given high school's GPA to what the GPAs of their past graduates have been at that university. So that's one approach.</p>
<p>Another approach: when my son applied to MIT, one part of the application was a page that was clearly designed to convert the school's grades to MIT's system. Each semester grade in each course, each year, had to be entered in "college prep, honors, IB, AP". Scores on national tests like the IB, SAT, and AP were entered on the same page.</p>
<p>IMHO, most schools take the GPA with a grain of salt. Class rank combined with the SAT gives a good relative idea of the quality of the student and the school--it means more to be in the top 5% with a GPA of 3.5 and an SAT of 2100 than it does to have a 4.0, top 10% and an SAT of 1800. Only my opinion, of course.</p>
<p>We made the same argument to our sons' CAtholic school. They did not weight honors or AP classes and we felt that our grads were hurt by that. We do agree that when a highly selective college receives thousands of applicants, it is unrealistic to expect that each will be given a "fair shake" when each school uses a different method for GPA. </p>
<p>The school gave in and now we have a weighted GPA</p>