<p>Hey guys,</p>
<p>I am a Junior in high school and I had a question about GPAs because I have heard different things. At my school, honors and AP courses receive 7 bonus points to their semester grades. My question is whether colleges strip these points when calculating GPA. My friends have said that schools do not take out the weights which is considered your unweighted GPA. And then weighted GPA is calculated by adding .5 or 1 to each AP or honors class. Could someone please explain the concept to me? Thanks!</p>
<p>More than likely they strip the points and only use unweighted GPA, as that is the most important GPA component.</p>
<p>For almost every college these days they recalculate either using their own weighting system and/or only considering core subjects. Either way your GPA will be manipulated. The idea behind doing so is to put GPAs in one universal system, since schools have their own weighting system and it would be unfair to compare GPAs where grades are weighted differently. As for the recalculating with only core subjects it is to remove any grade inflation caused by electives.</p>
<p>So I’ll be considered to have a 4.0 because the only B I ever got was in gym? If so, yay.</p>
<p>But how do they look at pass/fail credits?</p>
<p>Yes, almost every school will treat your grades like you had a 4.0. As for pass/fail, if they were electives it won’t matter since they will remove electives anyway, if they weren’t, I’m not sure, it is rather uncommon for core subjects to be pass/fail.</p>
<p>I took regular physics pass/fail because I took the final without taking the class. It’s not a required class at my school, but the school required me to take some kind of credit for the test I took, and I didn’t want to screw up my GPA in case I got a bad grade.
Even without physics I will have 6 science credits, and I might do AP Physics online next year.</p>