<p>How does your local high school calculate a weighted GPA? (For instance, ours adds up the two semester grades, adds in another .5 for honors classes, and divides by two. So, two semesters of honors A's works out to: 4.0 + 4.0 +0.5/2=4.25. AP's get a 1.0 in place of the .5, so two semesters of AP A's work out to 4.5.</p>
<p>Our independent high school does not weight grades. An A is an A in an AP course or a "regular" course.</p>
<p>Our high school also does not weight grades.</p>
<p>For weighted GPA in our system, all As, Bs, and Cs in honors or AP courses are given an extra point. Thus A=5, B=4, C=3, but D=1 and E=0 in those courses.</p>
<p>This leads to very high-looking weighted GPAs. It also leads to rather drastic differences in weighted GPA between students who take all honors and AP courses and those who choose to include some non-honors special interest courses (such as musical performance courses or journalism) in their schedules. I assume the colleges understand what's going on, though, and know how to interpret such things.</p>
<p>Ours doesn't weight grades, except maybe for AP classes, but we only have 4 AP classes, that you really can't take unless you're a Senior so it doesn't matter</p>
<p>My school gave APs +0.3.</p>
<p>AHA moment here, reading Marian's post #4. It could be even more than them understanding and interpreting.</p>
<p>I recall hearing admissions officers at LAC group discussions say, "We run our own formula to recalculate the GPA's anyway." So perhaps that equalizes not only the honors/AP differences of weighted vs. unweighted GPA's, but considers the "non-honors special interest areas" (performance arts, journalism..) a subject dear to my heart.</p>
<p>Side question -- my youngest never even bothered to find out his weighted GPA and went off to college. Yet he took plenty of AP's and honors. Should I encourage him to contact his h.s. and get the "weighted" if only to remember it and feel better about his GPA? Does anyone really care after college, anyway? Even if not, maybe he should know it for his own thoughts...</p>
<p>Regular: A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1
Advanced/honor/pre-IB/AG: A=5, B=4, C=3, D=2
IB/AP: A=6, B=5, C=4, D=3</p>
<p>The maximum weighted GPA is 6.0.</p>
<p>No, P3T. The notion strikes me as frankly ridiculous. Some schools weight grades. Some don't. Some schools grade very leniently. Some don't. High school GPA doesn't matter after the student gets into college (and the way the high school reports it doesn't really matter then either). Hopefully your son has other things that he can feel good about than a stupid number from high school.</p>
<p>
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Should I encourage him to contact his h.s. and get the "weighted" if only to remember it and feel better about his GPA?
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</p>
<p>Only if he's using it to compete with siblings or others. </p>
<p>My husband teases me about the fact that his college GPA was .04 higher than mine. There are people who enjoy this sort of thing.</p>
<p>Our system uses the same formula as Marian's. I think paying3tuitions is right about colleges disaggregating data and using their own formulas.
WSJ had an interesting article a while back...
<a href="http://www.uh.edu/ednews/2003/wsj/200307/20030725gpa.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.uh.edu/ednews/2003/wsj/200307/20030725gpa.html</a></p>
<p>My high school used A=4, B=3, etc, for regular courses. Honors +0.25, AP +0.5. You could only apply weight to a maximum of 5 classes per year (most people took 6), any others were counted as regular regardless of the level. They then took the number they got and scaled it back to give a weighted GPA out of 4.0.</p>
<p>The idea behind having a maximum number of classes allowed to be weighted was to encourage people to try something new or different with the spare unweighted class. It always had the potential to cause problems because the top students took 8 classes per year and had their averages dragged down by carrying 3 unweighted classes, which were often APs, when others only had 1, but in practice the only people who took APs also took 8 classes, so it evened itself out. The bigger problem was with people taking a regular-level course for the spare getting ranked over people who got a lower grade in an honors-level course, but most people didn't bother to take an honors course for their spare anyway. I guess in a more competitive school, there would have been more manipulation going on.</p>
<p>Scaling back to 4.0 was to make UW and W easily comparable, although of course this made the grades easily comparable within the school, but not with other schools. I do wonder if/how colleges managed to convert it into something that was comparable to other schools, it seems a lot of work for them.</p>
<p>Our school weights honors classes (percentages) by 1.025, and 1.04 for AP classes. The maximum weighted grade is 4.0 though.</p>
<p>Does this mean that my school weights heavily or not?</p>
<p>Marian that's funny and rings true. In the Sunday NYTimes Style section, whenever I read that "he" graduated magna cum laude and "she" was summa, I imagine this odd conversation between them. Did she marry down??</p>
<p>Our district does not use weighted grades, and UW-Madison doesn't either, helpful for the locals applying there. Also- look at the "fine print" and you will find most colleges/U's will choose which grades to count, and how to evaluate them.</p>
<p>Our school adds .5 for each term of honors classes:</p>
<p>Example: 4.0 (term 1 grade) + 3.0 (term 2 grade)/2 = 3.5 + 1.0 (If you took honor both terms) = 4.5.</p>
<p>However, because of required P.E., Seminar, etc. classes, there is actually a ceiling of a 4.8 GPA - and with scheduling concerns and such added in, no one in our school has ever gotten over a 4.55. But they don't put that on our college app. forms, do they? No! They write 5.0 as the max :(</p>
<p>Our high school weights grades when they compute the class ranking and GPA, but the grades on the transcript are unweighted. </p>
<p>We have a 0-100 system, where the slow classes have a weight of 1, (so top score is 100), regular college prep is 1.05 (top score 105) and honors and AP are 1.1 (top score 110). I wish the AP's counted for more than honors, but they don't. Only "academic" classes are counted when computing ranking, but I've never actually seen what they mean by "academic".</p>
<p>Well this certainly gives me hope that the colleges found a way to objectively assess applicant's GPA's. "Weighted" seems to mean so many different things, they would have to. Now, is there hope that they've figured out how to translate rank too?</p>
<p>Class rank formulas also vary by high school. Our poor rural h.s. that offered a few AP's clung to its belief that rank should be based on unweighted GPA, because that rewarded the hardworking people with many future visions. This also caused some grade-grubbing types to drop their Honors and AP classes for regular classes, hoping to inch up in school ranking. In my S's graduating year, the two highest academic achievers (Byrd scholarship, NMSF's, off to Harvard and Amherst) were ranked 9th and 11th in their senior class. The town celebrated those ranked 1-10 with many festivities. Although my S was #11, I supported the system as right for the town's values.</p>
<p>I'm not sure if colleges factor in those kinds of differences among h.s.'s when considering rank. </p>
<p>My thought is if you don't have one kind of shiny card to flash, flash another and don't dwell on how fair your school's system is to show your kid well. The school's system might be designed to encourage other kinds of kids than those destined for elite colleges. So rank #6 went to community college but can always be proud of that honor.</p>