<p>At least on CC, 5.0 weighted scale seems to be the norm.</p>
<p>However, not have I once seen a weighted scale of 4.0, and thats what my school uses.... in fact, it never publishes a formal unweighted GPA in its transcripts, which again seems pretty rare (in the context of this forum anyways).</p>
<p>Is my school a rarity for using such a weird scale?</p>
<p>5.0 weighed GPA scale is quite popular, but I don’t know if it is the norm. My D school also used a 4.0 max weighed GPA scale. All honor and AP courses are up by one subgrade but still capped at 4.0.</p>
<p>Our high school goes to 110 weighted theoretically, but you’d have to take 100% AP and honors courses to get that GPA. (All regular would be 105 and extra slow courses are 100.) It makes nearly everyone look like they have a better GPA than they really do. I think it’s most peculiar.</p>
<p>" It makes nearly everyone look like they have a better GPA than they really do." So does “extra credit”.</p>
<p>Not sure what you mean here by a 4.0 weighted scale. Our school uses a 4.0 scale, but with a 0.5 bump for honors or AP courses, which are pretty limited for freshman (no APs, only honors are in math and language) and sophomores so not sure what the actual theoretical maximum GPA would be. Certainly not a 4.5, because nobody can take all AP/honors. </p>
<p>Another district has a 5.3 as the maximum possible grade. At that school, an A+ is a possible grade at a 4.3 with a 1.0 bump for honors and APs. Freshman are allowed in honors and some APs. It may be possible there to take all honors and APs so maybe that would be a 5.3 weighted average? </p>
<p>I now understand why colleges re-calculate GPAs and why you have to view the GPAs reported on CC with a grain of salt (many do not indicate if they are weighted). A 4.0 GPA may not be a meaningful if the max possible grade is over 5 and students can take all their major subjects at the honors/AP level. </p>
<p>In California, the 4.0 scale with +1 for honors/AP/IB/dual-enrollment is essentially what the UC system uses, so it is very common for public high schools here. Pluses and minuses are ignored. The main differences between HS and UC GPA calculation are that the UCs limit the number of weighted points to 8 (semesters) and the UCs don’t count freshman classes. However, various UC campuses also consider either the unweighted and/or fully weighted (non-capped) GPA including freshman classes. </p>
<p>Our HS reports the following on transcripts: Weighted Academic GPA, Weighted Total GPA, Unweighted Academic GPA, Unweighted Total GPA. Class rank is by Weighted Academic GPA.</p>
<p>The HS counselor report is important for evaluating applicant’s GPA. Not only to learn the weight scale (which is less important as college may recalculate GPA anyway), but also to see the class rank and grade distributions. Some high schools may have over 25% GPA 4.0 (straight A) students, while other schools may have less than 5%.</p>
<p>My high school had no weighting for classes, so if you got an A that was 4.0 regardless of the class, A- was 3.7, and so on.</p>
<p>I’ve not heard of a 5 pt. scale. Our school uses 4 point and no weighting of GPA probably because that’s how our in-state unis in Michigan look at GPAs (unweighted on a 4 pt scale). It’s easy enough to eyeball a transcript and figure out a GPA on a 4 pt. scale - an A is 4, a B is 3, a C is 2 – add them up and divide by the number of classes…it’s possible to pretty much do it in your head just by scanning a transcript. </p>
<p>Interesting that some give no added weight to honors or APs. In our school at least these are MUCH harder and require much more effort. The AP bump ups can be questioned in some cases at some schools (does AP Human Geography deserve a 1 pt bump up over even a regular physics class (HG is not an AP offered at our HS but I have heard it is pretty easy for an AP?) It seems to me that the 0.5 bump up makes sense. Lets kids try to stretch without worrying about completely ruining their GPA and penalizes those that take the easy road. It doesn’t work as well with apps to big State Us, that only look at the grades, not the weighted average. Of course, many colleges also look at rigor and the quality of the HS when evaluating transcripts. </p>
<p>@Vladenschlutte isnt that unfair for people with harder courseloads?</p>
<p>Say one kid took 10 APs and had a 3.6 overall GPA and another kid only took regulars/honors and had a 4.0 . The kid with the the 10 APs should take the advantage in terms of GPA.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Why? A college knows who took the more difficult classes again by looking at the transcript. A school board knows, a principal knows, teachers know they all can access a transcript…why do you need to create inflation on a GPA. A transcript with a 3.8 and 10 AP classes is a much stronger transcript than a 3.8 and non-rigorous classes. I think people over think GPAs way too much. There’s no need to bumpity, bump bump because colleges get the grades AND the transcript - they can see with there own eye, the inflation becomes non-needed.</p>
<p>I think schools give honors and AP/IB a bump is to help with class ranking.</p>
<p>Also for the record our school district using a 4.0 scale with possible GPAs over 4.0.</p>
<p>Our school calculates two GPAS. One is the standard 4.0 scale for all classes (with no - or +), the other is an Academic GPA for the core academic classes. The Academic GPA is also calculated on a 4 point scale except that honors/AP classes get an extra weighting of 1 point. If a kid took all honors/APs all four years they could conceivably have a 5.0. Both GPAs are shown on the transcripts. No classs rank is calculated or shown on transcripts. Serious students only care about the Academic GPA because that is the one everybody looks at for colleges. </p>
<p>The dual calculation structure works because the Academic GPA takes into consideration course rigor. Top kids (i.e top 3%) will have GPAs of 4.75 or higher. Top 10% kids will have 4.2 or higher. </p>
<p>Our school uses a 5.0 scale. The maximum actually possible would be something around 4.8 due to various required non-honors classes. I hadn’t realized some schools were going over 5 until I saw mention of it on this site. My impression is that the two most popular systems are to add either 1 or .5 to grades earned in AP/honor classes, then take a weighted average. Our school uses 1 for both. These weighting systems penalize students for taking extra electives instead of study halls, so it’s a rather stupid metric. </p>
<p>In a thread on this topic some months ago, I saw a different system that adds a bonus for rigor of classes after calculating the unweighted GPA. This makes far more sense because it eliminates the penalty for taking electives instead of study halls.</p>
<p>Our school doesn’t compute “non-academic” courses in the weighted GPA. I never did figure out exactly what was or wasn’t called academic. I think the advanced orchestra must have been in it, because my younger son’s weighted GPA was higher than I thought it should be. Our school sends both the regular and weighted GPA to colleges and they use the WPGA to compute class rank which many colleges care about a lot, so it does make some difference how it’s done. My younger son had a B+/A- unweighted average depending on what courses you counted in it. (He was doing a program with extra orchestra in zero period.) His weighted average was 97 his rank was 6% and he had 8 or 9 AP courses - depending on whether Physics C is one or two courses. He applied to some colleges where being a B+ student was good enough and more highly selective colleges. He did very well, I think the rigor (and the rank which reflected that rigor) helped.</p>
<p>There are school that report only uw and also limit severly the number of AP classes that kids could take. However, these schools maybe well known for their rigor in regular classes. Their Regular classes are taught at higher level than AP at other schools and this fact is known to colleges because it has been proven many times by attending students who graduated from these HSs. So, all this w and uw gpa game sometime simply is not relevant and colleges pay more attention to the name of the HS. </p>
<p>momof3: In our large HS, GPA is used for things like National Honor Society and for honor roll. The weighted GPA is used there. Our school doesn’t rank, but does report quartiles, which again use the weighted academic GPA. It seems fair to me to give some “credit” on GPA to show how much more difficult it is to obtain a top grade in an honors or AP class. </p>
<p>I, too, believed for a long time that it was “unfair” to use unweighted GPAs, but the more the years went by the more I realized that it really doesn’t tell the colleges anything useful. Unweighted GPAs, national test scores and a high school profile is all any college really needs, all the rest is justy unneeded “noise.” I’ve come to the conclusion that if a high school “needs” to rank to name a val or a sal then adding points to GPA for various difficulties of classes is one solution,or perhaps it’s a feel good thing to make kids that take hard classes feel good, but in terms of any meaning outside the confines of the high school I don’t believe it has real meaning. Colleges can use those inflated GPAs when they report USNWR or rankings requests, but even the common data set generally reports unweighted GPAs, something I took a close look at. </p>
<p>This gets debated every single year but really college admissions counselors don’t care whether or not a school weights or doesn’t weight GPA for admissions. What they do care about is the competitiveness of the high school, the rigor of the classes, and the grades as in A,B,C or 80,90,100 or whatever constitutes and A or a B or a C. In the end, grades and the rigor of the course selection trumps everything. Someone with a bunch of Cs is going to struggle getting into UofM (or any selective place) even if they took a bunch of AP classes, got Bs or A minuses and ends up with a 3.9 weighted GPA. that’s just nonsense if you stop and think about it. A B student is a B student is a B student, even with a GPA of 5.75 or something random.</p>