<p>Do they just look better?</p>
<p>Each college can judge your hs classes and place extra weight where they choose to. So, College A might weight Honors and AP classes. College B might only weight AP classes, but can still see from your transcript that you took more rigorous classes. College C might weight Dual Enrollment courses taken at a college, while College D does not make them a part of your high school GPA at all. </p>
<p>So, if you have any clues about where you might want to attend college, check out their website to see what they value and how they weight different types of courses.</p>
<p>They (and APs, which are even better) show that you can handle harder work and didn’t just coast by in easy classes in high school, doing no work for your A. </p>
<p>AP>Honors>Regular</p>
<p>I don’t know about the IB program or dual enrollment. You’re showing academically ambitious and that you can handle the extra work of a harder course. If you are going to take a weighted course be sure that you can manage your time for the class and that you’re not going to fail. This would bring down you’re unweighted GPA. Colleges want you take rigorous classes and earn good grades in them.</p>
<p>Colleges want you to take honors and AP classes (if your school offers them) because it shows that you’re trying to challenge yourself, but weighted GPA doesn’t matter in itself (except insofar as it’s used to calculate class rank) because all high schools weight grades differently or not at all. </p>
<p>Honors classes raise your weighted GPA, but some look at the unweighted. (Which is a bummer for those that have like a 4.3 weighted vs. a 3.85 unweighted. Ugh.)</p>
<p>
Weighted and unweighted GPA are not on the same scale and shouldn’t be compared (i.e., a weighted GPA above 4.0 is not “better than perfect”). Selective colleges will either recalculate your GPA on their own scale or sort of eyeball your transcript to see what kind of grades you got overall…they don’t take any GPA at face value, especially a weighted one. </p>
<p>I don’t think honors classes have much weight. Take either AP or regular.</p>
<p>@Bouncer </p>
<p>Honors has more weight than regular. </p>
<p>@Kawaiiii Honors have more weight at SOME schools. My school doesn’t have honors.</p>
<p>The idea is to take the most challenging classes available. That doesn’t always mean honors classes.</p>
<p>@dsi411 </p>
<p>Honors always have more weight than regular classes… </p>
<p>Not all schools weight GPA, if that’s what you mean. </p>
<p>@Kawaiiii Oh well if you are right, that’s nor fair since my school doesn’t have honors. My school has pre-ap classes but they aren’t weighted.</p>
<p>@dsi411 </p>
<p>Isn’t Pre-AP basically Honors?</p>
<p>@Kawaiiii Yes but my school doesn’t understand that, apparently.</p>
<p>@dsi411 </p>
<p>Nice job at doing “@dsi411” to yourself 
</p>
<p>@Kawaiiii Never speak of that to anyone…</p>