I’ve seen this a few times on CC so far… a student will say they have something like a 3.3 UW GPA but a 4.5 W. This isn’t a verbatim post I’ve seen, but I think you get the general circumstances.
At my school, GPA is done just by a % out of 100, so your GPA can be 91, 92, 93, etc. I don’t hear much about students having such a huge gap between their UW and W GPA, usually not more than 3 points—even when taking lots of APs and Honors classes.
So my question is, how is this possible? Coming from a school that doesn’t do GPA on a 4.0 scale (we can convert it if we want, but our school still sends out the grades on a 100 scale), how does it work? Thanks so much in advance for clearing it up… I think I’m just confused.
Some schools may weight classes more than others. For example, if Honors courses are weighted +1.0 and AP are +2.0, a B in an honors course would give a weighted GPA of 4.0 rather than 3.0, and a B in an AP course would give a 5.0.
Does that make sense?
When a student takes an AP class, at some schools a weighted GPA is measured out of a 5.0 scale.
An A in an AP/Honors class = 5.0 WEIGHTED GPA, B = 4.0 WEIGHTED, C = 3.0 WEIGHTED, D’s & F’s don’t get weighted.
If someone takes a lot of AP classes and gets B’s and C’s in them, or even a few A’s, their weighted GPA will look good/be a high value, while their unweighted GPA - scored on a 4.0 scale, where A = 4.0, B = 3.0, C = 2.0, etc. - can be much lower.
Hope this cleared things up! 
Thanks guys! That makes a lot more sense. I wish my school did it like that.
Most colleges use unweighted GPAs so all applicants are on an even playing field so there really isn’t any benefit to your school doing weighted GPAs one way over another.
Right. There is too much variability in how different schools deal with grades for colleges simply to accept the high school GPA. Colleges can interpret the meaning of the grades by considering the school and also the students rank in the school. Even schools that don’t rank often give some indication of a student’s standing compared to peers or they explain the meaning of grades at their school relative to other schools.
Sometimes posts that list weighted GPAs fail to take into consideration the weightings. For instance they post something like 4.15/4.0. Well no. It is probably 4.15 out of a possible (say)6.0. You’d have to weight each possible class and figure out the highest possible GPA at that school as the denominator.