How does your high school weight grades?

<p>Someone told me today that our local high school does not weight honors and AP classses the way that most schools do. Our school multiplies AP grades by 1.2 so a 3.0 would equal a 3.6 and an honors class by 1.1. Does anyone else have a school that weights this way. If not, how do your schools weight grades??</p>

<p>My son’s school district did not weight grades, but has announced that it will do so beginning this year (and retroactively for current students). All AP and IB courses will award 5.0 for an A, instead of the standard 4.0 and for a B, 4.0 instead of 3.0.</p>

<p>Am I the only one bothered by this whole grading thing? </p>

<p>It seems like every school has a different system, just like they all have different criteria for getting into AP courses. Surely, the colleges understand this and only look at the ‘raw’ numerical rather than the GPAs calculated by the schools.How else can you compare apples to apples?</p>

<p>Our state uses a 93-100 scale but a lot of states use the 90-100 scale. And our school takes the raw numerical grade and adds 3 points for honors and 7 for AP/IB.Now compare that to Warriorboy648 school’s system. How do colleges take that information and compare applications across the board?? I’m hoping someone with more experience can answer this.</p>

<p>warriorboy, are you sure your school multiplies each grade by 1.2? That would mean that a 3.0 becomes a 3.6, but a 4.0 becomes a 4.8 and a 2.0 only a 2.4. Seems inconsistent, with your grade being even higher if you get an A than if you get a C.</p>

<p>Our school adds .67 for honors courses and a full point for AP courses.</p>

<p>Yes, it describes the weighting in the course catalogue. I didn’t pay alot of attention until my friend mentioned that my son’s GPA may be considered higher at schools than we realize. I assumed all high schools used the same system and only colleges were different.</p>

<p>You can set up an excel spreadsheet and figure out the school weightings yourself, as long as you have his grades, the amount of credit in the course, and his GPA for the year as calculated by the school. Then you can replace your weightings with those from other schools and see how it would change your son’s GPA…</p>

<p>My son started playing with numbers and it might make a big difference. I really need a transcript because we can’t remember grades past this year…</p>

<p>Our school does a 1.0 bump for AP’s and a .5 bump for honors. Most smaller colleges re-weight everything anyway. Bigger colleges might just take them as they come. I decided two kids ago to not think about it.</p>

<p>Our school did 1.1 for AP and honors. A local public school did 1.4 for honors/AP! however in the school profile weighting has to be addressed so that colleges can de-weight appropriately.</p>

<p>D’s school weights honors classes and AP classes the same. Each is worth an extra 0.5 of GPA. So an A in a standard class is 4.0, and an A in an honors or AP class is be a 4.5.</p>

<p>There have been countless threads on this subject. There are a lot of ways to weight grades. In most cases, colleges will re-calculate your grades based on their own weighting system. Then your only issue with your high school’s calculation of GPA becomes how it affects your class rank.</p>

<p>Our h.s. uses the same method at the UMass system and as many private colleges. An A in a College Prep class is a 4.0, an A in an Honors class is 4.5, and an A in an AP class is a 5.0.</p>

<p>D’s BF’s school gives exact number grades (83 for example). They get an extra 10 points for an honors class, and 15 points for an AP class.</p>

<p>I have heard that many Florida schools use a 6.0 scale - 4.0 for College Prep, 5.0 for Honors, and 6.0 for AP.</p>

<p>Don’t let your perception of other applicants on CC be skewed by their self-reported GPA’s, because you don’t know how they were weighted.</p>

<p>No grade weighting at our school.<br>
Doesn’t bother me, as every college we visited this summer said they would use their own system for weighting.</p>

<p>I was disappointed that one school said ‘we don’t weight electives like Art, as they are non-academic.’ I guess she hasn’t seen the amount of research and writing that D is doing for her IB Art class.</p>

<p>Our school system does the 6.0 scale.
AP “A” = 6pts
Honors “A” = 5 pts.
Reg. class “A” =4pts.</p>

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<p>That’s good to know. That’s what I would expect schools to do. That also explains why I see some rather strange avg. GPAs being reported by colleges. Some of the top schools average GPAs appear lower than I would have expected and lots of the lesser known schools seem to have strangely high average GPAs.</p>

<p>Seems like the SAT/ACT scores are the only thing that you can compare with some level of certainty.</p>

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<p>Boy, you got that right! This place will definitely give you an inferiority complex.</p>

<p>It adds on some kind of number, I have no idea how they do it. I think they add 4 points [out of 100] for AP and 3 for Honors… but not really sure.</p>

<p>Weighted Grades make me so mad where I live. For my private school we weight honors with .5 extra and AP with 1 extra. However in public school it is 1 for honors and 2 for AP. That combined with the fact that almost every class in public school has an honors counterpart makes things even more ridiculous. In fact they automatically give honors credit for those who go on to Spanish III in public school just because they don’t expect students to do it unless there is some incentive. </p>

<p>Its not hard to find 50 students at my local pub. who have a weighted GPA of 4.5 plus. Probably more than that. Yet you maybe find 1-3 in each of the grades at my school (of course that also has to deal with small class sizes). That’s not to say that all public schools in the area are like that. Just a good amount of them.</p>

<p>The high school here does no weighting whatsoever. It grades on the 93-100%=A scale. Students here do not seem to have been hurt by that at all when it comes to college admissions. This is a small town public high school (only one in town) in a semi-rural area of the state, and there is an impressive acceptance history to tip-top schools.</p>

<p>When we were touring colleges I got the distinct impression that admissions offices look at all the weighting with a jaundiced eye.</p>

<p>I don’t have any problem with weighting. Think about Olympic diving–you get a score on your dive, then it is multiplied by a difficulty factor for your final points. That makes a lot of sense to me–why not for kids who are willing to take more difficult classes?</p>

<p>We have no weighting at all. I disagree with that. I think tougher classes deserve more credit. Class rank is one issue that can get significantly affected by not weighting, and also our valedictorians (just need 4.0) are often kids who have taken minimal to no honors classes, never mind AP classes. They did start requiring that vals have at least 1 honors class each semester. Tough load. It also impacts merit scholarships at local schools where it’s purely by GPA and class rank.</p>

<p>Our school has a similar multiplier to warriorboy, but on a 100 point scale. The remedial courses have no weight, the regular college level courses are multiplied by 1.05, the honors and AP courses by 1.1. They report all grades as numbers and the weighted scores only figure into weighted GPA. I never thought about it, but I guess the more A’s you get in hard courses the more points get added. Sort of interesting… </p>

<p>Having been to several info sessions in the last three day, all the colleges say that they take into account the different school’s weighting systems and try to judge students within the context of their schools.</p>