<p>in S2’s school, they multiplication factor for honors and AP is 1.3. I think the AP weight should be higher since my son reported to me that APs are A LOT MORE intense than the honor classes. </p>
<p>However, I am told that his class will be the last one with weighted GPA. From the grade below on, they will report only unweighted GPA in the transcript, thought they do ranking on weighted scale. Even there, they won’t put the rankings on the transcript unless the student specifically asks for it.</p>
<p>Also remember that many colleges only calculate the GPA from core academic courses, while high schools may include electives in their GPA calculations All of which means it becomes very hard to look at a college’s “average GPA” and have any idea what that means, unless the college explains how they calculate GPA. (I have found that they will explain their method if you ask in an info session or email them). </p>
<p>The whole thing got so confusing to me that I finally did up an excel spread sheet a while ago. To get some sense of the range of GPA’s that you can accurately report for an individual student, I’ll offer my one of own kid’s GPA’s.</p>
<p>S (now in college) - after 11th grade:
unweighted core GPA: 3.47
unweighted GPA - ALL classes: 3.6
weighted Core (+.5 for honors, +1.0 for AP): 3.9
weighted All classes: 3.98</p>
<p>So, the same student could honestly be reported as have a GPA ranging from 3.47 to 3.98. </p>
<p>Buyer, beware when reading college admission stats!</p>
<p>I don’t have a problem with weighted grades either. But it doesn’t make much sense to me for every HS to have a different system for doing it. It makes it difficult to compare one school to another. I can see why colleges recalculate everything. There are several top schools that say that grades are ‘considered’ but not as important as standardized testing and essays. I can see why. With so many grading systems, grades can quickly become meaningless outside the context of a particular HS. The same goes for the whole AP course thing. Some of the things I’ve heard college admissions officers say are starting to make sense to me. I’ve heard ‘we don’t take the weight GPA too seriously’ and ‘while AP classes are fine, they aren’t a major factor in our application process.’ Evidently, the colleges are clued in to the games high schools play to make their kids look better and/or appease parents.</p>
<p>I’ve heard repeatedly during college information sessions that the most important thing is where the student stands in relation to all the other kids in their class and the rigors of each particular HS but it didn’t sink in until now. It’s all starting to make sense to me :)</p>
<p>When my older son was applying to college, I used a spreadsheet to calculate 4 different GPA’s for him. Total unweighted, total weighted, core academic unweighted, core academic weighted. Oh, and I also knew the method that one of our in-state publics (that my son was considering applying to) used to weight AP & honors courses, so I did a 5th calculation for that!</p>
<p>Probably overkil, but I’m very numbers oriented!</p>