A few months ago I had a conversation with an admissions officer regarding GPA. It started with me asking “what kind of GPA do I need,” but eventually it turned into him saying how annoying it can be to not only talk about high school GPA’s but then recalculate them when a large majority of different high schools and academies and prep schools have their own specific ways to calculate a student’s grades.
So, I was just wondering: how do your high schools calculate your GPA’s? What’s the scale (4? 5? 6? 100?)? Do you think it’s fair?
What’s the point of all these different methods of GPA calculations?
For my school, each school is worth 4 credits. Lab sciences are worth 5 as gym is deducted one day and only worth 3. Honors and AP classes are weighted on a 5 point scale. For my school’s GPA, it takes the four years and all classes together (including gym, etc.).
A = 4.0 = 94-100
B = 3.0 = 85-93
C = 2.0 = 74-84
D = 1.0 = 65-73
F = 0.0 = 0-64
Nothing was weighted.
Different schools offer different opportunities and have differing levels of difficulty, so it’s hard to compare GPAs from different schools even if the same method was used to calculate them.
I guess I should also put my school’s method:
Every class is graded out of 100 and goes towards your GPA, except for college courses, off periods, and classes spent as office/library aids. Any advanced class (Pre-AP, AP, and Engineering/PLTW) gets a 1.1 multiplier. Nearly every student in the top 10% has a 100 or above weighted GPA. On transcripts, we are only shown this weighted GPA.
It can get confusing when administration tries to calculate it into a 4 point scale. When I asked a counselor how she calculates it, she merely said “just divide by 25”- which I really hope isn’t true Thankfully, when I asked the person in charge of class rank/GPA, I was shown a chart that made much more sense, but still seemed overly complicated.
So, the system’s easy to take advantage of, is pretty messy, and is especially unfair to those with specific interests like athletes and musicians.
It’s interesting to see the similarities and differences in GPA calculation methods for schools, but it’s also worrying. How/Why is GPA seen as so important in college admissions if the calculation for almost every applicant is different?
Selective colleges try to look at your grades in context rather than judging you by your GPA outright. They’ll look at your transcript to see your letter grades in individual classes, and they’ll look at your school profile and guidance counselor recommendation to see if you generally took the most challenging classes offered. Class rank is also used when it’s available.
In most cases, a student who gets good grades in challenging classes (where “good” and “challenging” are relative to the school) will have an unweighted GPA commonly perceived as “high” (say 3.7 or above) even if their school has a slightly unfair system. Because of this, people will advise you to earn a “high” GPA even though that’s an oversimplification of what colleges want.
My school calculates GPA on a 100 point scale. For the weighted average, in regular classes you multiply by 1.03, honors you multiply by 1.06, and in AP courses you multiply by 1.1.
Our regular GPA system is traditional: 4=A, etc, with letter grades marked off by 10s (90-100, etc).
Our WGPA system is really messed up. It’s on a 5-4-3-2-1 scale with honors=AP=5 (for an A) but with any additional classes taken counting as a 4, regardless of its rigor. So, for example, if I took Calc III at a college on my own time, I wouldn’t receive honors credit, thus bringing down my WGPA and rank. Worst part is that no one really knew of the change (we had an incremental system before) so a handful of students who took online classes before entering high school got screwed over…
Interestingly, we have a dual rank system, so at least that’s some consolation.
@halcyonheather
That’s what I figured. But even then, GPA is misused in regards to athletic and merit scholarships that have a GPA requirement when each applicant’s is calculated differently. The average GPA stats in college admissions websites are tainted as well if each GPA is only going to be a measure of how well a student does in his or her own schedule that he or she constructed alone. In-state universities that automatically accept the top 10% of in-state graduating high schoolers (for instance, Texas A&M) will be stuck with some students who merely took advantage of a flawed system instead of those who actually worked hard but didn’t want to exploit the holes in the system just to get a good grade.
I understand its importance and am glad that some colleges do what you described, but I think that it needs to be re-examined, standardized, or just fixed so that it’s a true and fair indicator of how competent a student is both individually and in comparison to other classmates.
Anyway, I don’t want to get off topic. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked the question; I’m really just curious to see all the different ways CCers get their high school grades
We have the whole 4 credit system, where every A is equal to a 4, every B is equal to a 3, etc. No weighted GPA at my school, and they don’t calculate class rank (thankfully, since that would mean people in easy classes with a 4.0 would be in the top decile).
My school ranked people using unweighted GPA and it worked better than you would think because, for the most part, people who don’t bother to take honors classes won’t bother to get high grades either. People who care about selective colleges usually realize that “valedictorian with easy classes” is a bad strategy. (Depending on the state, however, it isn’t necessarily a bad strategy for getting into state schools and getting scholarships. I think school profiles should explain how class rank is calculated, but mine didn’t.)
If colleges are re-calculating GPA, the only reason they probably ask for it is when applicants’ schools don’t offer class ranks, so they can put your grades into context before comparing them with the rest of the applicant pool.
I think each school does it differently to suit the courses they offer, or to adjust marks so people don’t end up all getting perfect scores. At some schools I know they don’t weigh IB/AP because the average is a number out of 100 (and you’re not allowed to get 100/100 because “nobody’s perfect”), and instead they inflate the grades students receive in those challenging courses.
Thankfully, when I asked the person in charge of class rank/GPA, I was shown a chart that made much more sense, but still seemed overly complicated.