<p>Simple question, how much does it matter</p>
<p>Every college states that the single most important factor is curricular rigor, and so weighted GPA means everything. Many colleges employ their own, discrete weighting systems, and so the weighted GPA may differ. A lot of high schools don’t weight grades at all, but they will indicate whether or not you took the most demanding courseload. Some elite private schools decline to label any classes “Honors” or “AP” on the premise that all of their classes are taught at that level - colleges realize that, and will respect those schools curricula accordingly. If you are coming out of a typical, public high school, then I’d say that your weighted GPA will matter a lot. Colleges will not prefer a student who has a 4.1 for a light load of less-demanding classes over the student who risked an occasional B/B+ in difficult classes. If your 4.1 is weighted, and you had an unweighted 3.4 in the most demanding classes if will be worth more for college applications.</p>
<p>The best predictor of future academic performance is prior academic performance. </p>
<p>If you are asking whether taking an Honors/AP course (weighted +1) and getting a B or B+ (grade: 4.0) is better, worse, or equivalent to taking a regular course (unweighted) and getting an A (4.0), the answer is: Honors/AP is better. If you take the harder course and get less than an A, you showed what you could actually do. If you take the easier course, you could be showing some laziness - maybe you could have gotten an A in the harder course, too, if you’d been willing to take on the extra work.</p>
<p>Actually the answer is no, they don’t care about weighted GPA because there is no standard for that. There are simply too many different systems for them to bother with figuring out how your school works, so they do what they do with everyone - they look at the transcript and grades and evaluate accordingly. They are not going to reduce your entire HS experience to a single number, whether that is a WGPA or UGPA - at least at schools that have holistic admissions. YMMV at state schools with formula admissions.</p>
<p>Listen to Mr. Mom. Woogzmama is right in the sense that it is the “rigor” of the curriculum that matters to the admissions officers, but for most colleges (outside of the UCs and some other state schools), the “weighted GPA” is meaningless. Here is an example: Large public high school #1 tracks students and student John Doe is placed in the “honors” courses of 5 of his 6 academic subjects beginning freshman year. This continues throughout his high school, and he also takes 8 AP classes. He ends up with a 4.7 GPA by end of jr year despite several Bs and A-s. Small private school #2 offers no honors classes freshman or sophomore year, and limits the AP classes. Student Jane Doe ends up with straight As with 2 honors classes and 6 APs and has a 4.3 GPA (I am estimating GPA, not using actuals).</p>
<p>Then you have a school that scores on a 7-point scale. and another that doesn’t weight at all; and a third that scores on a 100-point scale. It becomes extremely difficult for any college to “compare” GPAs between schools, only within schools.</p>
<p>I don’t think the # your HS gives matters (except in the case of some auto-admit and auto-scholarship situations), selective colleges will look at rigor and grades and come up with their own number that reflects those. it may or may not correspond to your HS’ formula. Many colleges drop non-core grades, some drop freshman grades, some “weight” APs but not “Honors or pre-AP” courses, some do, etc. </p>
<p>Weighted GPAs may matter indirectly in that many HS use it to determine rank (though some do not), and colleges care to some degree about rank.</p>
<p>Simple question, but there is not a simple answer. The highly selective school will care about weighted GPA in that it is an indicator of how difficult of a curriculum you are taking at your school. The school profile will usually explain what the highest possible gpa is, and what a student has on a weighted basis gives a good indication on how many honors, AP and other weighted courses he is taking. Most such schools will then unweight the grades so that they can be compared on an apples to apples basis against other applicants from many schools with all kinds of grading scales. But that weight would be a factor in the the difficulty of the courses a student is taking. </p>
<p>Some schools won’t care at all as long as the gpa is above some acceptable threshhold. Most schools have to change the gpa to a single scale just so everyone is equally assessed with all of the different scales out there.</p>
<p>Colleges will most likely look at the rigor of the classes you chose. Each school weights differently, some applications don’t ask for a weighted GPA, some do. Colleges will be more lenient about someone getting a B in an AP class, ie. a B in AP Physics may be looked at better than an A or A- in regular physics, as it shows that the student challenged his or herself.</p>
<p>Our high school doesn’t weigh at all, which may be simpler, but it does make the whole ranking by decile thing more complicated; a student who takes easier courses and aces them will naturally be ranked higher than one who takes tougher ones and gets an A-, for example. And yet, because the high school does report the GPA’s relation to the decile, the AP student looks less attractive. Our Naviance uses the unweighted GPA in its graphs, and I have to wonder how useful they are for that reason, especially in schools that may be considered “match” by some students and “reach” by others: the average accepted GPA, therefore, may be simply unrelated to the acceptance decision. Two kids may apply to that school: one has taken all APs and had a strong performance, but in the 93ish territory, averaged together; another may have taken a mixture of an AP or two and honors or even college prep courses, and gotten 96. The AP kid might look at the “average” accepted GPA of 95 and be unduly concerned about his chances; the other might be mistakenly optimistic about his chances–assuming that the school really does look at the grades in the context of the courses chosen. Given that context is everything, a simple GPA number really doesn’t mean much, yet it is reported as a meaningful data point.</p>