Hello! I’ve been unreasonably stressed about my GPA since switching to a school with a drastically different GPA scale than my my old one. At my current school, an A- is a 3.3, when it would have been a 4.0 at my old school. So even though my grades show an upward trend and I get all A’s, my unweighted GPA has stagnated at a 3.6 and it’s stressing me out as a rising senior. My weighted is a 4.4 (and I got a 5.0 this year!) but I’ve been told that colleges tend to look at unweighted GPAs more than weighted ones, even with differing GPA scales and grade inflation at each school.
Will colleges recalculate my GPA during admissions? I’ve heard differing opinions on this matter too :^/ I just want to know how much this may hurt my chances of top 30 schools considering my application
Some colleges recalculate GPA, some don’t. They will all look at your grades in the context of your high school(s).
You will have to make sure that colleges receive your first high school’s profile, along with your transcript and current high school’s profile. Your GC will send the transcript and current high school profile to the colleges you apply to…talk with your GC about how to make sure colleges also receive your prior high school’s profile.
You’ll just have two GPAs when colleges look at your applications, one from the first school and one from the second. They will look at each school’s profile and that will tell them how to interpret those numbers.
Unless, as Mwfan1921 mentioned, those colleges are ones that do recalculate your GPA (using their own methodology to make an apples-to-apples comparison across all applicants and all high school years), the colleges probably wont attempt to somehow combine your two GPAs.
Yes, colleges do consider unweighted GPAs more than weighted ones, because just as there are differing ways to calculate GPA, there are many more ways to weight it.
I hope this makes sense.
Some colleges recalculate GPA based on their own criteria (ex. academic courses only, unweighted etc.) and others don’t. But please don’t worry. Your GPAs will be look at in the proper context. You should send colleges you apply to transcripts from both high schools. Attached to each transcript will be a school profile which, among other things, describes the HS grading system and the levels of courses offered. Please understand that admissions officers have to deal with a wide array of different grading systems (ex. various weighting scales, unweighted, numerical, international grading systems, written course evaluations to name but a few) so it will not be an issue.
As an aside, the college application process can be trying. Try not to get yourself “unreasonably stressed” over things that are outside of your control.