<p>I know there have been many threads on grade weighting. I'm looking for input regarding non-core classes. Does your High School count non-required classes towards the GPA and class rank? Our HS is exploring different ways to calculate GPA with the idea that more kids would take classes for exploration if the grade didn't count towards their GPA/class rank. The downside, as I see it is that teachers would have a harder time keeping students to task without the negative effect of a bad grade, but is that how it really works?</p>
<p>Ours does, but uses weighted gpa for class rank, so there is little incentive for top students to take extra non-core classes. Also, foreign language classes are not weighted until 3rd year, so kids that do not have high school language credits from middle school are behind from day 1. Starting a second language in high school is not encouraged because of this. My daughter’s class rank suffered because she chose to stick with her fine arts track, even though the courses were unweighted, while other kids were taking honors or AP classes. She doesn’t regret it for a minute, be she very likely would have been Val or Sal if she had only completed the required 1 fine arts credit.</p>
<p>Our HS counts every class in the GPA, including gym. Many of the noncore course are “fun” and are used to boost GPA. DS and DD have 98 or 99s in many noncore classes, but don’t take but one or maybe two per year. I find that if they are engaged in the class, they get very high grades. </p>
<p>I really think it depends on the HS. Our HS is a middle of the road HS with 10 or so AP options. Class rank is determined by weighted GPA. Only non-weighted GPA is put on the transcript.</p>
<p>My kids’ school used to calculate GPA based on the top four academic subject grades, plus 25% of a fifth course, and nothing else taken into account (including required courses like PE). (Kids generally would have 5-6 courses, one of which was often of the PE or health ed variety. Seven was not unknown. No course credit was given for extracurriculars. AP and honors courses were weighted.) This was explicitly to encourage experimentation without GPA pressure. Five years ago, they changed it to one where everything was loaded into GPA, although the required non-academic courses were de-emphasized. </p>
<p>I’m not certain what was wrong with the old system – it seemed reasonably popular. Maybe it was just bureaucracy. Maybe it was a problem where people with Cs on their transcripts were outranking people with only As (theoretically possible under the old system). Maybe it was seen as a disincentive to take the most challenging curriculum possible. (It sort of cut both ways on that – made taking extra, tough courses lower risk, but also failed to reward students for taking extra APs, etc.)</p>
<p>Our HS weights nothing and AFAIK counts all courses towards the GPA.</p>
<p>It’s a tough one. The high schools in my district use a weighted GPA for rank, BUT offer only 12 weighted coures (a few APs and a handful of dual enrollments). The sky high weighted GPAs tossed around on CC aren’t even possible at the local hs. Honors course? Yep, got 'em. Weighted? No way. Everything with the exception of PE is figured into the cum GPA.</p>
<p>Now, last year, the school board realized that a grade grubber could skimp on unweighted classes to give himself or herself a rank advantage. So, the board offered a policy change to calculate rank according to grade points rather than grade point average, giving the kids with fuller schedules the advantage. So that rare kid with all As in five APs ends the semester with a 5.0 but only 25 grade points. Another kid with the same As in the same 5 APs but who also takes art ends up with the lower GPA (because of unweighted art) but with 29 grade points and therefore a higher rank. Made sense to me. Will this change be impletemented for next year? Haven’t heard.</p>
<p>One thing I have heard repeatedly is that, no matter how/if your HS weights classes, the colleges rip the transcripts apart and re-weights them according to their own criteria. This gives everyone a more even chance (presumably). That said, at the very top schools, weighting is irrelevant because kids need high grades in the most demanding course track to even be considered as serious applicants.</p>
<p>If your school ranks, weighting is still important because colleges can’t rejigger ranks, though if a GC puts in a note saying something like “This student’s rank suffered because we don’t weight AP Classes” that may help. Our school supposedly only counts academic classes in the GPA, but art and music are counted. I think the only ones that aren’t are health and gym. My younger son was helped enormously since he took two music classes every term and never got lower than a 98. It put his rank at 6% which I am quite sure it wouldn’t have been otherwise. Since he took a full load of APs and one of the music classes was during an extra period, I don’t feel too badly about it, but nevertheless it was a good thing for him. The music classes didn’t have a weight so for some kids with weighted averages over 100 they brought down the average.</p>
<p>The only grades that are weighted are the AP classes and our school offers I think 9. They have a bunch of GPAs on the transcript, but the one that is used to ranked I think includes everything except PE/athletics (although I am not entirely sure whether Health is included or not). We have had kids whose ranking suffered because they took 3 years of journalism or drama. Valedictorian is defined as the top 2% at the completion of first semester Senior year. Last year we had a girl who took all the same APs as everyone else, but took AP Bio senior year rather than junior year like everyone else and that was enough to keep her from being valedictorian.</p>
<p>My kids’ HS includes everything in GPA except for gym (which is required every semester) and drivers’ ed. There is only 1 GPA calculated, and that’s what is used for class rank. It is a weighted GPA, and honors and AP courses get an extra 0.5 (so an A in honors/AP would be a 4.5 and an A in a regular college prep course would be a 4.0). Several years back the school added an honors option for band and orchestra because top students didn’t want to take non-honors classes that would lower their GPAs relative to those who took only honors/AP classes, and this was hurting the band and orchestra. The difference in GPA between #1 and #2 in my junior D’s class is that #1 took honors orchestra and #2 took art, which doesn’t have an honors option. Most kids don’t care because for them it doesn’t make much difference, but the kids at the tippy top do care.</p>
<p>Our district includes all classes in GPA, but weights only AP. Then that weighted GPA is what’s used for class rank. I’m not sure what they put on the transcript, even though I got an official sealed-in-an-envelope copy of D1’s at the end of junior year just to check. There was no GPA printed at all. 
I’ve never followed up on why that’s the case–maybe they just print it for seniors? Maybe it’s because we are in California, and UC and CSU have their own schemes? The adcoms didn’t seem to have a problem with it.</p>
<p>For college admissions purposes, I’d want to see schools provide both weighted and unweighted, and then explain the weighting and ranking schemes on the school profile. Maybe throw in the highest GPA of the senior class, and the range of GPAs covering the top 10% and 20%. Not all colleges recalculate GPA. U of O, for instance, says that they will use whatever GPA is printed on the transcript, weighted or unweighted. If both, they’ll use whatever is higher. Since their auto-admissions are stats-driven, this is a big difference. </p>
<p>Not sure there’s ever any way to make people happy about ranking and val/sal issues. :)</p>
<p>Everything is included in the gpa including gym, driver’s ed. Honors classes are given additional weight and AP/IB classes are weighted above the honors classes.</p>
<p>Neither of my D’s high schools weighted grades. The public school ranked, but the private school did not.</p>
<p>For the ranking I believe they included all classes</p>
<p>Our HS weights honors, advanced honors and accelerated courses as well as APS. For instance, my d is in a two years-accelerated honors math program (taking precalc in grade 10 at the highest honors track). This is weighted by 1.0.</p>
<p>Everything counts, no weighting in our system…system has “done away” with val/sal and has senior scholars. Colleges receive unweighted scores on transcript and a simple list of “most rigorous classes” which includes AP branded classes as well as non-branded classes.
There is a computation that is done to determine senior scholars and the senior scholars is not a finite number and varies by one or two or so each year but generally is roughly equal to a Top 10 (for our high school that is less than 20 kids).</p>
<p>What these threads always show, is that GPAs are really only meaningful within a particular HS. That is why class rank and top 10% are critical; it shows where you stand relative to everyone from your own HS; supposively a level playing field. Colleges really don’t have the time to recalculate everyone’s GPA. So, being in the top 5% (without splitting hairs about whether you took one extra class or took AP Bio in Senior yr or Jr year) or top 10% at your HS does mean you may make a cut off level for a particular college. Then they look at your standardized test scores, because those are national tests and everyone takes the same test. </p>
<p>In the end, students should do the best they can within the system they have. Hard classes, good grades.</p>
<p>^^^Which is why especially rigorous high schools, public and private, don’t rank. If you’ve got a school full of talented, hard-working students who would all be in the top 10% at other high schools, then ranking just hurts them in private college admissions.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the input! Ordinarylives, your situation is one that our HS is also concerned with. Apparently, some students are choosing to just take weighted classes and study halls to improve their GPA/class rank. Adding in grade points makes sense to discourage that.</p>
<p>We don’t have a particularly rigorous high school, but we are going to eliminate the reporting of class rank on the high school transcript. We will still track rank in order to select a valedictorian and salutatorian, and we will provide docummentation of class rank to colleges for students who need it for merit scholarship purposes.</p>
<p>Our school does weight courses for the purpose of ranking. Weighted grades do not appear on the transcript. Using a 100-point scale, basic Regents college prep courses in the academic cores are given 2 additional points. AP, Honors and Dual Enrollment courses are given 5 additional points. </p>
<p>No weighting is given to any courses outside the five academic cores but all are graded, including gym, and factor into the ranking system. Not surprisingly our val and sal this year have avoided most of the more rigorous courses as the 3-point bonus for taking an AP or Honors course rarely makes up the difference in rigor of grading (i.e. a 92 in basic Regents Living Environment produces a better weighted grade than a 88 in AP Biology. While colleges will no doubt view the kid who challenges him or herself more favorably than they do the kid who doesn’t, as far as class rank goes it often pays to take the easy way out.</p>
<p>Our California high school uses a weighted GPA that follows the UC weighing system for our school – PE doesn’t count in weighted GPA, only A-G courses. The only courses that get an extra GPA boost are AP classes and 2 specific honors classes. Class rank is based on weighted GPA. Kids do avoid non-weighted classes to boost their GPA, or wait till senior year to take required non-weighted classes (since class rank at the end of junior year determines eligibility for ELC program, top 4% get guaranteed admission to certain UC campuses)</p>
<p>The school also provides an “eligibility” GPA, which is a non-weighted GPA including PE. This is for determining whether an athlete is academically eligible to play sports, so I guess that helps those kids who needs those high grades in PE to stay eligible for sports.</p>