<p>D's HS did not rank and had very few AP's and out of all Honors classes shcool weighted only Honors Physics. It had no effect on kid's admission. I asked specifically about it at one of the college's information sessions. I was told that college is using unweighted GPA and rank is determined anyway even for schools that do not rank based on kid's GPA and HS class profile.</p>
<p>My children's high school did not and does not weight GPAs.I remember being told at a Colgate admissions meeting years ago that Colgate does its own weighting, based on unweighted GPAs from all students. I am pretty sure other colleges do something similar. Weighted GPAs are too variable from one secondary school to another to be really meaningful in their raw state. </p>
<p>A far as class rank, my children's school didn't exactly rank one by one, but did so informally to determine the top two students and also the top 10 percent for state scholarship purposes. I think ranking can be very artificial and counterproductive. An informative school profile probably provides ore than enough context for a reasonably sophisticated college admissions department to determine which students from a given high school really are the most hard working/talented/promising/well-packaged--which may not always be the same thing.</p>
<p>mattmom, the problem arises when schools DO rank, report that rank, and do not weight the grades.</p>
<p>I would prefer no ranking. But that's not likely in my lifetime. Getting the school district to weight AP course grades was as much as I could help accomplish! Now there are many more students taking the AP courses.</p>
<p>Our district neither weights nor ranks, although they do declare a val/sal and do release information on the school profile that gives an idea of where a given GPA would have fallen within last year's class. Discerning exactly where it falls is almost impossible, though, especially if it is in the B range. </p>
<p>About 6 years ago a boy I know was rejected from every school he applied to, including places where they expected him to get merit money. He was applying to schools of the general caliber of Drew, Fairfield U, et al--not a case of a kid who applied only to Ivies and Stanford, or the like. He had some kind of a B average, and had challenged himself by taking a number of honors and AP classes, in which he probably did not receive As. He was multi-sport varsity athlete, and generally a good kid. I have no idea what his SATs were.</p>
<p>His parents looked into what had happen. They were allowed to see the GC recommendation, in which she wrote about how wonderful it was that he had managed to rank at the 50% mark in his class, despite challenging himself in those honors and AP classes!</p>
<p>It seems almost without doubt that this revelation of his class rank based on an unweighted GPA is what caused him to be rejected at every school. His rank would have been higher had his grades been weighted.</p>
<p>IMHO, if they are not going to weight grades, they should not rank OR declare a val/sal or "top ten."</p>
<p>The top-ten-percent issue is basically a necessity in states that provide either scholarships at public in-state colleges and/or small stipends to be used at private in-state college. Depending on overall class size it can involve dozens of kids--or five. In New Jersey, for example, the scholarships are also tied to SAT scores (at a fairly low level, but one that may be unattainable for the top ten percent of graduates at academically weaker schools).</p>
<p>It isn't a great system, but so many colleges ask for decile rank anyway that it is unrealistic to assume that a school that gives grades won't be able to provide a general ranking as guidance for colleges. </p>
<p>I don't think there is any single right answer. At a strong public or private high school, the level of kids will likely be familiar to many colleges, and a kid who has gotten A minus/B plus grades in tough courses and is roughly assumed to be in the top twenty percent may very well be deemed well prepared and well suited to rigorous work loads in college. I suspect a lot has to do with the sophistication of the GC, too--so many levels of familiarity with the process and the subtleties of language...really challenging process on all sides.</p>
<p>It is hard to imagine a school naming a valedictorian who took no AP classes and got all A's, considering him to be ranked higher than a National AP scholar with one B in BC calculus. Hard to imagine this is what the local community would want.</p>
<p>I can entirely relate to the OP on this thread as that exact situation used to exist at our school as well. </p>
<p>As someone else said, the fact remains that the school DOES rank and therefore the unweighted ranking is a disservice to those who took more challenging classes and it also does not encourage the taking of challenging classes. </p>
<p>Let's not mix this up with the fact that colleges use an unweighted GPA to evaluate your record (as weighted systems vary too much from HS to HS and not all high schools have weighted grades) and that colleges definitely examine the rigor of the student's chosen curriculum. But the issue is that if they DO use a rank, then using an unweighted rank is not a great system and can hurt a strong student who took the challenging courses. </p>
<p>I don't think the OP's HS is asking the right question here though.....there is no way to prove why a student was or was not admitted to a certain college. </p>
<p>But they should examine that their strongest students are not necessarily the ones ranked high and are a disadvantage in college admissions to have a lower rank due to unweighted class ranking. </p>
<p>At our high school, indeed, many of the top ranked kids took no Honors or AP classes! It so happened that my older child took the hardest curriculum available and then some and she was valedictorian anyway even though they had UNWEIGHTED grades used for class rank (her aim was not to be val....at all...that is not my point). But just saying that even with the disadvantage of unweighted grades used for rank, she still ended up val as the only kid in the HS who had straight A's all four years. But those ranked in the top five included the kids who were NOT taking the harder classes. Many of the top ranked kids in the school were not truly the top students in the school who were in the hardest academic track. </p>
<p>In junior year, my daughter initiated and spearheaded a small committee to address this very issue. She did extensive research on the rationale for weighted GPA rankings and researched examples across the country and then within our own state. She presented these findings and drew up a proposal for a policy change at our HS and she presented it to the faculty and she also presented it to the School Board....over an almost two year period....with lotsa ups and downs along the way.....and actually the upshot was that she was able to get the school board, after public hearings on her policy proposal, to adopt the policy she had written for the school to have weighted GPA rankings but unweighted GPA is on the transcript and is used for Honor Roll. She knew from the get go that this would not ever affect her or she would never benefit as the policy would go into place after she graduated. She is very proud of her initiative and ability to effect change in her school and this was also talked about by those who wrote her recs in terms of them rarely seeing a student who actually effected change in the school. While she was on the Student Senate and started a committee of three on this and led it, she was never an elected officer. But the officers tend not to achieve anything while in office and it tends to be a popularity contest but as just a regular student, she made a difference in her school and got the School Board to adopt her policy that lots of good students will now benefit from who have come after her. She is now in graduate school. </p>
<p>Perhaps a commitee in your school.....either made up of just students or perhaps community members as well, could spearhead a policy change like my daughter initiated and led. It worked here!</p>
<p>RE: post #26....that was what we had here. While my D was val and had taken the hardest claases, the sal had taken NONE of these classes and nor had the person ranked third.</p>
<p>( in Seattle)
neither of Ds schools weighted grades.
One school ranked- other school didn't rank.
Both were accepted to all the schools they applied.
My impression is- college takes it into consideration- however- it can limit the outside scholarships to which you can apply.</p>
<p>We don't know if the district ranks or weighs the grades. We do know his grades and SATS.
We found out his class rank when the local newspaper was featuring regional high school students.</p>
<p>I don't think the issue is whether or not the school weights grades as colleges will examine the transcript grades, the rigor of the courses in the context of what the school offers, and use an unweighted GPA. The issue of weighted grades, or at least in the context of the OP's issue, had to do with using weighted grades to determine class rank IF the school actually uses and reports class rank.</p>
<p>My information is old. It would be useful to gather current information for the purpose of trying to change your school's system. In 2005, formulas were available for the computation of merit aid at some schools. Class rank was a variable in many of those computations. The information was derived from the official transcript information. If no rank was reported, that was not factored, of course, but if a rank was supplied, that was the figure entered into the computational matrix.</p>
<p>Where did you find these formulas? I would love to find info on something like that.</p>
<p><a href="i.e.%20giving%20extra%20GPA%20points%20in%20AP%20and%20honors%20classes">quote</a>. And yes, it is pretty impossible to come up with explicit proof that someone didn't get in because they did not get the benefit of weighted class rank.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Another reason it's disingenuous for the school district to suggest that college acceptance and rejection decisions are relevant to deciding their AP policy, is that it's a zero sum game. Any rise in the ranking of AP students (which would increase their acceptances) is exactly compensated by a drop in rank by the non-AP students (increasing their rejections). It's literally a zero sum game as far as the ranks are concerned and philosophically zero sum for the college acceptances. </p>
<p>The same goes for rank itself. The small number of high-ranking students who would be helped by the ability to report a high rank on college applications, are outnumbered by the middle and low-ranking students who would be protected by not reporting rank.</p>
<p>The school district faces a philosophical choice. If it reports rank at all, some executive decision is needed as to what the rank is meant to represent. Is it effort, or obedience, or average level of performance (AP-weighted GPA), or total performance (un-averaged sum of grade points earned) or something else. Acceptances and rejections have nothing to do with that.</p>
<p>I do have a specific example for you - Indiana University and their automatic scholarships:
Automatic</a> Academic Scholarships: Types of Scholarships: Office of Scholarships: IU Bloomington</p>
<p>These scholarships are awarded based on SAT scores and GPA. They accept whatever GPA the high school reports - weighted or unweighted - and they don't adjust it in any way. This obviously puts students with unweighted GPAs at a disadvantage. In addition their cutoff GPAs for pre-admission into their Kelley school and honors program are similar.</p>
<p>Want to add that my child was able to go around the GPA issue at IU with the help of his counselor who certified a hypothetical weighted gpa that Indiana accepted for both the pre-admit and the scholarship. Without that extra effort he would have missed out.</p>
<p>Similar experience here: CU Boulder has specific thresholds for merit scholarships and uses GPA reported by school to decide - weighted or not (ours is not). Fortunately they wanted my kid, and by discussion with her GC, figured out how to calculate it so it worked out. So what our principal self-righteously claims "does not matter", mattered $15K to me.</p>
<p>(Although both this and the one above speak to weighted vs. unweighted, not rank).</p>
<p>In cases when school rank but do not weight GPA, I do not see any problem either, since all selective programs consider combination of school / number of AP's availble / taken and overall rigor of classes of each candidate. Kids with schedules that are apparently on a lighter side will not have a chance and they are aware of this fact and the grades that they should have on their AP exams in order to be competitive.</p>
<p>Our hs did not give bonus points for AP or honors classes, and on top of that, calculated pluses and minues into GPAs (including "A+" as 4.33) AND gave the same amount of credit (and lack of weighting) for a semester of band, chorus, or basic level math class. As a result, an A in BC Physics was worth less GPA-wise than an A+ in Consumer Math or Boys Chorus (and lots of A+'s were awarded to boys who went out for chorus year after year). Class ranks were calculated based on the unweighted GPA averages. A kid taking the toughest classes and failing to earn the "A+" in that class fared worse than classmates taking quite easy classes and making sure they got the "plus" added to the A grade. After a couple kids were rejected from very competitive schools because they were not ranked in the top 10 percent of the class (despite having near 4.0 GPAs and having taken the toughest classes available), the school district FIANLLY stopped ranking students.</p>
<p>Our h.s. does not even provide an unweighted GPA, just the weighted one. When my D needed an unweighted GPA for a scholarship application, she had to calculate one herself.</p>