<p>Do you think Stanford will recalculate your w-GPA? We dont have A+/A- as other school districts have.
Any insight into this?</p>
<p>Stanford no longer recalculates GPA. (I believe this is a change starting this year.)</p>
<p>whoa really kyledavid? where did you hear that? if so life is going to be so much easier...</p>
<p>volleysnap, many colleges don't recalculate GPA - they just look at the subjects they care about, (they mainly care about 'solids' and ignore most electives like psychology, journalism, etc) and whether you took the toughest course load in those solids. </p>
<p>So as a practical matter, even if stanford used to recalculate GPA and now doesn't, it won't change how you are assessed (which is only logical, given school's weightings are all over the map - some schools weight APs at 6 and some at 4.3 and some at 4...) It just means they will ignore GPA altogether and just look at your grades and course difficulty, which is more or less what it meant for them to recalculate GPA. (colleges that do recalculate omit non-solids, and use standard weighting, so it comes to the same thing.)</p>
<p>Ailey, I agree with you. I hope you are right. Then all this hardwork (taking the hardest coursework) wouldn't go unnoticed.</p>
<p>whoa... is that true? do you have a link / article / email or whatever stating that?</p>
<p>explode, many books on selective college admissions have been written that talk about how transcripts are assessed. It's only logical that it works this way - selective colleges don't admit by context-free information - they weigh everything in context. An A means nothing if it is on easy courses, and a 5.0 GPA isn't better than a 4.0 GPA if they are calculated using different algorithms. </p>
<p>Stanford and all selective colleges know that, so they use sensible assessment policies.</p>
<p>you can look up on there website that they no longer calculate GPA.</p>
<p>They still take it into account, but more weight is placed on your rank and course load as a result.</p>
<p>.. what if my school does not rank?</p>
<p>I thought that has always been the case; colleges have always used GPA's only in terms of relative competitiveness at one's school. They haven't ever compared them across schools have they? That wouldn't be standardized at all. That's why the Ivy Academic Index is based on class rank. </p>
<p>I think Stanford is just making it obvious to applicants this year that that's what they do...</p>
<p>remember1990, that's exactly right - gpa's have always been only for within a school, and even there, if a school doesn't weight classes differently for rigor, they don't use the GPA even for that.</p>
<p>And no, class rank doesn't take on more importance - there again, if rank is based on unweighted grades, it isn't used even within the school. Within the Ivy League, the Academic Index is really only used for athletes - most of the ivy league schools don't calculate AI except for athletes - Dartmouth I think is one of the exceptions,but even there, the adcoms have leeway to over-ride apparent class rank based on the other factors we have been discussing.</p>
<p>Net - as far as transcript assessment is concerned, what matters is course rigor, how you've done in those courses, and how you've done within the context of your school given those 2 factors.</p>
<p>
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colleges have always used GPA's only in terms of relative competitiveness at one's school.
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</p>
<p>Not necessarily. For example, UCs like Berkeley or UCLA calculate your UC GPA and don't consider rank. They cap the number of points you can get from weighted courses at 8 in order to make comparison of applicants easier; they're more comparable if there's some sort of cap (+ a-g courses are standard, etc.). Stanford used to recalculate GPA, supposedly, but also considers rank.</p>
<p>I think "considered" is an understatement. I'm pretty sure the top schools use class rank heavily in the admission process. It's the only way to determine one's competitiveness within a specific environment.</p>
<p>True but how do they look at a particular group of students that "really" did not take the most challenging course load available in their school, so they wound up with 98 GPAs, no AP courses, no research courses, then you have your other group of kids that broke their tails availing of all AP's/Honors courses research etc. Didn't bail senior year to maintain high GPA, still doing the AP grind, within a school that "barely" weights AP courses, zero weight given to honors/accelerated, 95 or better to get .5 added, 0.25 from 90-94 for AP level? THAT really screws the ranking within a specific environment.</p>
<p>first, I need to emphasize that all my information is only applicable to private colleges, since public univs often do some number crunching that is not holistic - as kyledavid says, the UCs do some of that, though they try to strike a balance.</p>
<p>So for the selective private schools -</p>
<p>they consider rank only if it has course rigor factored into it. If it doesn't, for instance when schools don't weight courses for difficulty, they don't use class rank since it's not useful.</p>