Need a quick opinion-Counselor mistake

Colleges and Universities A-Z Tufts University
1

<p>My child is in a school where they give an extra 5 points (out of 100) to AP Class Grades.
So if you get a 93 in the class, you are scored a 98. If however, you get 100 in the class, you do not get 105.</p>

<p>My child has taken 1 AP Sophmore year, 3 Junior Year and 4 Senior Year. In some of her AP's she has gotten 5 poionts, in two she did not. </p>

<p>Her Guidance Counselor listed her GPA as 4.0 and WEIGHTED. If she were in a school that did true weighting, she would have a 4.5 or more (?). Her UNWEIGHTED is 3.9. She did not explain that in the initial counselors report.</p>

<p>Now for the mid-year, my child has a 95.6 unweighted average. The Counselor will report it this way. She is also ranked 15 out of over 400.</p>

<p>Should my daughter or the couselor write a note to admissions, explaining the way it is weighted? It really is a big difference, and if the admin officers dont go back into her transcript, they might miss how well she did. If they are comparing one student with a 4.0 against another with a 4.0, there is a big difference if one school caps at 4.0, and one caps at 5.0, or 4.5, or.......</p>

<p>Thoughts?</p>

2

<p>It is my understanding that schools, in order to compare apples to apples, recalculate GPAs on an unweighted basis and a 4.0 scale (which it seems to me can then hurt kids who took the hardest courses and, say, got a lesser grade than someone who took any easier path—but I think colleges counterbalance that by comparing relative rigor of courseloads by examining transcripts—something I certainly think they do) so the fact that your D’s school doesn’t calculate AP credit the same way as some others probably isn’t an issue. Also, it sounds like her school actually provides class rank (lots of schools don’t so colleges have to try to approximate, based on the school’s profile, an applicant’s rank) so I don’t really think you need to worry about this at all.</p>

3

<p>It shouldn’t hurt her because admissions officers understand that there really is no standard way of weighting GPAs, so they’ll look at it in the context of what it is.</p>