<p>Out school does not weight GPA. Actually it does, but it gives .025 for AP and nothing for honors classes. Are we at disadvantage applying with such low weighted GPA? And also, if we took Algebra I and II in middle school, will it be included with our HS GPA?</p>
<p>No. Colleges don’t care about your weighted GPA because every school weights differently. My school doesn’t weight anything at all. </p>
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<p>Only if it was taken for high school credit. Depends on your school.</p>
<p>They do their own weighting calculations. It’s not a problem.</p>
<p>Like halcyonheather said above, middle school grades are not generally included unless they were taken for high school credit.</p>
<p>MANY schools don’t weight GPA. Colleges rarely care about weighted GPA, they look at grades and rigor.</p>
<p>As long as your school also doesn’t rank, it shouldn’t be a big problem. If your school ranks–or if they provide deciles for schools that want them–then it can lead to problems for some kids.</p>
<p>Also the schools compute their version of GPA to award their scholarships.</p>
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<p>At my school, ranking people on unweighted GPA works fairly well because everyone who cares about school at all takes honors classes. People in regular classes don’t try hard enough to have a high unweighted GPA.
I think they consider course difficulty when there are ties.</p>
<p>I heard at least a couple admission officers talked about the transcript, classes and grades, is the most important. GPA not so much since as others pointed out every high school does something different, they don’t weight, they weight with .25, .5, 1 point, etc.</p>
<p>Our high school includes the middle school classes in the transcript but not in the GPA.</p>
<p>If your school does not produce a weighted GPA, it could have an impact on qualifying for Automatic Merit Scholarships that are the subject of much discussion here on CC. </p>
<p>These schools set a GPA cutoff and a minimum ACT/SAT score for various amounts of automatic scholarships. For example, Alabama gives a full tuition scholarship for a 3.5 GPA and a 32 ACT (or corresponding SAT); at Miami (OH) the GPA cutoff is 3.7 and a 32 ACT for a guaranteed one half to full tuition scholarship. At most schools with Automatic Merit there are other scholarships for lesser test scores, but the minimum GPA tends to stay the same. However, there are a few schools that have sliding scales for GPAs too.</p>
<p>I have a kid at both Bama and Miami and know that they both will take the GPA(s) listed on the transcript. So if you have a 3.6 unweighted, and a qualifying test score, you have a guaranteed scholarship at Bama, but not at Miami. If this applies to you and you are interested in a Miami or other school where you just miss a GPA cutoff because there is no weighted GPA, you would need to contact admissions and let them know your school doesn’t weight and plead your case. You may very well get a scholarship - you just don’t have the assurance that you have it locked up, without special action by the school.</p>
<p>PS - See BobWallace’s sticky about Automatic Merit Scholarships for more information. If you are interested, be sure to check the schools website for the most current information. Schools can and do sometimes change the scholarship amounts and requirements for each application year.</p>
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<p>You mean these schools just blindly compare whatever numbers the high schools send them? What if the school uses a non-4.0 scale for unweighted GPA or something?</p>
<p>Well I can’t speak to all of the hundreds of schools that have automatic merits scholarships, but at Alabama and Miami, (large state universities with many thousands of applications) where I have firsthand experience, they take the GPA(s) listed on the transcript and convert them to a 4.0 scale. (For example, my kids HS was on a 5.0 scale - not a problem.) </p>
<p>As I noted previously, if your school doesn’t weight the GPA, and the college in question accepts a weighted GPA for their scholarships, and you fall just short of the minimum GPA because your school doesn’t weight - you may or may not have a problem. The failure of the school to weight has taken an “automatic” scholarship and turned it into a “pleading for an exception” scholarship. (I would hope that the schools would see that any weighting would raise the GPA enough to qualify, but you never know without asking.)</p>
<p>I can’t know the colleges reasoning for sure, but I assume they understand that most HSs that weight their GPAs add no more than 1 point for AP and .5 for honors classes. (A few may add less, but I’ve never heard of adding more than that. However, with tens of thousands of schools in the country anything is possible.) However, the important part is that there must also be an appropriately high ACT/SAT score that will “confirm” the “quality” of the student for scholarship purposes. </p>
<p>Most schools with automatic scholarships also have competitive scholarships you can apply for where they analyze your transcript, essays, personal statements, letters of recommendation, EC’s etc. for additional funds.</p>
<p>Given the growth in popularity of automatic merit scholarships, I think schools that don’t weight GPAs are doing their students a disservice - or at least their parents, since they are the ones that typically have to pay for college.</p>
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<p>Weighted GPA is generally on a 5.0 scale, though. A GPA above 4.0 isn’t possible with a 4.0 scale.</p>
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<p>They’re hurting students by calling their Bs what they are instead of considering them As?</p>
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<p>Miami specifically says the GPA is on a 4.0 scale, and weighted scales seem to me to always be 5.0 or something other than 4.0. </p>
<p>[University</a> Merit Scholarships | Miami Scholarships | Scholarships | High School Students | Financial Aid | Admission | Miami University](<a href=“Costs, Scholarships, and Financial Aid | Miami University”>Costs, Scholarships, and Financial Aid | Miami University)</p>
<p>That said, our school has long not weighted GPA and is beginning to this year, and also beginning to rank. I have mixed feelings about it. Both my kids took AP courses because they liked the teachers, or liked the challenge, or whatever. The fact that these are now weighted doesn’t factor into my D’s decision to take them or not at all.</p>
<p>“I think schools that don’t weight GPAs are doing their students a disservice.”</p>
<p>My district’s high school doesn’t weight nor does it rank and I have seen no indication that it hurts the students in any way. They consistently get kids into all the Ivies (except P’ton for some unknown reason) and all the other top colleges and U’s in the country. Admission offices actually have to read the transcript thoroughly and look at the rigor of the classes the student has taken. This is, of course, the norm at the most select colleges anyway - they don’t use arbitrary GPA/SAT cutoffs to decide upon admission.</p>
<p>OHMomof2 - my son is a senior at Miami who received an automatic merit scholarship. I can assure you that Miami takes your reported GPA(s) (non-weighted and weighted, if reported) and translates them onto a 4.0 scale (if your HS is on a 5.0, 6.0, 8.0 or 100 point scale). If either GPA converts to 3.7 or higher, you qualify for a merit scholarship - the exact amount or range depends upon your ACT/SAT score.</p>
<p>Regarding ranking, your school seems to be doing the exact opposite of the school districts here in suburban Chicago. Within the past 5 years, virtually every suburban school district has dropped the reporting of rank. These systems are ranked as the best in the state and 99%+ of the kids go on to college. At some schools kids with one B in four years could be out of the top 10% - so rank was dropped to enhance their chances at elite and other highly competitive schools.</p>
<p>Emilybee - I think we are comparing apples and oranges. I agree, Ivies and uber-elite privates will recompute GPAs as they see fit. They also tend to be very familiar with their networks of feeder schools that tend to comprise a good portion of their incoming students - so they tend to “know” the value of grades at a particular school. They may offer generous financial aid packages, but they tend to be highly influenced by need, since all accepted students are “meritorious”. </p>
<p>Automatic merit scholarships tend to be offered by state flagship and directional universities as well as non-elite privates to entice high-stat kids to attend by offering full or nearly full tuition scholarships. They also tend to be favored by parents who make too much for any financial aid, but not enough to easily pay $250,000 out of pocket - especially with grad/law/med school down the line.</p>
<p>If weighting a GPA is ignored by the uber-elite schools but could give some of your students a financial leg-up if they are interested in a flagship or “regular” private school - why not?</p>
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<p>It is if they give 4.3 for an A+. Our school does this.</p>
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<p>I would argue in that case that you are not on a 4.0 scale, you are on a 4.3 scale.</p>
<p>^ our school used to give a 4.33 for A+ too, and other than the A+, it is still a 4.0 scale…meaning that any grade lower than A+ is computed the same way as if 4.0 were the top. That is stopping with the new weighting system that begins this year. If you never take an AP or advanced class, your max GPA, weighted or not, will be 4.0. If you took ALL APs (not possible at our school) then it would be 5.0 (weighted).</p>
<p>Interesting on Miami. We send 20+ kids there every year from our HS and next year will be the first year that GPAs will be weighted (and they won’t be retroactively weighted for upperclassmen), so it hasn’t come up yet. I assumed that since they specifically said “4.0 scale” on the scholarship description that they mean unweighted. If they convert down from a 5.0 weighted scale then the GPA would drop accordingly, I’d think. In any case I know at least one parent who is annoyed that the new weighting won’t be retroactive, in other words that junior year APs won’t be counted, only senior year APs…specifically because of Miami’s merit cutoffs. </p>
<p>The new weighting/rank thing is, I am told, at the request of parents who think their kids are being shortchanged in auto-admit and auto-merit state schools that want a rank and, I guess, weighted GPA.</p>
<p>^^ Our school is a 5.0 scale. My son, who didn’t “kick it into gear” until late sophomore year had a 4.86 weighted GPA - he took some, but not a huge number of AP. ( He had many B’s freshman and early sophmore year) Multiply that by .8 and it coverts to 3.89; his unweighted was 4.6 which coverts to 3.68 - so the weighting got him the money. (Of course back in 2010 that was $9,000 per year, not the half to full tuition now offered - but that’s another story.) </p>
<p>He has “kept it in gear” and has a 3.86 through 6 semesters at Miami. So Miami got a good student and the money made the tuition competitive with our instate flagship, which he had no interest in attending.</p>
<p>Good to know. D will likely apply to Miami because of that merit, though she insists she wants to leave the state (is the grass always greener?? )</p>