I am confused with how colleges take into account weighted GPAs and how they factor in Private school that don’t offer official AP courses but have particular course that are equivalento AP level. For example our school has “intensive” Biology, Physics and Chemistry classes. Do you still had a letter grade up when considering your overall gpa for these classes?
If your high school doesn’t add anything then you would have to look at individual colleges (their websites or contact their admissions if you can’t find information there)and ask whether they will or not. I’m doubtful any would.
so does that mean your b is worth less then an ap b even if the class is equally has hard?
In the case you’ve described, probably not.
Your transcript will be considered in the context of your school, and the amount of “academic rigor” will be determined on the basis of whether or not you took the most challenging classes available to you, not whether or not you got a grade bump.
Your unweighted GPA will not be compared against other kids’ schools’ weighted GPAs, and ADCOMs (or more likely, local reps) will know that a given school’s “Senior Honor’s” ____ (or in your case, “Intensive”) class might have more/less rigor than an AP class, depending upon the school.
Thank you for this helpful response. So would you say just for understanding where we are that we should calculate in our minds a grade as if it were weighted to know if we are in a ballpark for a school?
In general, it is best to look at unweighted GPA, since weighting methods vary greatly between high schools. The exception is if a college recalculates GPA with its own weighting system, in which case you would do the same recalculation for the purpose of comparing your GPA to that college’s stats (California public universities are the most well known examples here).
@giantoctopus - You can compare your GPA to other students’ unweighted GPAs.
Frankly, weighted GPAs are a bit of a joke as there are no standard practices and every school weighs classes differently. For example, I’ve seen people posting about being in schools where the maximum weighted GPA is a 6.0, whereas at schools like @MurphyBrown’s that don’t give a grade bump for AP/Honors, the maximum GPA would be a 4.0.
At my daughter’s school, for example, there are no weighted classes in 9th; students are allowed to take one AP in 10th, and more in 11th and 12th. It’s not possible to end up with more than 9 or 10 APs. Compare that with schools that let you take APs right off the bat. There are kids on CC with 17 APs for goodness sakes! (Talk about overkill!!)
Colleges know this and recalculate GPAs as they see fit. Some will strip +/- off grades, some will weigh honor/APs differently. Just take the most challenging courses available to you and do the best you can in them. Don’t take APs in subjects you don’t love – you’ll end up regretting it!
Stop worrying about whether your school weights grades. Get high grades in the most rigorous classes your school offers, and colleges will not dock you for the lack of APs. My kids went to a private high school with no APs until senior year (then only 2 per student, and the only options were Calc AB, Stats, French, & Spanish). Their school did not weight. Honors classes only offered in the math & sciences, none in the humanities (and again, no grade weighting). My D2 got into everyplace she applied – UChicago, Swarthmore, Harvey Mudd, Carleton, and a few lower ranked schools with good merit. I would not worry about this at all, just do your best within the context of your school.
Lots of schools don’t weight, and colleges are aware of that.
High schools issue a document called a School Profile which describes the grading system, the honors/AP courses, average SAT/ACT scores, AP scores, student demographics, etc.
My DD’s Public Magnet HS didn’t do many AP classes and all classes were taught at the Honors Level.
The School Profile will explain that and also give an idea of the caliber of students.
Here is an example from her school profile:
CLASS OF 2009
62 Graduates
Four Year College -> 100%
NMSQT/PSAT 31 Commended -> 9 Semi-Finalists/Finalists -> 3 Winners
SAT I Mean Scores: 685 (Critical Reading), 725 (Math), 680 (Writing)
AP Exams 100% tested, 151 total exams taken, 94.7% scoring 3 or above
AP Courses Biology, Calculus (AB, BC), Chemistry, Physics C, Statistics
Grading System
All courses at XXHS are taught at the Honors level and grades are therefore not weighted or inflated.
92-100 (A) = Superior Proficiency
85-91 (B) = Above Average Proficiency
77-84 © = Proficient
70-76 (D) = Partial Proficiency
55-69 (F) = Not Proficient/No Credit
Class Rank
The majority of our students earn grades that are exemplary. Each year a large percentage of the senior class receives Semi-Finalist or Commended Status on the NMSQT. We believe that our students’ levels of achievement are not fully communicated by using class rank as a singular transcript statistic. XX High School, therefore, precludes reporting of class rank.
‘Frankly, weighted GPAs are a bit of a joke as there are no standard practices and every school weighs classes differently.’ Even unweighted GPAs are not sufficiently accurate, as the academic levels of high schools in USA, from most elite privates and publics to lowest performing publics, vary so widely. That’s why the school profile is used. Class rank is even more reliable, which is why so many HSs are dropping it.
The guidance counselors at our school tell the kids that their transcript itself is more important than the GPA because each college will view the grades in the way that makes most sense to them. Weighted GPAs are for purposes of ranking students (our school only tells them top 1%, 5%, 10%…) and don’t mean much for college admissions purposes. The kids are told to take the most challenging classes they can get As or Bs in and not to worry that much about everyone else.
Agree that transcript is most important. Selective colleges want to see rigor, to see students can do the work. This might be different for kids wanting to go to big publics that are more metric-centered, which admits on GPA, SAT, class rank and not much else. Those schools often admit a wide range of students and can offer remedial classes, and have a lot of churn with transfers in and out.
Your HS will send a school profile along with your transcript that describes things like what classes are offered, the grading system etc. so your transcript will be reviewed in the proper context. No reason to worry. And FWIW our HS offers AP classes and does not weight – it does not hurt the top students at all.
My kids go to a small, rigorous charter school with an accelerated math & science curriculum (and high quality humanities, as well). They have no official “honors” classes (used to be all were considered honors), or weighted grades, or class rankings. They offer very limited AP offerings because of the small size and problems with staffing and scheduling. Unfortunately, even though this year they’re offering more APs than ever, most kids can’t take all of the offered APs even if they want to because many are scheduled at the same time. I’m worried that unless our School Profile (which has been thin and mostly not fully descriptive as of yet) will list all these APs that the school offers, but some students will be penalized for not taking the “most rigorous” courses offered – NOT because they didn’t want to but because some of the classes were literally at the same time and kids had to choose. I also want our School Profile to reflect that many of these newly added AP courses are just that – that the options did not exist when my rising senior could have taken them, for example.
We’re lucky in that our state has free post secondary enrollment (you have to apply of course and different colleges have different requirements), so historically many of our kids take their senior years and even their junior years (full- or prat-time) at local colleges and universities. (That’s what mine have done.) I’m hoping that the LACs that my D17 is applying to understand all these nuances, but I’m not confident our School Profile will do a good enough job explaining them. We have a new guidance counselor and I know she’s working hard to improve the profile, but it’s not there yet.
I also think it’s unfortunate that AP is now the go-to signal for “high rigor” even though in my kids’ experiences, some of their non-AP courses at their school have been far and above higher quality and more rigorous than some of the AP classes that other kids at other schools near us have had. It’s too bad that our little school doesn’t have the name recognition or even the numbers to really “sell” our graduates to many schools beyond the ones right here.
thank you. can you explain more about the school profile? Is this something we can read? Is this simply the comments that teachers make for each class that the take?
This is a document that the school creates, which usually lists, among other things, contact info, size of the graduating class, median SAT/ACT scores, grading/ranking policies, classes offered. graduation requirements, etc. See examples below:
http://stuy.enschool.org/ourpages/auto/2013/3/7/37096823/Class%20of%202016%20profile%20PDF.pdf
http://www.newton.k12.ma.us/cms/lib8/ma01907692/centricity/domain/28/counseling/nnhsprofile2014-2015.pdf
thanks!
Wow @skieurope – thanks for those links to the two examples of school profiles. It’s shocking how fancy and market-ready they are compared to the sad little profile that I’ve seen from our school, even though last year our profile was greatly improved as compared to prior years. We just now have a full-time academic guidance counselor for the first time ever (who also coordinates other academic needs at the school, not just college counselling). I know she’s working to improve ours, but it’s NOTHING like these, even though our school boasts some pretty nice comparable stats for our student body. I had thought of the school profile in terms of describing our offered coursework etc, but I had never really thought of it like these slick marketing products – which clearly they can be! This is really good food for thought - thank you!