Hi, at our high school they do GPA and weighted GPA. We have a program where kids can take college courses during high school in MN. They apply to the college for this PSEO program and if accepted and the high school counselor approves it, they can take anywhere from one class to full time at the college.
Our high school does weighted GPA for AP classes, but no weight is given for the PSEO classes (these are true college classes taken with other students at that college). I understand this, because how do you weight? Our local technical community college classes are less rigorous than U of Minnesota. Even if you get accepted to the U of M and take a full load there is no bump to weighted GPA. It’s very competitive to get accepted to the U of M PSEO program, much less so for the community college PSEO… and many students go to one of the private 4 year colleges that participate, because at the U of M you get last choice after all the other students for class registration which can be a problem.
At our high school a student with 4.0 unweighted GPA with one AP English has a higher weighted GPA than a student who went full time to the University of Mn their junior and senior years.
I am in this position. Tied for first in class unweighted 4.0 GPA (class of >550 kids). But unweighted, tied for 20th because two APs, but a significant number of semester classes at junior year at a private 4 year college. This is a wonderful program in our state for the right student, because the state covers the full cost of tuition and books. There are pitfalls too, if you bite off more than you can chew. Fortunately, the college classes are all A’s too. They go into weighted average at 4.0.
My question is, do colleges recognize this when they are looking at GPA and class rank?
Or is this a disadvantage from a merit award and admissions standpoint? I know there are many other factors as well, but my question is just as it pertains to GPA and class rank.
This is only a potential issue if there are others from your HS with higher WGPAs applying to the same colleges or with some scholarships. Otherwise, since there is no common weighting rubric, colleges look at UWGPA or they recalculate to their own rubric. Either way, your rank is solid.
College vary on how important they consider class rank (as determined by your high school).
Be glad you are not in Texas if you do not like rank-grubbing type of situations.
My D’s HS did that too. Remember that your school report will go with your transcript as well as your counselor’s rating on your course rigor.
We just looked at a couple different methodologies used by schools or online advice. Our school gives a .3 bump for AP courses, no bump for classes taken at the U of M or a 4 year private college/university and no bump for honors courses (the honors courses thing is more normal). I feel a lot better—it would appear our high school is a little stingy with weighted GPA. No wonder the Georgia website said to draw a line with a sharpie through the weighted GPA provided by the high school. 
. Feeling much better about this now, and frankly the class ranking using weighted at our high school is a little “off” too…
I doubt there’s any solution that will fit every situation.
Our HS gives a weight for DE courses that is halfway between honors and AP. But this means the Calc 1 or Communications and Rhetoric class at the University of Pittsburgh gets the same weighting as an online course in Excel at the local community college.
Yes, HS weightings can be a bit of a random number generator, so colleges pretty much ignore them (based on comments, Texas publics may be outliers). Rigorous coursework is valued, but admissions offices either re-calculate all weighted GPAs on a common scale or consider unweighted GPA and a measure of course rigor as two data points.
Case in point - my D is on track to graduate with her school’s max possible weighted GPA, a 5.56.
That’s very different than here! It would be impossible to achieve that weighted GPA at our high school since the highest weighted grade in any one class is 4.3. They don’t offer all required classes AP and no additional weight is given to classes taken at colleges. Therefore, even a weighted 4.3 would be impossible to achieve at our high school. That doesn’t mean there aren’t challenging AP classes and kids who take classes at the U of M etc, we just weight differently here.
Exactly why “my weighted GPA is…” is essentially meaningless.
As I noted, admissions offices know this.