<p>Does anyone know if Harvard recalculates the GPA based on their own criteria, the way I gather Stanford does?</p>
<p>Selective schools only use your GPA to assess your standing within your own school - and not even that if your school does not weight advanced classes more than the regular ones. </p>
<p>Given how differently schools compute GPA, it is not used at all to compare applicants from different schools. So it really doesn't matter if they do or not - it won't make any difference to your admissions prospects.</p>
<p>Do they recalculate GPA's for transfer students?</p>
<p>Ailey, according to your description, all selective schools would completely ignore GPAs from applicants whose high schools don't weight grades or rank. I doubt that that is the case. They must have some methodology for assessing performance.</p>
<p>It used to be a truism cited on various Usenet college-related boards that "all" major schools recalculated GPA using their own methods, so that the method used by your high school to calculate GPA, weighted or not, was irrelevant. I know that that is not true, either, since Yale does not recalculate.</p>
<p>So the question remains: does Harvard recalculate GPA?</p>
<p>For that matter, does anyone have information on whether the other Ivies and elite LACs do so?</p>
<p>Comsolation, let me explain:</p>
<p>GPA is not used tomake comparisons for candidates from different schools because schools weight differently, so x-school GPA comparisions are invalid. </p>
<p>For applicants from the same school, it is used to assess standing within the school IF the school weights. If not, the college will just look at the grades and the course rigor, and not the GPA. </p>
<p>So someone with the highest GPA at a school that didn't weight who took all regular classes and got all As would NOT be assessed more favorably than someone who took the most rigorous courses and got one B. (In fact, the former would not be a competitive applicant at all and would be weeded out pretty quick.)</p>
<p>So it's not really GPA per se that counts on your transcript, but your course rigor and how you did. GPA is only a proxy for that, and given what a poor proxy it is, (different schools weight differently, some schools don't weight etc) it is used for narrow and specific purposes only, and to reiterate, whether a school recalculates or not will not impact anyone's admission prospects.</p>