<p>First off, my school does not weight GPAs. I have a 3.88 unweighted and I am unfamiliar with weighting of a lot of other schools. When people say their GPA is 4.4 or 4.7 or something weighted, most of the time are APs counted as max. 5.0 (or honors max. 5.0, APs max. 6.0? or some other) I recalculated my GPA using APs = 5.0 and came up with 4.13 as my weighted, which seems a little low as I took 5 APs and lots of honors classes. And if I recalculate it with APs A=6.0, honors A = 5.0, I get 4.63. If someone could point to me if those are reasonable weightings, I will be less confused :D</p>
<p>Second, do the most competitive colleges place a lot of emphasis on raw class rank? I'm ranked about 10% in my class but four of my five Bs are from freshman year at another school where the biology and english classes were killers compared to my current school. My counselor told me that my course rigor was far above most of the rest of my class. However, my class rank and GPA (again, unweighted) don't reflect that and I'm worried about the impact that a class rank of roughly 40 out of slightly over 400 might have if I'm applying to say, MIT or stanford where nearly everyone accepted is in the top 5% of their class. (for MIT it's about 94%) Even if my GPA is well within the range for incoming freshman at those universities.</p>
<p>Hmm, I just realised that what I just wrote sounds really braggy and conceited, but I didn't mean it that way. :D I am just stressed.</p>
<p>My last question is about how much emphasis colleges place on freshman grades. As I said before, four of my five Bs were in freshman year. Without my freshman year, my unweighted GPA would be 3.96 and probably place me a lot higher ranked in my class, which is actually not something a lot of those ranked above me now could probably say. Weighted 4.375 if APs are max. 5.0, and 4.88 if APs are 6.0, honors are 5.0.</p>
<p>Thanks everyone for reading this. I hope to get some responses. :)</p>
<p>Stanford recalculates GPA without freshman year. I’m not sure about MIT. They consider your grades in terms of which classes you took, your school, and various other circumstances rather than just applying whatever weighting system your school happens to use. According to the CDS stats, the majority of admitted students did not submit class rank at both schools. In short, your grades are not going to prevent you from being accepted. However, you’ll need far more than just a high GPA to be accepted. If you look at the Stanford RD thread, the accepted students in the thread actually have a lower average GPA than the rejected students. However, the accepted students have better awards, ECs, and various other unique things that make them stand out.</p>
<p>Thanks! That is by far the most helpful response I got for this question. I was just a little put off by the fact that 94% of MIT incoming freshman were in top 5% of their school and etc. etc. is it still a good idea to explain circumstances?</p>
<p>Of course I’ll work on my ECs and all I just don’t want my grades to get in the way</p>
<p>I suspect the 94% in top 5% only includes students who submitted class rank. The CDS data states that the majority of the admitted freshman class did not submit class rank, and that group likely has worse stats. The same MIT rep who posted the class rank stat you quoted also posted, “We do not consider class rank as such,” in a MIT FAQ thread where someone asked him the same thing you wrote (will his top 8% class rank hurt him). A more detailed quote is below:
You don’t need to explain the circumstances (it might hurt you if you explain it like you did in the first post and imply you struggled with the other school’s class rigor), and it is certainly possibly to get admitted with a lower class rank. I was accepted to both schools without being in the top 10% of my class.</p>
I just don’t want my grades to get in the way</p>