Hey guys! Quick question that I think everyone would want to know.
Do any of you guys know exactly how Stanford re-weights and normalizes GPAs? I recall at an admissions meeting one of the officers saying they throw out all weighted GPAs and weight according to their system based on letter grades.
From their website:
And a quick search on Google and College Confidential shows that in the past Stanford treats A-, A, and A+ as the same weighting-wise. Do we know if this is still true?
Yes, they reweight them into an SU6 GPA (considering your last 6 semesters of HS), although they also look at your GPA on your transcript. As for what goes into the “secret sauce” for the SU6: yes, it’s unweighted; and yes, they do group A+,A, and A- into the same grade weighting-wise – which is good if you have an A-, awful if you have a B+.
I don’t know if you heard last year about the FERPA glitch that students found, thereby allowing admitted students to look at their admissions records. But anyway, that shined light on how lots of schools – Yale, Princeton, Stanford, what have you – evaluate students. Try and google that if you want something more in-depth. Here’s the article I used: http://cathincollege.com/2015/04/08/i-saw-what-stanford-admissions-officers-said-about-me/
@willay Which grades are made up in the SU6 GPA? As of now, the last 6 semesters for me would be 2 Junior semesters, 2 Sophomore semesters, and 2 freshman semesters. But I thought that Stanford doesn’t take your freshman grades into account.
@ayyyyyyy Stanford does not take your freshmen grades into account. Depending on how your school runs (semesters, trimesters) you may be giving them some of your senior year grades (also depends on if you apply regular or not). So basically they are looking at sophomore and junior grades. There is also generally an emphasis on junior grades. Grades do not necessarily need to be high as long as they show noticeable improvement over time (junior grades are stronger than sophomore grades).
That is NOT true.
They aren’t used for GPA calculation, but if you had a horrible freshman year, that is something they will notice and wonder about. You GC evaluation may also take that into account and discuss it in some context.