<p>How does Stanford calculate high school GPA for the admission purposes? I cannot find this information anywhere. Do they include freshman year or not? Do they include classes taking outside the school for GPA purposes or not? Do they give extra value to AP / honors classes or not?
Thank you.</p>
<p>They don’t really “calculate” your GPA or have rigid cutoffs; instead, they spend about 10 seconds glancing at your entire transcript (freshman year included) with the intention of determining whether or not you’re qualified to do the work. Though Stanford does not confirm this, I would say that the freshman year is the least important year and that you can make up for average performance in your freshman year by showing a significant upward trend throughout your junior and senior years. </p>
<p>They give “extra value” to honors/AP classes in the sense that taking those classes helps them determine if you’re challenging yourself academically (which is really important to them) as well as what your intellectual interests are (i.e., someone who says he/she wants to be an engineer should be taking AP Calculus and Physics).</p>