After moving from an IB school with pre-IB in Florida to an IB school with no pre-IB in Oregon, my unwieghted and weighted GPA, as well as my class rank, dropped significantly. There are no advanced classes at this school for freshman and sophomore years, although you can take honors for a couple classes which only consists of doing one easy project (from what I’ve heard). The curriculum is no different from a regular class, while the curriculum in pre-IB classes are much different. Because of this, my unweighted GPA looks much lower here, as well as my class rank, which dropped from top 10% unweighted to top 25%.
Also, since pre-IB is not weighed at this school, my weighted GPA has dropped from well over 5.0 to about 4.17, and my weighted gpa class rank is top 15% or so rather than top 5%. Overall, my question is this: Will college admission officers look beyond the numbers on my class rank and keep in mind that I switched high schools with different standards? Will my college admission chances be hurt?
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
What sort of weighting system results in a GPA over 5? This is a pretty common phenomena. The best you can do is get the school profile for your previous school included, so that those grades are put in context.
The grading system is based on a 6 point scale at that school. Thanks for the reply, I guess I’ll try to email my old school at one point to see if they can send info about that stuff.
No. Students switch HS’s all the time for any number of reasons. Additionally, there are over 37,000 HS’s in the US, and seemingly, each has its own weighting system. For that reason, most colleges will look at unweighted, or will weight according to their own standards.
The ranking may be a bit more troublesome. A rank in the top 10% with a WGPA of 5+/6 makes me wonder about the overall performance level at that school, although the school profile may tell a more complete story.
Thanks for the reply. I hope colleges will be able to acknowledge that differences in grading may account for the lowish class rank. Most people who get in to private schools with 30+ average ACT scores, which is what I hope to do, probably have much higher class ranks, so I hope this isn’t an issue.