<p>I think this is why grade-inflation is so prevalent in California's high school system. Every California high school wants to send as many kids to UCs as possible, so they pad their students' GPAs to meet the eligiblity requirement. Eventually, honors/AP courses become a neccessity for the upper-tier UCs (UCB, UCLA, UCSD) while the ceiling for a "weighted" GPA gets inflated from 4.0 to 4.5 and in some schools, 5.0... As a result, you end up with most of each graduating class having >4.0 GPAs, a trend that is unheard of outside California.</p>