Email the school and ask… Otherwise it’s a guessing game
Thank you so much for this information. It is very helpful. I just told my daughter to take all Aps and Honors and it looks like that was good advice for top schools.
I think it is displaying the weighted GPA despite the misleading title.
I have been looking at a many CDS’s lately, and it seems pretty common. Even if we know that grade inflation is rife, when almost no college which displays the grade distribution has fewer than 30% of their students with a 4.0 average, with many claiming that 50% of more have 4.0 averages, the numbers no longer makes sense. This is especially true when all of these colleges have far more students with 4.0s than they have students in the topm10%, or than they have students with SATs in the top 5%-10%.
So a CDS like this makes sense:
They have 35% with 4.0, 31% with SAT or ACT scores in the top 5%, and 51% from the top 10% of their class.
When the number of 4.0s AND the number in the top 10% are similar, but are far higher than the number with similarly high test scores, it indicates that many of the feeder high schools have grade inflation.
When the number of 4.0 GPAs far exceeds the number of students from the top 10%, that means that the college is presenting the distributions of the weighted grades. This is especially obvious when they also provide a GPA average which is obviously an average of weighted GPAs.
I mean - how does it make any sense at all that a colleges presents an average which is not the same scale as the distribution? It is like presenting a distribution of annual temperatures in Celsius, but giving the average temperature in Fahrenheit.
There is a simple logical explanation, and an explanation which requires faith that colleges administrators are all honest as the day is long, and when they mean day, they mean a mid-summer day at the one of the Poles.
Simple explanation - the GPAs in the distribution and the average are both weighted, and the 4,0s represent all the weighted GPAs from 4,0 and higher. The CDS is standard, and the scale only goes up to 4.0, which is why the numbers pile up under 4.0
The believe-that-the administrators-never-are-dishonest explanation - the average is weighted, but the distributed is unweighted, because of deep and mysterious reasons which are not being shared with us, but are certainly valid and have to do with the administrator’s attempts to provide us with the most honest and transparent view of admissions at the school.
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This may also be due to the fact many HS students only know their weighted GPAs (and many seem surprised at the idea they can calculate their uw themselves) so wouldn’t properly compare if only the uw were presented and likely would overshoot.
Since the colleges are recalculating the GPAs anyway, rather than depending on the students, one would expect that they would use their own calculations, like the UC system does. The NY publics seem to also be able to do so fine.
So did Stanford, BTW. Their match between GPAs, average GPA, class ranks, and test scores are what you would expect if 95% of the accepted students indeed have unweighted GPAs of 4.0 (you get an unweighted average GPA of over 3.96), but also a nice demonstration of grade inflation:
Hi, you mentioned UGA showed you how to they calculated their GPA.
I have seen so many different ways HS calculate their weighted GPA, but none so far that does it like our school district.
- No weight for Honors classes
- APs receive the folllowing: (A, A-) =.0488, (B+, B, B-) =.0366, (C+, C, C-) =.0244, (D+, D) =.0122, E=O. Bonus credit will be awarded as follows for semester courses: (A , A-) = .0244; (B+, B, B-) = .0183; (C+, C, C-) = .0122; (D+, D) = .0061; and E = 0.
These are such odd crooked weight number that always made me wonder how they came up with them.
One other thing I think I’ve noticed is that the top classification on a CDS used to be 3.75-4.0 (or something similar). I suspect schools are just filing in the same data.