Can someone please help me understand weighted vs unweighted GPA? My son, HS Sophomore at a public school in the Dallas area that does accelerated block scheduling has the following:
Weighted GPA: 4.0833
Unweighted GPA: 3.450
WTD Numerical: 97.7792
I’m not understanding the meaning of the difference of weighted vs unweighted and which matters more?
All his core classes are PreAp and a couple AP. He’s also in marching band, and had one business elective this year.
His class size is quite large…around 1000. Last years graduating senior class was the largest in our school’s history…1080 I believe. We are a Title 1 school, it’s a really good school district, but we’re definitely not like some of our more affluent high schools that are cutthroat competitive. In my mind he was solid for top 10% but I don’t know what all this means now lol.
The unweighted GPA is usually based on a 4.0 scale (an A = 4, B = 3, etc). It doesn’t matter what level the class is (regular, honors, AP…) an A is always worth 4 points. This is the GPA most colleges will look at.
The weighted GPA gives extra points for honors and/or AP classes. Each high school has their own method of calculating weighted GPA, and it’s often used as a way to rank students. Your guidance counselor can provide the details on how your school calculates both GPAs.
In our district, the curriculum handbook provides details on how the weighted GPA (and unweighted) is calculated. They don’t include required health or PE classes in the GPA. For weighted GPA, all honors, DE and AP courses are on a 5.0 scale. Also some districts don’t weight all As (A+, A, A-) as a 4.0 but ours does. So track down the curriculum handbook or equivalent to help understand how it’s calculated.
In my opinion, neither weighted nor unweighted is necessarily a good way to compare students… unweighted could unfairly penalize students who take AP/honors classes; hence, weighted GPAs are usually used to compare within a HS for ranking (not all high schools rank) but weighted is not a good way to compare students from different high schools because every place does it differently. Some colleges recalculate GPAs (weighted and unweighted) so they have some consistency when looking at students.
Ranking can also get crazy… in our district, they stopped including courses taken outside of the HS (such as at the local community college, not dual enrollment) in the GPA/transcript because it was viewed as not fair for students who could not afford to take classes that charged tuition. My daughter (senior) is currently ranked #1 with a 4.8xxxx GPA but that might change because she is only taking four courses each semester and the others who are highly ranked are taking 5 or 6. Frankly, the difference between the top few percentage is meaningless.
Thanks for the insight, I did some more digging and found out our district changed policies starting this year. Weighted GPA determines class rank. Under the newer calculation in effect for classes graduating 2021 and later, AP classes and dual credit classes receive the same multiplier. (Under the previous calculation - which will still be used for classes of 2019 and 2020 - dual credit classes have the same multiplier as pre-AP classes. The old multipliers were 1.2 for PAP classes and 1.3 for AP classes.)
Also, only grades in English, Math, Science, Social Studies and Foreign Language will go towards determining GPA and Class Rank. I guess the district decided too many kids were opting out of fine arts, band etc.
We’re now anxiously awaiting the class rank release and report cards for last semester, which is supposed to be sometime this week. Our district does 4 9 week grading periods and this is the first time we’ve ended a semester term with exams at the winter break!