@UWadmissionstaff OK. Interesting numbers. Do you use GPA as mentioned on transcript or do you recalculate it? If you recalculate it, do you do you provide additional points to rigorous courses such as honors/AP/IB etc?
My daughter was admitted last year and my second daughter is applying this year. As I recall they don’t recalculate for Honors and AP but look at overall rigor and that the student increases challenge over the four years into senior year.
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Did I miss something?
Is “UWadmissionstaff” an official response, or is it someone using a userID that sounds official?
If it’s an official response, it’s interesting to note that they’re following this thread.
If it’s an official response, my question to you is: “will there be any responses rolled out prior to March 12?”
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Here in WA, all high schools use unweighted GPA for everything. There is no extra weight ever used for AP or IB classes like in other states. So a perfect 4.0 is the highest GPA a Washington State HS grad can achieve. At least for public schools, I expect private schools can do whatever they want. Since UW is a state school in WA I expect that they use the WA HS GPA scale as their baseline and then adjust downwards all the inflated GPAs from other states to match the unweighted GPAs that all WA HS students have. I don’t have any inside information to know that for certain, but that would be my guess. As for looking at rigor of coursework, that is easy enough to do by simply counting up the number of AP and IB courses that a student took. I’m sure they have a formula for that.
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So what advice would you give a student just entering high school? It seems like they look at GPA without giving any weight to Honors or AP, and only consider course rigor afterwards, if you meet the GPA threshold. That means getting high GPA is more important than course rigor, which means you should only take hard courses if you can sill maintain 4.0 GPA.
I’m sure they are sophisticated enough to be able to evaluate the rigor of your transcript even without the artificial weighting that some states apply to GPA for AP/IB classes.
When you fill out the coalition Application that the UW uses, one of the things that you do is assign AP/IB or honors tags to all the appropriate courses when you enter all your transcript information by hand into the online application. So they can run your transcript through any algorithm that they want to evaluate rigor.
I have absolutely no idea how they evaluate GPA. I’m just pointing out that they have the means to weight AP/IB and honors courses any way that they choose and not simply they way that some state decided to do it via GPA. I expect they are pretty sophisticated about it.
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This should be helpful:
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The only advice to give is for the student to take the hardest courses they can handle and to do the best they possibly can. I think getting all As in regular courses vs getting a few Bs in AP/Honors courses will not look as good.
When I was in grad school at UNC, one of my roommates was an application reader for undergrad. The first thing she looked at was the transcript, skimming down the list of classes looking at course rigor, then she looked at grades and any positive/negative trends. She never looked at just a GPA number and moved on. Back then, i don’t think weighted/unweighted GPAs were a thing and she had no problem whatsoever figuring out each kid.
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Remember that grade are all computerized via the Coalition app. When you fill out the coalition app you enter every single HS course that you took individually along with the grade and any AP/IB or Honors designation. The UW admissions office doesn’t look at your actual paper transcript. They have a computerized data set of all of your courses and grades with the AP/IB/Honors designations attached. So they can sort, evaluate, and compare grades and compare or generate GPA anyway they want to. The weight that your own school chooses to apply to AP courses is irrelevant. UW can do it any way that it wants to and rank everyone’s transcripts equally. Obviously they aren’t just looking at GPA. They may not actually even look at your reported GPA at all. They might well do their own internal calculations of weighted GPA for admissions purposes.
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The only think I will add is that at least in our WA school district there is an advanced math track that kids can get on in Middle School so my girls took Algebra and Geometry in 7th and 8th grade which put them on an advanced track in HS. I didn’t think anything of it but on the UC application they specifically asked about those as HS math courses in Middle School so possibly when UW is looking at math classes they may view starting with Algebra 2 and moving up to AP Calculus as a more rigorous path and take that into consideration.
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Could today be the day?
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Hopefully
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good vibes to all
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At what time do decisions release
Hopefully we get our decisions today
I heard from 5-7 pm
Today? I thought the majority of admission will not be released until next Friday, the 12th.
I thought they notified acceptance thru the mail and deferrals and rejections were posted to your portal… is this still correct?
Decisions to be out on 12th March by around 5pm - 7pm
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All decisions no matter if one is rejected, accepted or waitlisted will be shown on the applicants portal. If you get accepted then they will send you the acceptance package after you get notified on your portal.
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